by L. J. Smith
“About Matt?” She gave him a straightforward, intelligent glance.
“Nat? No, no. It’s about you. I know you were surprised that Stefan would leave you in the care of somebody like me.”
There was no room for privacy in the Ferrari and he was sharing her body warmth already.
“Yes, I was,” she said simply.
“Well, it may have something to do with—”
“It may have had something to do with how we decided that my aura would give even old vampires the jigsies. From now on, I’ll need strong protection because of that, Stefan said.”
Damon didn’t know what the jigsies were, but he was prepared to bless them for getting a delicate point across to a lady. “I think,” he said carefully, “that of all things, Stefan would want you to have protection from the evil folk drawn here from all over the globe, and above all other things that you not be forced to—to, um, jigsy—if it was not your wish.”
“And now he’s left me—like a selfish, stupid, idealistic idiot, considering all the people in the world who might want to jigsy me.”
“I agree,” Damon said, careful of keeping the lie of Stefan’s willing departure intact. “And I’ve already promised what protection I can offer. I really will do my best, Elena, to see that no one gets near you.”
“Yes,” said Elena, “but then something like this”—she made a little gesture probably to indicate Shinichi and all the problems brought about by his arrival—“comes up and nobody knows how to deal with it.”
“True,” said Damon. He had to keep shaking himself and reminding himself of his real purpose here. He was here to…well, he wasn’t on St. Stefan’s side. And the thing was, it was easy enough….
There she was, brushing her hair out…a fair pretty maiden sat brushing her hair out…the sun in the sky was nonesuch so gold…. Damon shook himself hard. Since when had he gotten into ye Olde English folksongs? What was wrong with him?
To have something to say, he asked, “How are you feeling?”—just, as it happened, as she lifted her hand to her throat.
She grimaced. “Not bad.”
And that made them look at each other. And then Elena smiled and he had to smile back, at first just a quirk of the lip, and then a full smile.
She was…damn it, she was everything. Witty, enchanting, brave, smart…and beautiful. And he knew that his eyes were saying all that and that she wasn’t turning away.
“We might—take a little walk,” he said, and bells rang and trumpets played fanfares, and confetti came raining down and there was a release of doves….
In other words, she said, “All right.”
They picked a little path off the clearing that looked easy to Damon’s night-acquainted vampire eyes. Damon didn’t want her on her feet too much. He knew that she still hurt and that she didn’t want him to know it or to pamper her. Something inside him said, “Well, then, wait until she says she’s tired and help her to sit down.”
And something else beyond his control, sprang out at the first little hesitation of her foot, and he picked her up, apologizing in a dozen different languages, and generally acting the fool until he had her seated on a comfortably carved wooden bench with a back to it and a very light traveling blanket over her knees. He kept adding, “You’ll tell me if there’s something—anything—else you want?” He accidentally sent to her a snippet of his thoughts of possible contenders, which were, a glass of water, him sitting beside her, and a baby elephant, which he had earlier seen in her mind that she admired very much.
“I’m very sorry, but I don’t think I do elephants,” he said, on his knees, making the footstool more comfortable for her, when he caught a random thought of hers: that he was not so different from Stefan as he seemed.
No other name could have caused him to do what he did then. No other word, or concept, could have such effect on him. In an instant the blanket was off, the footstool had disappeared, and he was holding Elena bent backward with the slender column of her neck fully exposed to him.
The difference, he told her, between me and my brother is that he is still hoping somehow to slip in through some side door into heaven. I’m not such a moaning ninny about my fate. I know where I’m going. And I don’t—he gave her a smile with all canines fully extended—give a damn about it.
Her eyes were wide—he’d startled her. And startled her into an unintentional, thoroughly honest response. Her thoughts were projected toward him, easy to read. I know—and, I’m like that, too. I want what I want. I’m not as good as Stefan. And I don’t know—
He was enthralled. What don’t you know, sweetheart?
She just shook her head, eyes shut.
