by L. J. Smith
He viewed her body, veiled under the sheet, with dispassion—no, with positive guilt. Dio mio—what if he hadn’t found her? He couldn’t get the picture out of his mind of how she’d looked, stumbling forward like that…lying there breathless…kissing his hand…
Damon sat down and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why had she been in the Ferrari with him? She’d been angry—no, not angry. Furious was closer but so frightened…of him. He could picture that clearly now, the moment of her throwing herself out of the speeding car, but he couldn’t remember anything before it.
Was he going out of his mind?
What had been done to her? No…Damon forced his thoughts away from the easy question and made himself ask the real question. What had he done to her? Elena’s eyes, blue with golden flecks, like lapis lazuli, were easy to read even without telepathy. What had…he…done to her that was so frightening that she would jump out of a speeding car to get away from him?
He’d been taunting the fair-haired boy. Mutt…Gnat…whatever. The three of them had been together, and he and Elena had been…damn! From there to his awakening at the steering wheel of the Ferrari, all was a shimmering blank. He could remember saving Bonnie at Caroline’s house; he could remember being late for his 4:44 A.M. meeting with Stefan; but after that, things began to fragment. Shinichi, maledicalo! That fox! He knew more about this than he was telling Damon.
I have always…been stronger…than my enemies, he thought. I have always…remained…in…control.
He heard a slight sound and was by Elena in an instant. Her blue eyes were shut, but the lashes were fluttering. Was she waking up?
He made himself turn down the sheet by her shoulder. Shinichi had been right. There was a lot of dried blood, but he could sense that the blood flow itself was more normal. But there was something horribly wrong…no, he wouldn’t believe it.
Damon barely kept himself from screaming in frustration. The damn fox had left her with a dislocated shoulder.
Things were definitely not going well for him today.
Now what? Call for Shinichi?
Never. He felt he couldn’t look at the fox again tonight without wanting to murder him.
He was going to have to put her shoulder back in the socket alone. It was a procedure usually only attempted by two people, but what could he do?
Still keeping Elena in an iron mind-grip, making sure she couldn’t awaken, he grasped her by the arm and began the painful business of dislocating the humerus even farther, pulling the bone away so that he could finally release pressure and hear the sweet pop that meant that the long arm bone had slipped back into the socket. Then he let go. Elena’s head was tossing from side to side, her lips parched. He poured some more of Shinichi’s magical bone-knitting tea into the battered cup, then lifted her head gently from the left side to put the cup to her lips. He let her mind have some freedom, then, and she started to lift her right hand and then dropped it.
He sighed and tilted her head, tipping the silver flagon so that the tea trickled into her mouth. She swallowed obediently. It all reminded him of Bonnie…but Bonnie hadn’t been so terribly hurt. Damon knew he couldn’t return Elena to her friends in this condition; not with her camisole and jeans shredded, and dried blood everywhere.
Maybe he could do something about that. He went to the second door off the bedroom, thought, bathroom—modern bathroom, and unlocked and opened the door. It was exactly what he’d imagined: a pristine, white, sanitary place with a large heap of towels piled, ready for guests, on the bathtub.
Damon ran warm water over one of the washcloths. He knew better by now than to strip Elena and dump her in warm water. It was what she needed, but if anyone ever found out, her friends would have his beating heart torn out of his chest and staked on a pike. He didn’t even have to think about that—he simply knew it.
He went back to Elena and began to gently stroke dried blood off her shoulder. She murmured, shaking her head, but he kept it up until the shoulder at least looked normal, exposed as it was by torn cloth.
Then he got another washcloth and went to work on her ankle. This was still swollen—she wasn’t going to be running away anytime soon. Her tibia, the first of the two bones in the lower leg, had grown properly together again. It was more evidence that Shinichi and the Shi no Shi had no need for money, or they could simply put this tea on the market and make a fortune.
