The Return: Nightfall tvd-5

by Лиза Джейн Смит

  Instead, he concentrated on a nearby astronomical phenomenon.

  The full moon, medium high, and white and pure as snow. And Elena floating in front of it, wearing an old-fashioned high-necked nightgown — and little if anything else. As long as he looked at her without the Power needed to discern her aura, he could examine her as a girl rather than as an angel in the midst of blinding incandescence.

  Damon cocked his head to get a better view of the silhouette. Yes, that was definitely the right apparel for her, and she should always stand in front of brilliant lights. If he Slam.

  He was flying backward and to the left. He hit a tree, trying to make sure that Bonnie didn’t hit it, too — she might break. Momentarily stunned, he floated — wafted really — down to the ground.

  Stefan was on top of him.

  “You,” said Damon somewhat indistinctly through the blood in his mouth, “have been a naughty boy, boy.”

  “She made me. Literally. I thought she might die if I didn’t take some of her blood — her aura was that swollen. Now you tell me what’s wrong with Bonnie—”

  “So you bled her despite your heroic unflagging resistance—” Slam.

  This new tree smelled of resin. I never particularly wanted to get acquainted with the insides of trees, Damon thought as he spat out a mouthful of blood. Even as a crow I only use them when necessary.

  Stefan had somehow snatched Bonnie out of the air while Damon was flying toward the tree. He was that fast now. He was very, very fast. Elena was a phenomenon.

  “So now you have a secondhand idea what Elena’s blood is like.”And Stefan could hear Damon’s private thoughts. Normally, Damon was always up for a fight, but right now he could almost hear Elena’s weeping over her human friends, and something inside him felt tired. Very old — centuries old — and very tired.

  But as for the question, well,yes. Elena was still bobbing aimlessly, sometimes spread-eagled and sometimes balled up like a kitten. Her blood was rocket fuel compared to the unleaded gasoline in most girls.

  And Stefan wanted to fight. Wasn’t even trying to hide it. I was right, Damon thought. For vampires, the urge to squabble is stronger than any other urge, even the need to feed or, in Stefan’s case, the concern for his — what was the word? Oh, yes.Friends.

  Now Damon was trying to elude a thrashing, trying to enumerate his assets, which weren’t many, because Stefan was still holding him down. Thought. Speech. A penchant for fighting dirty that Stefan just couldn’t seem to understand. Logic. An instinctive ability to find the chinks in his foe’s armor…

  Hmmm…

  “Meredith and”—damn! What was that boy’s name? — “her escort are dead by now, I think,” he said innocently. “We can stay here and brawl, if that’s what you want to call it, considering that I never laid a finger on you — or we can try to resuscitate them. Which will it be, I wonder?” He really did wonder about how much control Stefan had over himself right now.

  As if Damon had zoomed out abruptly with a camera, Stefan seemed to become smaller. He had been floating a few feet above the ground; now he landed and looked about himself in astonishment, obviously unaware that he had been airborne.

  Damon spoke in the pause while Stefan was most vulnerable. “I wasn’t the one who hurt them,” he added. “If you’ll look at Bonnie”—thank badness, he knew her name—“you’ll see that no vampire could do it. I think”—he added ingenuously, for shock value—“that the attackers were trees, controlled by malach.”

  “Trees?”Stefan barely took time to glance at Bonnie’s pin-pricked arm. Then he said, “We need to get them indoors and into warm water. You take Elena—” Oh, gladly. In fact I’d give anything,anything —

  “—and this car with Bonnie right back to the boardinghouse. Wake Mrs. Flowers. Do all you can for Bonnie. I’ll go on ahead and get Meredith and Matt—” That was it! Matt. Now if only he had a mnemonic“They’re just up the road, right? That was where your first strafe of Power seemed to come from.”

  A strafe, was it? Why not be honest and just call it a feeble wash?

  And while it was fresh in his mind…M for Mortal, A for Annoying, T for Thing. And there you had it. The pity was that it applied to all of them and yet not all of them were called MAT. Oh, damn — was there supposed to be another T at the end? Mortal, Annoying, Troublesome Thing? Annoying Terrible Thing?

