by L. J. Smith
“Our little cabin—Misao’s and mine.”
“And it wouldn’t possibly be a trap, would it?”
“If you think so, fine! I’ll go in alone….” Shinichi had finally changed into a half-fox, half-human form: black hair to his waist, with ruby-colored flames licking up from the ends, one silky tail with the same coloration behind him waving behind him, and two silky, crimson-tipped twitching ears on top of his head.
Damon approved aesthetically, but more important, he now had a ready-made handle. He caught Shinichi by the tail and twisted.
“Stop that!”
“I’ll stop it when I get Elena—unless you waylaid her deliberately. If she’s hurt, I’m going to take whoever harmed her and cut him into slivers. His life is forfeit.”
“No matter who it was?”
“No matter who.”
Shinichi was quivering slightly.
“Are you cold?”
“…just…admiring your resolve.” More inadvertent quivering. Almost shaking his entire body. Laughter?
“At Elena’s discretion, I would keep them alive. But in agony.” Damon twisted the tail harder. “Move!”
Shinichi took another step and a charming country cabin came into view, with a gravel path leading up between wild creepers that loaded the porch and hung down like pendants.
It was exquisite.
Even as the pain grew, Elena began to have hope. No matter how turned around she was, she had to come out of the forest at some point. She had to make it. The ground was solid—no sign of mushiness or slanting downward. She wasn’t headed for the creek. She was headed for the road. She could tell.
She fixed her sights on a distant, smooth-barked tree. Then she hopped to it, the pain almost forgotten in her new feeling of certainty.
She fell against the massive, peeling, ash-gray tree. She was resting against it when something bothered her. Her dangling leg. Why wasn’t it bumping painfully against the trunk? It had knocked continually against all the other trees when she turned to rest. She pulled back from the tree, and, as if she knew it were important, gathered all her Power and let it go in a burst of white light.
The tree with the huge hole in it, the tree she had started from, was in front of her.
For a moment Elena stood completely still, wasting Power, holding the light. Maybe it was some different…
No. She was on the other side of the tree, but it was the same one. That was her hair caught in the peeling gray bark. That dried blood was her handprint. Below it was where her bloody leg had left a mark—fresh.
She’d walked straight out and come straight back to this tree.
“Noooooooooooooo!”
It was the first vocalized sound she’d made since she’d fallen out of the Ferrari. She’d endured all that pain in silence, with little gasps or sharp breaths, but she’d never cursed and screamed. Now she wanted to do both.
Maybe it wasn’t the same tree—
Nooooooo, nooooooo, noooooooooooo!
Maybe her Power would come back and she’d see that she’d only hallucinated—
No, no, no, no, no, no!
It just wasn’t possible—
Nooooooo!
Her crutch slipped from under her arm. It had dug into her armpit so deeply that the pain there rivaled the other pains. Everything hurt. But worst was her mind. She had a picture in her mind of a sphere like the Christmas snow globes you shook to make snow or glitter fall through liquid. But this sphere had trees all over the inside. From top to bottom, side to side, all trees, all pointing toward the middle. And herself, wandering inside this lonely sphere…no matter where she went, she’d find more trees, because that was all there were in this world she’d stumbled into.
It was a nightmare, but something like it was real.
The trees were intelligent, too, she realized. The little creeping vines, the vegetation; even now it was pulling her crutch away from her. The crutch was moving as if being passed from hand to hand by very small people. She reached out and just barely grabbed the end of it.
She didn’t remember having fallen to the ground, but here she was. And there was a smell, a sweet, earthy, resinous aroma. And here were creepers, testing her, tasting her. With delicate little touches, they wound into her hair so that she couldn’t pick her head up. Then she could feel them tasting her body, her shoulder, her bloody knee. Nothing about it mattered.
She squeezed her eyes shut, her body heaving with sobs. The creepers were pulling at her wounded leg now, and instinctively she jerked away. For a moment the pain woke her up and she thought, I’ve got to get to Matt, but the next moment that thought was dulled, too. The sweet, resinous smell remained. The creepers felt their way across her moving chest, across her breasts. They encircled her stomach.
And then they began to tighten.
By the time Elena realized the danger, they were restricting her breathing. She couldn’t expand her chest. As she let out her breath, they only tightened again, working together: all the little creepers like one giant anaconda.
She couldn’t tear them away. They were tough and springy and her nails couldn’t cut through them. Working her fingers under a handful, she pulled as hard as she could, scraping with her nails and twisting. Finally one fiber sprang loose with the sound of a harp’s string breaking and a wild whipping in the air.
The rest of the creepers pulled tighter.
She was having to fight to get air now, fight not to contract her chest. Creepers were delicately touching her lips, swaying over her face like so many thin cobras, then suddenly striking and going taut around her cheek and head.
I’m going to die.
She felt a deep regret. She had been given the chance of a second lifetime—a third, if you counted her life as a vampire—and she hadn’t done anything with it. Nothing but pursue her own pleasure. And now Fell’s Church was in peril and Matt was in immediate danger, and not only was she not going to help them, she was going to give up and die right here.
