by L. J. Smith
She had barely stopped rolling when she was pulling at the bush that had thwarted her and getting to her feet just as she pulled the last entangling stems from her hair. The calculation about the Dunstans’ house happened instantaneously in her head, even as she turned and saw the crushed swath she’d cut through the greenery and the blood on the road.
At first she looked at her skinned hands in bewilderment; they couldn’t have left such a gory trail. And they hadn’t. One knee had been skinned—flayed, really—right through her jeans—and one seriously messed up leg, less bloody but causing her sheets of pain like white lighting even while she was not trying to move it. Two arms with quite a lot of skin removed.
No time to find out how much or to figure out what she’d done to her shoulder. A screeeeeeech of brakes ahead. Lord, he’s slow. No, I’m fast, hyped up by pain and terror. Use it!
She ordered her legs to sprint into the forest. Her right leg obeyed, but when she swiveled her left and it hit the ground fireworks went off behind her eyes. She was in a state of hyper-alertness; she saw the stick even as she was falling. She rolled over once or twice, which caused dull red flares of pain to go off in her head, and then she was able to grab it. It might have been specially designed for a crutch, around underarm height and blunt on one end but sharp on the other. She tucked it under her left arm and somehow willed herself up from her place in the mud: boosting off with her right leg and catching herself on the crutch so that she scarcely had to touch her left foot to the ground.
She’d got turned around in the fall and had to twist to right herself again—but there she saw it, the last remains of sunset and the road behind her. Head forty-five-degrees right from that glow, she thought. Thank God, it was her right arm that was messed up; this way she could support herself with her left shoulder on the crutch. Still without a moment’s hesitation, without giving Damon an extra millisecond to follow her, she plunged in her chosen direction into the forest.
Into the Old Wood.
27
When Damon woke up, he was wrestling with the wheel of the Ferrari. He was on a narrow road, heading almost straight into a glorious sunset—and the passenger door was waving open.
Once again, only the combination of almost instantaneous reflex and perfectly designed automobile allowed him to keep out of the wide, muddy ditches on either side of the one-lane road. But he managed it and ended up with the sunset at his back, gazing at the long shadows down the road and wondering what the hell had just happened to him.
Was he sleep-driving now? The passenger door—why was it open?
And then something happened. A long, thin thread, slightly waving, almost like a single strand of gossamer, lit up as the reddish sunlight hit it. It was dangling from the top of the passenger window, which was shut, with the roof down.
He didn’t bother to pull the car to one side, but stopped in the middle of the road and went around to look at that hair.
In his fingers, held toward the light, it turned white. But turned toward the dark of the forest, it showed its true color: gold.
A long, slightly waving, golden hair.
Elena.
As soon as he had identified it, he got back into the car and began to backtrack. Something had ripped Elena right out of his car without putting so much as a scratch on the paint. What could have done that?
How had he managed to get Elena to go for a spin anyway? And why couldn’t he remember? Had they both been attacked…?
When he backtracked, however, the marks by the passenger’s side of the road told the entire grisly story. For some reason, Elena had been frightened into jumping out of the car—or some power had pulled her. And Damon, who now felt as if there were steam rising from his skin, knew that in all the woods there were only two creatures that could have been responsible.
He sent out a scouting probe, a simple circle that was meant to be undetectable, and almost lost control of the car again.
Merda! That blast had come out as a sphere-shaped killing strafe—birds were dropping out of the sky. It tore through the Old Wood, through Fell’s Church, which surrounded it, and into the areas beyond, before finally dying out hundreds of miles away.
Power? He wasn’t a vampire, he was Death Incarnate. Damon had a vague thought of pulling over and waiting until the turmoil inside himself had stopped. Where had such Power come from?
Stefan would have stopped, would have dithered around, wondering. Damon just grinned savagely, gunned the engine, and sent thousands of probes raining from the sky, all attuned to catch a fox-shaped creature running or hiding in the Old Wood.
He got a hit in a tenth of a second.