  “I said, is that all right?”

  Damon returned to the present. “No, it’s not all right. The other car’s wrecked. It won’t drive.”

  “I’ll float it behind me.” Stefan wasn’t bragging, just making a statement of fact.

  “It’s not even in one piece.”

  “I’ll bind the pieces. Come on, Damon. I’m sorry I strafed you; I had a completely wrong idea about what was going on. But Matt and Meredith may really be dying, and even with all my new Power, and all of Elena’s, we may not be able to save them. I’ve raised Bonnie’s core temperature a few degrees but I don’t dare to stay and bring it up slowly enough.Please, Damon.” He was putting Bonnie in the passenger seat.

  Well, that sounded like the old Stefan, but coming from this powerhouse, the new Stefan, it had rather different undertones. Still, as long as Stefan thought he was a mouse, he was a mouse. End of discussion.

  Earlier Damon had felt like Mount Vesuvius exploding. Now he suddenly felt as if he were standing near Vesuvius, and the mountain was rumbling. Ye gods! He actually felt seared just being this close to Stefan.

  He called on all his considerable resources, mentally packing himself in ice, and hoped that at least a breath of coolness underlay his answer. “I’ll go. See you later — hope the humans aren’t dead yet.”

  As they parted, Stefan sent him a powerful message of disapproval — not strafing him with sheer elemental pain, as he had before when throwing Damon against the tree, but making sure that his opinion of his brother was stamped across every word.

  Damon sent Stefan a last message as he went.I don’t understand, he thought innocently toward the disappearing Stefan.What’s wrong with saying that I hope the humans are still alive? I’ve been in greeting card shops, you know— he didn’t mention that it wasn’t for the cards but for the young cashiers — and they had sections like “Hope you get well” and “Sympathy,” which I suppose means that the previous card’s spell wasn’t strong enough. So what’s wrong with saying “I hope they’re not dead”?

  Stefan didn’t even bother to answer. But Damon flashed a quick and brilliant smile anyway, as he turned the Porsche around and set off for the boardinghouse.

  He tugged on the clothesline that kept Elena bobbing above him. She floated — nightgown billowing — above Bonnie’s head — or rather where Bonnie’s head should have been. Bonnie had always been small, and this freezing illness had her crumpled into the fetal position. Elena could practically sit on her.

  “Hello, princess. Looking gorgeous, as always. And you’re not too bad yourself.”

  It was one of the worst opening lines of his life, he thought dejectedly. But he wasn’t feeling quite himself. Stefan’s transformation had startled him — that must be what’s wrong, he decided.

  “Da…mon.”

  Damon started. Elena’s voice was slow and hesitant…and absolutely beautiful: molasses dripping sweetness, honey falling straight from the comb. It was lower in pitch, he was sure, than it had been before her transformation, and it had become a true Southern drawl. To a vampire it resembled the sweet drip-drip of a newly opened human vein.

  “Yes, angel. Have I called you ‘angel’ before? If not, it was purely an oversight.”

  And as he said this, he realized that that was another component to her voice, one he’d missed before: purity. The lancing purity of a seraph of seraphim. That should have put him off, but instead it just reminded him that Elena was someone to take seriously, never lightly.

  I’d take you seriously or lightly or any way you prefer, Damon thought, if you weren’t so stuck on my idiot you
nger brother.

  Twin violet suns turned on him: Elena’s eyes. She’d heard him.

  For the first time in his life, Damon was surrounded by people more powerful than he was. And to a vampire, Power was everything: material goods, community position, trophy mate, comfort, sex, cash, candy.

  It was an odd feeling. Not entirely unpleasant in regards to Elena. He liked strong women. He’d been looking for one strong enough for centuries.

  But Elena’s glance very effectively brought his thoughts back to their situation. He parked askew outside the boardinghouse, snatched up the stiffening Bonnie, and floated up the twisting, narrowing staircase towards Stefan’s room. It was the only place he knew there was a bathtub.