To break the deadlock, he whispered into her ear, “What about this, then:
Say I’m bold
And say I’m bad
Say—you vanities
—I’m vainer.
But you Erinyes, just add
I kissed Elena.”
Her eyes flew open. “Oh, no! Please, Damon.” She was whispering. “Please! Please not now!” And she swallowed miserably. “Besides, you asked me if I’d like a drink, and then suddenly it’s no drink. I wouldn’t mind being a drink if you’d like, but first, I’m so thirsty—as thirsty as you are, maybe?”
She did the little tap-tap-tap under her chin again.
Damon’s insides melted.
He held out his hand and it closed around the stem of a delicate crystal glass. He swirled the splash of liquid in it expertly, tested it for bouquet—ah, exquisite—then gently rolled it on his tongue. It was the real thing. Black Magic wine, grown from Clarion Loess Black Magic grapes. It was the only wine most vampires would drink—and there were apocryphal stories of how it had kept them on their feet when their other thirst could not be assuaged.
Elena was drinking hers, her blue eyes wide above the deep violet of the wine as he told her some of its story. He loved to watch her when she was like this—investigating with all her senses fully aroused. He shut his eyes and remembered some choice moments from the past. Then he opened them again to find Elena, looking very much the thirsty child, eagerly gulping down—
“Your second glass…?” He’d discovered the first goblet at her feet. “Elena, where did you get another one?”
“I just did what you did. Held out my hand. It’s not as if it were hard liquor, is it? It tastes like grape juice, and I was dying for a drink.”
Could she really be that naïve? True, Black Magic wine didn’t have the sharp odor or taste of most alcohol. It was subtle, created for the fastidious vampire palate. Damon knew that the grapes were grown in the soil, loess, that a grinding glacier leaves behind. Of course, that process was only for the long-lived vampires, as it took ages to build up enough loess. And when the soil was ready, the grapes were grown and processed, from graft to foot-stomped pulp in ironwood vats, without ever seeing the sun. That was what gave it its black velvet, dark, delicate taste. And now…
Elena had a “grape juice” mustache. Damon wanted very much to kiss it away.
“Well, someday you can tell people you drank two glasses of Black Magic in under a minute, and impress them,” he said.
But she was doing the tap-tap-tapping again under her chin.
“Elena, do you want to have some of your blood drawn?”
“Yes!” She said it in the ringing-bell tones of someone who has finally been asked the right question.
She was drunk.
She flung both arms backward, draping them against the bench, which conformed to accept her body’s every new motion. It had become a black suede couch with a high back: a divan, and just now, Elena’s slender neck was resting on the highest point of that back, her throat exposed to the air. Damon turned away with a little moan. He wanted to get Elena to civilization. He was worried about her health, mildly concerned about…Mutt’s; and now…he couldn’t have anything he wanted. He could hardly bleed her when she was drunk.
Elena made a different sort of
sound that might have been his name. “D’m’n?” she mumbled. Her eyes had filled with tears.
Just about anything that a nurse might have to do for a patient, Damon had done for Elena. But it seemed she didn’t want to unswallow two glasses of Black Magic in front of him.
“‘M’shick,” Elena got out, with a dangerous hiccup at the end. She gripped Damon’s wrist.
“Yes, this is not the kind of wine to guzzle. Wait, just sit up straight and let me try…” And maybe because he said the words without thinking, without thinking of being rude, without thinking of manipulating her one way or another, it was all right. Elena obeyed him and he put two fingers on either side of her temples and pressed slightly. For a split second there was a near disaster, and then Elena was breathing slowly and calmly. She was still affected by the wine, but she wasn’t drunk any longer.
And the time was now. He had to tell her the truth at last.
But first, he needed to wake up.
“A triple espresso, please,” he said, holding out his hand. It appeared instantly, aromatic and black as his soul. “Shinichi says espresso alone is an excuse for the human race.”
“Whoever Shinichi is, I agree with him or her. A triple espresso, please,” Elena said to the magic that was this forest, this snowflake globe, this universe. Nothing happened.