There. Under a black cohosh bush, if he wasn’t mistaken—under some unspeakable bush, anyway. And Shinichi knew he was coming.
Good. Damon sent a wave of Power directly at the fox, catching it in a kekkai, a sort of invisible rope-barrier that he tightened deliberately, slowly, around the struggling animal. Shinichi fought back, with killing force. Damon used the kekkai to pick him up bodily and slam the little fox body into the ground. After a few of these slams Shinichi decided to stop fighting and played dead instead. That was fine with Damon. It was the way he thought Shinichi looked best, except for the bit about playing.
At last he had to stash the Ferrari between two trees and ran swiftly to the bush where Shinichi was now fighting the barrier around him to get into human form.
Standing back, eyes narrowed, arms crossed on his chest, Damon watched the struggle for a while. Then he let up enough on the kekkai’s field to allow the change.
And the instant Shinichi became human, Damon’s hands were around his throat.
“Where is Elena, kono bakayarou?” In a lifetime as a vampire you learned a lot of curse words. Damon preferred to use those of a victim’s native language. He called Shinichi everything he could think of, because Shinichi was fighting, and was Calling telepathically for his sister. Damon had some choice things to say about that in Italian, where hiding behind your younger twin sister was…well, good for a lot of creative cursing.
He felt another fox-shape racing at him—and he realized that Misao intended to kill. She was in her true shape as a kitsune: just like the russet thing he’d tried to run over while driving with Damaris. A fox, yes, but a fox with two, three…six tails altogether. The extra ones usually were invisible, he gathered, as he neatly caught her in a kekkai as well. But she was ready to show them, ready to use all her powers to rescue her brother.
Damon contented himself with holding her as she struggled vainly within the barrier, and saying to Shinichi, “Your baby sister fights better than you do, bakayarou. Now, give me Elena.”
Shinichi changed forms abruptly and leaped for Damon’s throat, sharp white teeth in evidence, top and bottom. They were both too keyed up, too high on testosterone—and Damon, on his new Power—to let it go.
Damon actually felt the teeth scrape his throat before he got his hands again around the fox’s neck. But this time Shinichi was showing his tails, a fan that Damon didn’t bother to count.
Instead he stomped one neat boot on the fan and pulled with his other two hands. Misao, watching, shrieked in anger and anguish. Shinichi thrashed and arched, golden eyes fixed on Damon’s. In another minute his spine would crack.
“I’ll enjoy that,” Damon told him sweetly. “Because I’ll bet that Misao knows whatever you know. Too bad you won’t be here to see her die.”
Shinichi, rabid with fury, seemed willing to die and condemn Misao to Damon’s mercies just to avoid losing the fight. But then his eyes darkened abruptly, his body went limp, and words appeared faintly in Damon’s mind.
…hurts…can’t…think…
Damon regarded him gravely. Now, Stefan, at this point, would release a good deal of the pressure on the kitsune so the poor little fox could think, Damon, on the other hand, increased the pressure briefly, then released it back to the previous level.
“Is that better?” he asked solicitously.
“Can the cute little foxie think now?”
You…bastard…
Angry as he was, Damon suddenly remembered the point of all this.
“What happened to Elena? Her trail runs out up against a tree. Is she inside it? You have seconds left to live, now. Talk.”
“Talk,” seconded another voice, and Damon barely glanced up at Misao. He’d left her relatively unguarded and she’d found power and room to change into her human shape. He took it in instantaneously, dispassionately.
She was small-boned and petite, looking like any Japanese schoolgirl, except that her hair was just like her brother’s—black tipped with red. The only difference was that the red in her hair was lighter and brighter—a truly brilliant scarlet. The bangs that fell into her eyes had blazing fiery tips, and so did the silky dark hair falling over her shoulders. It was striking but the only neurons that lit in Damon’s mind in response were connected to fire and danger and deception.
She might have fallen into a trap, Shinichi managed.
A trap? Damon frowned. What kind of trap?