  There was barely room for three inside the tiny bathroom, and Damon was the one carrying Bonnie. He ran water into the ancient, four-footed tub based on what his exquisitely tuned senses said was five degrees above her current icy temperature. He tried to explain to Elena what he was doing, but she seemed to have lost interest and was floating round and round Stefan’s bedroom, like a close-up of Tinkerbell caged. She kept bumping the closed window and then zooming over to the open door, looking out.

  What a dilemma. Ask Elena to undress and bathe Bonnie, and risk her putting Bonnie in the tub wrong side up? Or ask Elena to do the job and watch over them both, but not touch — unless disaster struck? Plus, someone had to find Mrs. Flowers and get hot drinks going. Write a note and send Elena with it? There might be more casualties in here any moment now.

  Then Damon caught Elena’s eye, and all petty and conventional concerns seemed to drop away. Words appeared in his brain without bothering to come through his ears.

  Help her. Please!

  He turned back to the bathroom, lay Bonnie on the thick rug there and shelled her like a shrimp. Off with the sweatshirt, off with the summer top that went under it. Off with the small bra — A cup, he noticed sadly, discarding it, trying not to look at Bonnie directly. But he couldn’t help but see that the prickling marks the tree had left were everywhere.

  Off with the jeans, and then a small hitch because he had to sit and take each foot in his lap to get the tightly tied high-top sneakers off before the jeans would come past her ankles. Off with socks.

  And that was all. Bonnie was left naked except for her own blood and her pink silky underwear. He picked her up and put her in the tub, soaking himself in the process. Vampires associated baths with virgin’s blood, but only the really crazy ones tried it.

  The water in Bonnie’s bathtub turned pink when he put her in. He kept the tap running because the tub was so large, and then sat back to consider the situation. The tree had been pumping something into her with its needles. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. So it ought to come out. Most sensible solution was to suck it as if it were a snakebite, but he was hesitant to try that until he was sure Elena wouldn’t crush his skull if she found him methodically sucking Bonnie’s upper body.

  He would have to settle for next best. The bloody water didn’t quite conceal Bonnie’s diminutive form, but it helped to blur the details. Damon supported Bonnie’s head against the edge of the tub with one hand, and with the other he began to squeeze and massage the poison out of one arm.

  He knew he was doing the right thing when he smelled the resinous scent of pine. It was so thick and viscid itself that it hadn’t yet disappeared into Bonnie’s body. He was getting a small amount of it out this way, but was it enough?

  Cautiously, watching the door and cranking his senses up to cover their broadest spectrum, Damon lifted Bonnie’s hand to his lips as if he were going to kiss it. Instead, he took her wrist in his mouth and, suppressing every urge he had to bite, instead simply sucked.

  He spat almost immediately. His mouth was full of resin. The massage wasn’t enough by far. Even suction, if he could get a couple of dozen vampires and attach them all over Bonnie’s little body like leeches, wouldn’t be enough.

  He sat back on his heels and looked at her, this fatally poisoned woman-child he’d as good as given his word to save. For the first time, he became aware that he was soaked to the waist. He gave an irritated glance toward the heavens and then shrugged out of his black bomber jacket.

  What could he do? Bonnie needed medicine, but he had no idea what specific medicine she needed, and there was no witch he knew of to appeal to. Was Mrs. Flowers acquainted with arcane knowledge? Would she give it to him if she were? Or was she just a batty old lady? What was a generic medicine — for a human? He could give her over to her own people and let them try their bungling sciences — take her to a hospital — but they would be working with a girl who’d been poisoned by the Other Side, by the dark places they would never be allowed to see or understand.

  Absently, he had been rubbing a towel over his arms and hands and black shirt. Now, he looked at the towel and decided that Bonnie deserved at least a sop to modesty, especially since he could think of no more work to be done on her. He soaked the towel and then spread it out and pushed it underwater to cover Bonnie from throat to feet. It floated in some places, sank in others, but generally did the job.

  He turned the water temperature up again, but it made no difference. Bonnie was stiffening into the true death, young as she was. His peers in old Italy had had it right, he thought, a female like this was a maiden, no longer girl, not yet woman. It was especially apposite since any vampire could tell that she was a maiden in both senses.