“We look at things…differently,” Shinichi had said, fixing Damon with those strange golden eyes. “Money doesn’t mean much to us. What does? The deathbed agonies of an old rogue who fears he’s going to hell. Watching him sweat, trying to remember encounters he’s long forgotten. A baby’s first conscious tear of loneliness. The emotions of an unfaithful wife when her husband catches her with her lover. A maiden’s…well, her first kiss and her first night of discovery. A brother willing to die for his brother. Things like that.”
And many other things that couldn’t be mentioned in polite company, Damon thought. A lot were about pain. They were emotional leeches, sucking up the feelings of mortals to make up for the emptiness of their own souls.
He could feel the sickness inside him again as he tried to imagine—to calculate—the pain Elena must have felt, leaping out of his car. She must have expected an agonizing death—but it was still better than staying with him.
This time, before entering the door that had been a white-tiled bathroom, he thought, Kitchen, modern, with plenty of ice packs in the freezer.
Nor was he disappointed. He found himself in a strongly masculine kitchen, with chrome appliances and black-and-white tiling. In the freezer: six ice packs. He took three back to Elena and put one around her shoulder, one at her elbow, and one around her ankle. Then he went back into the kitchen’s spotless beauty for a glass of ice-cold water.
Tired. So tired.
Elena felt as if her body were weighted with lead.
Every limb…every thought…lapped in lead.
For instance, there was something she was supposed to be doing—or not doing—right now. But she couldn’t make the thought come to the surface of her mind. It was too heavy. Everything was too heavy. She couldn’t even open her eyes.
A scraping sound. Someone was near, on a chair. Then there was liquid coolness on her lips, just a few drops, but it stimulated her to try to hold the cup herself and drink. Oh, delicious water. It tasted better than anything she’d ever had before. Her shoulder hurt terribly, but it was worth the pain to drink and drink—no! The glass was being pulled away. She tried, feebly, to hang onto it, but it was pulled out of her grasp.
Then she tried to touch her shoulder, but those gentle, invisible hands wouldn’t let her, not until they had washed her own hands with warm water. After that they packed the ice packs around her and wrapped her like a mummy in a sheet. The cold numbed her immediate feelings of pain, although there were other pains, deep inside….
It was all too difficult to think about. As the hands removed the ice packs again—she was shivering with cold now—she let herself lapse back into sleep.
Damon treated Elena and dozed, treated and dozed. In the perfectly appointed bathroom, he found a tortoiseshell hairbrush and a comb. They looked serviceable. And one thing he knew for certain: Elena’s hair had never looked like this in her life—or unlife. He tried to stroke the brush gently through her hair and found that the tangles were much harder to get out than he’d imagined. When he pulled harder on the brush, she moved and murmured in that strange sleep-language of hers.
And, finally, it was the hair brushing that did it. Elena, without opening her eyes, reached up and took the brush from his hand and then, when it hit a major tangle, frowned, reached up to grasp a fistful and try to get the brush through it. Damon sympathized. He’d had long hair at times during his centuries of existence—when it couldn’t be helped, and though his hair was as naturally fine as Elena’s, he knew the frustrated feeling that you were ripping your hair out by the roots. Damon was about to take the bru
sh from her again, when she opened her eyes.
“What—?” she said, and then she blinked.
Damon had tensed, ready to push her into mental blackout if it were necessary. But she didn’t even try to hit him with the brush.
“What…happened?” What Elena was feeling was clear: she didn’t like this. She was unhappy about another awakening with only a vague idea of what had been going on when she slept.
As Damon, poised for fight or flight, watched her face, she slowly began to put together what had happened to her.
“Damon?” She gave him that no-holds-barred lapis gaze.
It said, Am I being tortured, or treated, or are you just an interested bystander, enjoying somebody’s pain while drinking a glass of cognac?
“They cook with cognac, princess. They drink Armagnac. And I don’t drink…either,” Damon said. He spoiled the entire effect by adding hastily, “That’s not a threat. I swear to you, Stefan left me as your bodyguard.”