“Maybe it’s only attuned to my voice right now,” Damon said, flashing her a reassuring smile, and then he fetched her espresso with a wave.
To his surprise, Elena was frowning.
“You said ‘Shinichi.’ Who’s that?
Damon wanted nothing less than for Elena to get involved with the kitsune, but if he was really going to tell all she was going to have to. “He’s a kitsune, a fox spirit,” he said. “And the person who gave me that Web address that sent Stefan running.”
Elena’s expression froze over.
“Actually,” Damon said, “I find that I would rather get you home before taking the next step.”
Elena lifted exasperated eyes to the sky, but let him pick her up and carry her back to the car.
He had just realized where the best place to tell her was.
It was just as well that they didn’t urgently need to get to any place that was out of the Old Wood right now. They didn’t find any road that did not lead to dead ends, little clearings, or trees. Elena seemed so unsurprised at finding the little lane that led to their small but perfectly appointed house that he said nothing as they entered and he took new inventory of what they had.
They had one bedroom with one large, luxurious bed. They had a kitchen. And a living area. But any of these rooms could become any kind of room you chose simply by thinking of it before opening the door. Moreover, there were the keys—left behind by what Damon was realizing was a seriously shaken Shinichi—that allowed the doors to do more. Insert a key in a door and announce what you wanted and there you were—even, it seemed, if it should be outside Shinichi’s territory in spacetime. In other words, they seemed to link to the real outside world, but Damon wasn’t entirely sure about that. Was it the real world or just another of Shinichi’s play-traps?
What they had right now was a long spiraling stairway to an open-air observatory with a widow’s walk around it, just like the roof of the boardinghouse. There was even a room just like Stefan’s, Damon noted as he carried Elena up the stairs.
“We’re going all the way up?” Elena sounded bewildered.
“All the way.”
“And what are we doing up here?” Elena asked, when he had her settled in a chair with a footstool and a light blanket on the roof.
Damon sat down on a rocker, rocking a little, his arms wrapped around one knee, his face tilted to the clouded sky.
He rocked once more, stopped, and turned to face her. “I suppose we’re here,” he said, in the light self-mocking tone that meant he was very serious, “so that I can tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
32
“Who is it?” a voice was saying from the forest darkness. “Who’s out there?”
Bonnie had seldom been as grateful to anyone as she was to Matt for holding on to her. She needed people contact. If she could only bury herself deep enough in other people, she would be safe somehow. She just barely managed not to scream as the dimming flashlight swung onto a surrealistic scene.
“Isobel!”
Yes, it really was Isobel, not at the Ridgemont hospital at all, but here in the Old Wood. She was standing at bay, almost naked except for blood and mud. Right here, against this background, she looked like both prey and a sort of forest goddess, a goddess of vengeance, and of hunted things, and of punishment for any being who stood in her way. She was winded, breathing hard, with bubbles of saliva coming out of her mouth, but she wasn’t broken. You only had to see her eyes, shining red, to see that.
Behind her, stepping on branches and letting loose the occasional grunt or curse, were two other figures, one tall and thin but bulbous on top, and one shorter and stouter. They looked like gnomes trying to follow a wood nymph.
“Dr. Alpert!” Meredith seemed just barely able to sound like her ordinary controlled self.
At the same time, Bonnie saw that Isobel’s piercings were much worse. She’d lost most of her studs and hoops and needles, but there was blood and, already, pus, coming out of the holes where they had been.
“Don’t scare her,” Jim’s voice whispered out of the shadows. “We’ve been tracking her since we had to stop.” Bonnie could feel Matt, who had drawn in air to shout, suddenly choke it off. She could also see why Jim looked so top-heavy. He was carrying Obaasan, Japanese-style, on his back, with her arms around his neck. Like a backpack, Bonnie thought.
“What happened to you?” Meredith whispered. “We thought you’d gone to the hospital.”