  And it had all been done under his nose. The lure, the pack-attack, the marvelous technique and synchronization — they had killed this maiden while he sat and watched. He’d applauded it.

  Slowly, inside, Damon could feel something growing. It had sparked when he thought of the audacity of the malach, hunting his humans right under his nose. It didn’t ask the question of when the group in the car had become his humans — he supposed it was because they had been so close lately that it seemed they were his to dispose of, to say whether they lived or died, or whether they became what he was. The growing thing surged when he’d thought of the way the malach had manipulated his thoughts, drawing him into a blissful contemplation of death in general terms, while death in very specific terms was going on right at his feet. And now it was reaching incendiary levels because he had been shown up too many times today. It really was unbearable….

  …and it was Bonnie….

  Bonnie, who had never hurt a — a harmless thing for malice. Bonnie, who was like a kitten, making airy pounces at no prey at all. Bonnie, with her hair that was called something strawberry, but that looked simply as if it was on fire. Bonnie of the translucent skin, with the delicate violet fjords and estuaries of veins all over her throat and inner arms. Bonnie, who had lately taken to looking at him sideways with her large childlike eyes, big and brown, under lashes like stars….

  His jaws and canines were aching, and his mouth felt as if it were on fire from the poisonous resin. But all that could be ignored, because he was consumed with one other thought.

  Bonnie had called for his help for nearly half an hour before succumbing to the darkness.

  That was what needed to be said. Needed to be examined. Bonnie had called for Stefan — who had been too far away and too busy with his angel — but she had called for Damon, too, and she had pleaded for his help.

  And he had ignored it. With three of Elena’s friends at his feet, he had ignored their agonies, had ignored Bonnie’s frenzied pleas not to let them die.

  Usually, this sort of thing would only make him take off for some other town. But somehow he was still here and still tasting the bitter consequences of his act.

  Damon leaned back with his eyes closed, trying to shut out the overwhelming smell of blood and the musty scent of…something.

  He frowned and looked around. The little room was clean even to its corners. Nothing musty here. But the odor wouldn’t go away.

  And then he remembered.

  12

  It came back to him, all of it: the cramped aisles an
d the tiny windows and the musty smell of old books. He had been in Belgium some fifty years ago, and had been surprised to find an English-language book on such a subject still in existence. But there it was, its cover worn to a solid burnished rust, with nothing of the writing remaining, if there ever had been any. Pages were missing inside, so no one would ever know the author or the title, if either had ever been printed there. Every “receipt”—recipe, or charm, or spell — inside involved forbidden knowledge.

  Damon could easily remember the simplest spell of all: “Ye Bloode of ye Samphire or Vampyre iƒfair goode aƒa general physic for all Maladie ƒor mischief Done by those who Dance in the Woodeƒat Moonspire.”

  These malach had certainly been doing mischief in the woods, and it was the month of Moonspire, the month of the “summer solstice” in the Old Tongue. Damon didn’t want to leave Bonnie, and he certainly didn’t want Elena to see what he was going to do next. Still supporting Bonnie’s head above the warm pinkish water, he opened his shirt. There was a knife of ironwood in a sheath at his hip. He removed it and, in one quick motion, cut himself at the base of his throat.

  Plenty of blood now. The problem was how to get her to drink. Sheathing the dagger, he lifted her out of the water and tried to put her lips to the cut.

  No, that was stupid, he thought, with unaccustomed self-deprecation. She’s going to get cold again, and you don’t have any way to make her swallow. He let Bonnie lapse back into the water and thought. Then he pulled out the knife again and made another cut: this one on his arm, at the wrist. He followed the vein there until blood was not just dripping but streaming steadily out. Then he put that wrist to Bonnie’s upturned mouth, adjusting the angle of her head with his other hand. Her lips were partly open and the dark red blood flowed beautifully. Periodically she swallowed. There was life in her yet.

  It was just like feeding a baby bird, he thought, tremendously pleased with his memory, his ingenuity, and — well, just himself.