This was technically true if you considered the facts: Stefan had yelled, “You’d better make sure nothing happens to Elena, you double-dealing bastard, or I’m going to find a way to come back and rip off your—” The rest had been muffled in the fight, but Damon had gotten the gist. And now he took the assignment seriously.
“Nothing else will hurt you, if you’ll allow me to watch over you,” he added, now getting into the area of the fictitious, since whoever had frightened or pulled her out of the car had obviously been around when he had. But nothing would get her in the future, he swore to himself. However he had blundered this last time, from now on there would be no further attacks on Elena Gilbert—or someone would die.
He wasn’t trying to spy on her thoughts, but as she stared into his eyes for a long moment, they projected with total clarity—and utter mystery—the words: I knew I was right. It was someone else all along. And he knew that under her pain, Elena felt a huge sense of satisfaction.
“I hurt my shoulder.” She reached up with her right hand to grip it, but Damon stopped her.
“You dislocated it,” Damon said. “It’s going to hurt for a while.”
“And my ankle…but someone…I remember being in the woods and looking up and it was you. I couldn’t breathe but you tore the creepers off me and you picked me up in your arms….” She looked at Damon in bewilderment. “You saved me?”
The statement had the sound of a question, but it wasn’t. She was wondering over something that seemed impossible. Then she began to cry.
A baby’s first conscious tear of loneliness. The emotions of an unfaithful wife when her husband catches her with her lover…
And maybe a young girl’s weeping when she believes that her enemy has saved her from death.
Damon ground his teeth in frustration. The thought that Shinichi might be watching this, feeling Elena’s emotions, savoring them…it was impossible to bear. Shinichi would give Elena her memory back again, he was certain of that. But at a time and place most amusing to him.
“It was my job,” he said tightly. “I’d sworn to do it.”
“Thank you,” Elena gasped between her sobs. “No, please—don’t turn away. I really mean it. Ohhh—is there a box of tissues—or anything dry?” Her body was heaving with sobs again.
The perfect bathroom had a box of tissues. Damon brought it back to Elena.
He looked away as she used them, blowing her nose again and again as she sobbed. Here there was no enchanted and enchanting spirit, no grim and sophisticated fighter of evil, no dangerous coquette. There was only a girl broken by pain, gasping like a wounded doe, sobbing like a child.
And undoubtedly his brother would know what to say to her. He, Damon, had no idea of what to do—except that he knew he was going to kill for this. Shinichi would learn what it meant to tangle with Damon when Elena was involved.
“How do you feel?” he asked brusquely. No one would be able to say he’d taken advantage of this—no one would be able to say he’d hurt her only to…to make use of her.
“You gave me your blood,” Elena said wonderingly, and as he looked quickly down at his rolled-up sleeve, she added, “No—it’s just a feeling I know. When I first—came back to Earth, after the spirit life. Stefan would give me his blood, and eventually I would feel…this way. Very warm. A little uncomfortable.”
He swung around and looked at her. “Uncomfortable?”
“Too full—here.” She touched her neck. “We think it’s a symbiotic thing…for vampires and humans who live together.”
“For a vampire Changing a human into a vampire, you mean,” he said sharply.
“Except I didn’t Change when I was part spirit still. But then—I turned back human.” She hiccupped, tried a pathetic smile, and used the brush again. “I’d ask you to look at me and see that I haven’t Changed, but…” She made a helpless little motion.
Damon sat and imagined what it would have been like, taking care of the spirit-child Elena. It was a tantalizing idea.
He said bluntly, “When you said you were a little uncomfortable before, did you mean that I should take some of your blood?”
She half glanced away, then looked back. “I told you I was grateful. I told you that I felt…too full. I don’t know how else to thank you.”
Damon had had centuries of training in discipline or he would have thrown something across the room. It was a situation to make you laugh…or weep. She was offering herself to him as thanks for rescue from suffering that he should have saved her from, and had failed.