I’ll take you to where you can look into them, Shinichi said evasively.
“And the fox can suddenly think again. But you know what? I don’t think you’re cute at all,” Damon whispered, then dropped the kitsune on the ground. Shinichi-as-a-human fountained up, and Damon dropped the barrier just long enough to let the fox in human form try to take his head off with one punch. He leaned away from it easily, and returned it with a blow that knocked Shinichi back into the tree hard enough to bounce. Then, while the kitsune was still dazed and glassy-eyed, he picked him up, slung him over one shoulder, and started back to the car.
What about me? Misao was trying to curb furious and sound pathetic, but she really wasn’t very good at it.
“You’re not cute, either,” Damon said, recklessly. He could get to like this super-Power thing. “But if you mean, when do you get out, it’s when I get Elena back. Safe and healthy, with all her bits attached.”
He left her cursing. He wanted to get Shinichi to wherever they had to go while the fox was still dazed and in pain.
Elena was counting. Go straight one, go straight two—untangle crutch from creeper, three, four, go straight five—it was definitely getting darker now, go straight six, caught by something in hair, yank, seven, eight, go straight—damn! A fallen tree. Too high to scramble over. She’d have to go around it. All right, to the right, one, two, three—a long tree—seven steps. Seven steps back—now, sharp right turn and keep walking. Much as you’d like to, you can’t count any of those steps. So you’re at nine. Straighten yourself because the tree was perpendicular—dear heaven, it’s pitch dark now. Call that eleven and—
—she was flying. What had caused her crutch to slip, she didn’t know, couldn’t tell. It was too dark to go frisking around, maybe finding herself a case of poison oak. What she had to do was to think about things, to think so that this all-pervading hellish pain in her left leg would quiet down. It hadn’t helped her right arm either—that instinctive windmilling, trying to catch something and save herself. God, that fall had hurt. The whole side of her body hurt so much—
But she had to get to civilization because she believed only civilization could help Matt.
You have to get up again, Elena.
I’m doing it!
Now—she couldn’t see anything, but she had a pretty good idea which way she’d been pointed when she’d fallen. And if she was wrong, she would hit the road and be able to backtrack.
Twelve, thirteen—she kept counting, kept talking to herself. When she reached twenty she felt relief and joy. Any minute now, she’d hit the driveway.
Any minute now, she’d hit it.
It was pitch black out, but she was careful to scuff the ground so she would know, the minute she hit it.
Any…minute…now…
When Elena reached forty she knew she was in trouble.
But where could she have gone so far wrong? Every time some small obstacle had made her turn right, she’d turned carefully left the next time. And there was that whole line of landmarks in her way, the house, the barn, the small cornfield. How could she have gotten lost? How? It had only been half a minute in the forest…only a few steps in the Old Wood.
Even the trees were changing. Where she had been, near the road, most of the trees had been hickory or tulip. Now she was in a thicket of white oaks and red oaks…and conifers.
Old oaks…and on the ground, needles and leaves that muffled her foot-hops into soundlessness.
Soundlessness…but she needed help!
“Mrs. Dunstan! Mr. Dunstan! Kristin! Jake!” She threw the names out into a world that was doing its best to muffle her voice. In fact, in the darkness she could discern a certain swirling wispy grayness that seemed to be—yes—it was fog.
“Mrs. Dunstaa—a-aan! Mr. Dunstaa-aa-an! Kriiiissstiiiinnn! Jaaa-aaake!”
She needed shelter; she needed help. Everything hurt, most of all her left leg and right shoulder. She could just imagine what a sight she would make: covered in mud and leaves from falling every few feet, her hair in a wild mop from being caught on trees, blood everywhere….
One good thing: she certainly didn’t look like Elena Gilbert. Elena Gilbert had long silky hair that was always perfectly coifed or charmingly dishabille. Elena Gilbert set the fashions in Fell’s Church and would never be seen wearing a torn camisole and jeans covered with mud. Whoever they thought this forlorn stranger was, they wouldn’t think she was Elena.