“Somehow, a tree fell across the road while we were letting you off, and we couldn’t get around it to get to the hospital, or anywhere else. Not only that, but it was a tree with a hornet’s nest or something inside it. Isobel woke up like that”—the doctor snapped her fingers—“and when she heard the hornets she scrambled out and ran from them. We ran after her. I don’t mind saying I would have done the same if I’d been alone.”
“Did anybody see these hornets?” Matt asked, after a moment.
“No, it had just turned dark. But we heard them all right. Weirdest thing I ever heard. Sounded like hornet a foot long,” Jim said.
Meredith was now squeezing Bonnie’s arm from the other side. Whether to keep her silent or to encourage her to speak, Bonnie had no idea. And what could she say? “Fallen trees here only stay fallen until the police make the decision to look for them?” “Oh, and watch out for the hellish streams of bugs as long as your arm?” “And by the way, there’s probably one inside Isobel right now?” That would really freak Jim out.
“If I knew the way back to the boardinghouse, I would drop these three off there,” Mrs. Flowers was saying. “They’re not part of this.”
To Bonnie’s surprise, Dr. Alpert did not take exception to the statement that she herself was “not part of it.” Nor did she ask what Mrs. Flowers was doing with the two teenagers out in the Old Wood at this hour. What she said was even more astonishing: “We saw the lights as you started shouting. It’s right back there.”
Bonnie felt Matt’s muscles tighten up against her. “Thank God,” he said. And then, slowly, “But that’s not possible. I left the Dunstans’ about ten minutes before we met, and that’s right on the other side of the Old Wood from the boardinghouse. It would take at least forty-five minutes to walk it.”
“Well, possible or not, we saw the boardinghouse, Theophilia. All the lights were on, from top to bottom. It was impossible to mistake. Are you sure you’re not underestimating time?” she added, to Matt.
Mrs. Flowers’ name is Theophilia, Bonnie thought, and had to curb an urge not to giggle. The tension was getting to her.
But just as she was thinking it, Meredith gave
her another nudge.
Sometimes she thought that she, and Elena, and Meredith had a sort of telepathy with each other. Maybe it wasn’t true telepathy, but sometimes just a look, just a glance, could say more than pages and pages of argument. And sometimes—not always, but sometimes—Matt or Stefan would seem to be part of it. Not that it was like real telepathy, with voices as clear in your head as they would be in your ears, but sometimes the boys seemed to be…on the girls’ channel.
Because Bonnie knew exactly what that nudge meant. It meant that Meredith had turned the lamp off in Stefan’s room on the top of the house, and that Mrs. Flowers had turned the downstairs lights off as they left. So while Bonnie had a very vivid image of the boardinghouse with lights blazing, that image couldn’t be reality, not now.
Someone is trying to mess with us was what Meredith’s nudge meant. And Matt was on the same wavelength, even if it was for a different reason. He leaned very slightly back at Meredith, with Bonnie in between.
“But maybe we should head back toward the Dunstans’,” Bonnie said in her most babyish, heartrending voice. “They’re just normal people. They could protect us.”
“The boardinghouse is just over that rise,” Dr. Alpert said firmly. “And I really would appreciate your advice on how to slow down Isobel’s infections,” she added to Mrs. Flowers.
Mrs. Flowers fluttered. There was no other word for it. “Oh, goodness, what a compliment. One thing would be to wash the dirt out of the wounds immediately.”
This was so obvious and so unlike Mrs. Flowers that Matt squeezed Bonnie hard just as Meredith leaned in on her. Yeehaw! Bonnie thought. Do we have this telepathy thing going or not! So it’s Dr. Alpert who’s the dangerous one, the liar.
“That’s it, then. We head for the boardinghouse,” Meredith said calmly. “And Bonnie, don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.”
“We sure will,” Matt said, giving her one last hard squeeze. It meant I get it. I know who’s not on our side. Aloud, he added, in a fake stern voice, “It’s no good going to the Dunstans’ anyway. I already told Mrs. Flowers and the girls about this, but they’ve got a daughter who’s like Isobel.”