What would be the right thing to do? The spiritual thing? Cooperate with evil now, and hope she’d have the chance to destroy it later? Maybe. Maybe all she needed to do was to ask for help.
The feeling of breathlessness was leaving her light-headed. She would never have believed it of Damon, that he would put her through all this, that he would allow her to be killed. Just days ago she had been defending him to Stefan.
Damon and the malach. Maybe she was his offering to them. They certainly demanded a lot.
Or maybe it was just that he wanted her to beg for help. He might be waiting in the darkness quite close, his mind centered on hers, waiting for a whispered please.
She tried to spark the last of her Power. It was almost depleted, but like a match, with repeated striking she managed to get a tiny white flame.
Now she visualized the flame going into her forehead. Into her head. Inside. There.
Now.
Through the fiery agony of not being able to draw a breath, she thought: Bonnie. Bonnie. Hear me.
No answer—but she wouldn’t hear one.
Bonnie, Matt is in a clearing in a lane off the Old Wood. He may need blood or some other help. Look for him. In my car.
Don’t worry about me. It’s too late for me. Find Matt.
And that’s all I can say, Elena thought wearily. She had a vague, sad intuition that she hadn’t gotten Bonnie to hear her. Her lungs were exploding. This was a terrible way to die. She was going to be able to exhale one more time, and then there would be no more air….
Damn you, Damon, she thought, and then she concentrated all her thoughts, all her mind’s reach on memories of Stefan. On the feeling of being held by Stefan, on Stefan’s sudden leaping smile, on Stefan’s touch.
Green eyes, leaf green, a color like a leaf held up to sunlight…
The decency he had somehow managed to retain, untainted…
Stefan…I love you….
I’ll always love you….
I’ve lov
ed you….
I love…
28
Matt had no idea what time it was, but it was deep dusk under the trees. He was lying sideways in Elena’s new car, as if he’d been tossed in and forgotten. His entire body was in pain.
This time he awoke and immediately thought, Elena. But he couldn’t see the white of her camisole anywhere, and when he called, first softly, then shouting, he got no answer.
So now he was feeling his way around the clearing, on hands and knees. Damon seemed to have gone and that gave him a spark of hope and courage that lit up his mind like a beacon. He found the discarded Pendleton shirt—considerably trampled. But when he couldn’t find another soft warm body in the clearing, his heart crashed down somewhere around his boots.
And then he remembered the Jaguar. He fumbled frantically in one pocket for the keys, came up empty, and finally discovered, inexplicably, that they were in the ignition.
He lived through the agonizing moment when the car wouldn’t start, and then was shocked to see the brightness of its headlights. He puzzled briefly about how to turn the car while making sure he wasn’t running a limp Elena over, then dug through the glove compartment box, flinging out manuals and pairs of sunglasses. Ah, and one lapis lazuli ring. Someone was keeping a spare here, just in case. He put it on; it fit well enough.
At last his fingers closed over a flashlight, and he was free to search the clearing as thoroughly as he wanted to.
No Elena.
No Ferrari either.
Damon had taken her somewhere.
All right, then, he would track them. To do that he had to leave Elena’s car behind, but he had already seen what these monsters could do to cars, so that wasn’t saying much.
He would have to be careful with the flashlight, too. Who knew how much charge the batteries had left?
For the hell of it, he tried calling Bonnie’s mobile phone, and then her home phone, and then the boardinghouse. No signal, even though according to the phone itself, there should have been. No need to question why, either—this was the Old Wood, messing with things as usual. He didn’t even ask himself why it was Bonnie’s number he called first, when Meredith would probably be more sensible.
He found the tracks of the Ferrari easily. Damon had sped out of here like a bat…Matt smiled grimly as he finished the sentence in his mind.
And then he’d driven as if to get out of the Old Wood. This was easy, it was clear that either Damon had been going too fast for proper control or that Elena had been fighting, because in a number of places, mainly around corners, the tire tracks showed up clearly against the soft ground beside the road.
Matt was especially careful not to step on anything that might be a clue. He might have to backtrack at some point. He was careful, too, to ignore the quiet noises of the night around him. He knew the malach were out there, but he refused to let himself think about them.
And he never even asked himself why he was doing this, deliberately going into danger instead of retreating from it, instead of trying to drive the Jaguar out of the Old Wood. After all, Stefan hadn’t left him as bodyguard.
But then you couldn’t trust anything that Damon might say, he thought.
And besides—well, he’d always kept one eye out for Elena, even before their first date. He might be clumsy, slow, and weak in comparison to their enemies now, but he would always try.
It was pitch-dark now. The last remnants of twilight had left the sky, and if Matt looked up he could see clouds and stars—with trees leaning in ominously from either side.
He was getting toward the end of the road. The Dunstans’ house should be coming up on the right pretty soon. He’d ask them if they’d seen—
Blood.
At first his mind flew to ridiculous alternatives, like dark red paint. But his flashlight had caught reddish brown stains on the roadside just as the road made a sharp curve. That was blood on the road there. And not just a little blood.
Being careful to walk well around the red-brown marks, running his flashlight over and over the far side of the road, Matt began to put together what must have happened.
Elena had jumped.