But the forlorn stranger was feeling a sudden qualm. She’d walked through woods all her life and never had her hair caught once. Oh, of course she had been able to see then, but she didn’t remember having to step out of her way often to avoid it.
Now, it was as if the trees were deliberately reaching down to catch and snag her hair. She had to hold her body clumsily still and try to whip her head away in the worst cases—she couldn’t manage to stay upright and get the tendril torn out as well.
But painful as the tearing at her hair was, nothing scared her like the grabbing at her legs.
Elena had grown up playing in this forest, and there had always been plenty of room to walk without hurting herself. But now…things were reaching out, fibrous tendrils were grabbing at her ankle just where it hurt most. And then it was agony to try to rip with her fingers at these thick, sap-coated, stinging roots.
I’m frightened, she thought, putting into words at last what all her feelings had been since she stepped into the darkness of the Old Wood. She was damp with dew and sweat, her hair was as wet as if she’d been standing in the rain. It was so dark! And now her imagination began to work, and unlike most people’s imaginations it had genuine, solid information to work with. A vampire’s hand seemed to tangle in her hair. After an endless time of agony in her ankle and her shoulder, she had twisted the “hand” out of her hair—to find another curling stalk.
All right. She would ignore the pain and get her bearings here, here where there was a remarkable tree, a massive white pine that had a huge hole in its center, big enough for Bonnie to get into. She would put that flat at her back and then walk straight west—she couldn’t see stars because of the cloud cover, but she felt that west was to her left. If she were correct, it would bring her to the road. If she were wrong and it was north, it would take her to the Dunstans’. If it were south, it would eventually take her to another curve of the road. If it were east…well, it would be a long walk, but it would eventually take her to the creek.
But first she would gather all her Power, all the Power she’d been unconsciously using to dull the pain and give her strength—she would gather it and light up this place so she could see if the road was visible—or, better, a house—from where she stood. It was only a human’s power but, again, the knowledge of how to use it made all the difference, she thought. She gathered the Power in one tight white ball and then loosed it, twisting to look around before it dissipated.
Trees. Tre
es. Trees.
Oaks and hickories, white pine and beech. No high ground to get to. In every direction, nothing but trees, as if she were lost in some grimly enchanted forest and could never get out.
But she would get out. Any of those directions would take her to people eventually—even east. Even east, she could just follow the stream until it led to people.
She wished she had a compass.
She wished she could see the stars.
She was trembling all over, and it wasn’t just from the cold. She was injured; she was terrified. But she had to forget about that. Meredith wouldn’t cry. Meredith wouldn’t be terrified. Meredith would find a sensible way to get out.
She had to get help for Matt.
Gritting her teeth to ignore the pain, Elena started off. If any of her wounds had happened to her in isolation, she would have made a big fuss about it, sobbing and writhing over the injury. But with so many different pains, it had all melted into one terrible agony.
Be careful now. Make sure you’re going straight and not tilting off at an angle. Pick your next target in your straight line of sight.
The problem was that by now it was too dark to see much of anything. She could just make out deeply grooved bark straight ahead. A red oak probably. All right, go to it. Hop—oh, it hurts—hop—the tears washing down her cheeks—hop—just a little farther—hop—you can make it—hop. She put her hand out on shaggy bark. All right. Now, look straight in front of you. Ah. Something gray and rough and massive ahead—maybe a white oak. Hop to it—agony—hop—somebody help me—hop—how long will it take?—hop—not that far now—hop. There. She put her hand on the wide rough bark.
And then she did it again.
And again.
And again. And again. And again.
“What is it?” Damon demanded. He’d been forced to let Shinichi lead once they were out of the car again, but he still kept the kekkai loosely around him and he still watched every move the fox made. He didn’t trust him as far as—well, the fact was, he didn’t trust him at all. “What’s behind the barrier?” he said again, more roughly, tightening the noose around the kitsune’s neck.