But he was no hero. He wasn’t like St. Stefan, to refuse this ultimate of prizes; whatever condition she was in.
He wanted her.
30
Matt had given up on clues. As far as he could tell, something had caused Elena to bypass the Dunstan house and barn completely, hopping on and on until she got to a squashed and torn bed of thin creeping vines. They hung limp from Matt’s fingers, but they reminded him, disquietingly, of the feeling of the bug’s tentacles around his neck.
And from there on there was no sign of human movement. It was as if a UFO had beamed her up.
Now, from making forays to all sides until he had lost the patch of creepers, he was lost in the deep Wood. If he wanted to, he could fantasize that all sorts of noises were all around him. If he wanted to, he could imagine that the light of the flashlight was no longer as bright as it had been, that it had a sickly yellowish tinge….
All this time, while searching, he had kept as quiet as possible, realizing that he might be trying to sneak up on something that didn’t want to be snuck up on. But now, somewhere inside him, something was swelling up and his ability to stop it was weakening by the second.
When it burst out of him, it startled him as much as it might have any possible listeners.
“Ellleeeeeeeeeeeeeeenaaaa!”
From the time when he’d been a child, Matt had been taught to say his nighttime prayers. He didn’t know much else about church, but he did have a deep and sincere feeling that there was Someone or Something out there that looked after people. That somewhere and somehow it all made sense, and that there were reasons for everything.
That belief had been severely tested during the past year.
But Elena’s return from the dead had swept away all his doubts. It had seemed to prove everything that he’d always wanted to believe in.
You wouldn’t give her back to us for just a few days, and then take her away again? he wondered, and the wondering was really a form of praying. You wouldn’t—would You?
Because the thought of a world without Elena, without her sparkle; her strong will; her way of getting into crazy adventures—and then getting out of them, even more crazily—well, it was too much to lose. The world would be painted in drab grays and dark browns again without her. There would be no fire-engine reds, no flashes of parakeet green, no cerulean, no daffodil, no mercury silver—and no gold. No sprinkles of gold in endless blue lapis lazuli eyes.
“Elllleeeeeeena
aaa! Damn you, you answer me! It’s Matt, Elena! Elleeeeee—”
He broke off quite suddenly and listened. For a moment his heart leaped and his whole body started. But then he made out the words he could hear.
“Eleeeeeenaaa? Maaaatt? Where are you?”
“Bonnie? Bonnie! I’m here!” He turned his flashlight straight up, slowly twisting it in a circle. “Can you see me?”
“Can you see us?”
Matt pivoted slowly. And—yes—there were the beams of one flashlight, two flashlights, three!
His heart leaped to see three beams. “I’m coming toward you,” he shouted, and suited the action to the word. Secrecy had been long ago left behind. He was running into things, yanking at tendrils that tried to grab his ankles, but bellowing all the while, “Stay where you are! I’m coming to you!”
And then the flashlight beams were right in front of him, blinding him, and somehow he had Bonnie in his arms, and Bonnie was crying. That at least lent the situation some normality. Bonnie was crying against his chest and he was looking at Meredith, who was smiling anxiously, and at…Mrs. Flowers? It had to be, she was wearing that gardening hat with the artificial flowers on it, as well as what looked like about seven or eight woolly sweaters.
“Mrs. Flowers?” he said, his mouth finally catching up with his brain. “But—where’s Elena?”
There was a sudden droop in the three people watching him, as if they had been on tiptoes for news, and now they had slumped in disappointment.
“We haven’t seen her,” Meredith said quietly. “You were with her.”
“I was with her, yeah. But then Damon came. He hurt her, Meredith”—Matt felt Bonnie’s arms clench on him. “He had her rolling on the ground having seizures. I think he’s going to kill her. And—he hurt me. I guess I blacked out. When I woke up she was gone.”
“He took her away?” Bonnie asked fiercely.
“Yeah, but…I don’t understand what happened next.” Painfully, he explained about Elena seemingly jumping out of the car and the tracks that led nowhere.