Either that or Damon had pushed her out of a speeding car—and after all the trouble he’d taken to get her, that didn’t make much sense. Of course, he might have already bled her until he was satisfied—Matt’s fingers went up to his sore neck instinctively—but then, why take her in the car at all?
To kill her by pushing her out?
A stupid way to do it, but maybe Damon had been counting on his little pets to take care of the body.
Possible, but not very likely.
What was likely?
Well, the Dunstans’ house was coming up on this side of the road, but you couldn’t see it from here. And it would be just like Elena to jump out of a speeding car as it rounded a sharp corner. It would take brains, and guts, and a breathtaking trust in sheer luck that it wouldn’t kill her.
Matt’s flashlight slowly traced the devastation of a long hedge of rhododendron bushes just off the road.
My God, that’s what she did. Yeah. She jumped out and tried to roll. Jeez, she was lucky not to break her neck. But she kept rolling, grabbing at roots and creepers to stop herself. That’s why they’re all torn up.
A bubble of elation was rising in Matt. He was doing it. He was tracking Elena. He could see her fall as clearly as if he’d been there.
But then she got flipped by that tree root, he thought as he continued to follow her trail. That would have hurt. And she’d slammed down and rolled on the concrete for a bit—that must have been agony; she’d left a lot of blood here, and then back into the bushes.
And then what? The rhododendron showed no more signs of her fall. What had happened here? Had Damon reversed the Ferrari fast enough and gotten her back?
No, Matt decided, examining the earth carefully. There was only one set of footprints here, and it was Elena’s. Elena had gotten up here—only to fall down again, probably from injury. And then she’d managed to get up again, but the marks were weird, a normal footprint on one side and a deep but small indentation on the other.
A crutch. She found herself a crutch. Yeah, and that dragging mark was the mark of her bad foot. She walked up to this tree, and then around it—or hopped, actually, that’s what it looked like. And then she’d headed for the Dunstans’.
Smart girl. She was probably unrecognizable by now, and anyway, who cared if they noticed the resemblance between her and the late, great Elena Gilbert? She could be Elena’s cousin from Philadelphia.
So she’d gone, one, two, three…eight steps—and there was the Dunstan house. Matt could see lights. Matt could smell horses. Excitedly, he ran the rest of the way—taking a few falls that didn’t do his aching body any good, but still heading straight for the back porch light. The Dunstans weren’t front porch people.
When he got to the door, he pounded on it almost frenziedly. He’d found her. He’d found Elena!
It seemed a long time before the door opened a crack. Matt automatically wedged his foot in the crack while thinking, Yes, good, you’re cautious people. Not the type to let a vampire in after you’d just seen a girl covered in blood.
“Yes? What do you want?”
“It’s me, Matt Honeycutt,” he said to the eye that he could see peering out of the slit of open door. “I’ve come for El—for the girl.”
“What girl are you talking about?” the voice said gruffly.
“Look, you don’t have to worry. It’s me—Jake knows me from school. And Kristin knows me, too. I’ve come to help.”
Something in the sincerity of his voice seemed to strike a chord in the person behind the door. It was opened to reveal a large, dark-haired man who was wearing an under-shirt and needed a shave. Behind him, in the living room was a tall, thin, almost gaunt woman. She looked as if she had been crying. Behind both of them was Jake, who’d been a year senior to Matt at Robert E. Lee High.
“Jake
,” Matt said. But he got no answer back except a dull look of anguish.
“What’s wrong?” Matt demanded, terrified. “A girl came by here a while ago—she was hurt—but—but—you let her in, right?”
“No girl’s come by here,” said Mr. Dunstan flatly.
“She had to have. I followed her trail—she left a trail in blood, do you understand, almost up to your door.” Matt wasn’t letting himself think. Somehow, if he kept telling the facts loudly enough, they would produce Elena.
“More trouble,” Jake said, but in a dull voice that went with his expression.
Mrs. Dunstan seemed the most sympathetic. “We heard a voice out in the night, but when we looked, there was no one there. And we have troubles of our own.”
It was then, right on cue, that Kristin burst into the room. Matt stared at her with a feeling of déjà vu. She was dressed up something like Tami Bryce. She had cut off the bottoms of her jeans shorts until they were practically nonexistent. On top she was wearing a bikini top, but with—Matt hastily turned his eyes away—two big round holes cut just where Tami had had round pieces of cardboard. And she’d decorated herself with glitter glue.
God! She’s only, what, twelve? Thirteen? How could she possibly be acting this way?
But the next moment, his whole body was vibrating in shock. Kristin had pasted herself against him and was cooing, “Matt Honey-butt! You came to see me!”
Matt breathed carefully to get over his shock. Matt Honey-butt. She couldn’t know that. She didn’t even go to the same school as Tami did. Why would Tami have called her and—told her something like that?
He shook his head, as if to clear it. Then he looked at Mrs. Dunstan, who had seemed kindest. “Can I use your phone?” he asked. “I need—I really need to make a couple of calls.”
“The phone’s been down since yesterday,” Mr. Dunstan said harshly. He didn’t try to move Kristin away from Matt, which was odd because he was clearly angry. “Probably a fallen tree. And you know mobile phones don’t work out here.”
