The Vampire Diaries #6: Shadow Souls (The Return Trilogy #2) (2010)

Chapter 10

The next morning Elena got up and dressed quietly in the motel room, grateful for the extra space. Damon was gone, but she had expected that. He usually got his breakfast early while they were on the road, preying on waitresses at all-night truck stops or early-morning diners.

She was going to discuss that with him someday, she thought as she put the packet of ground coffee in the little two-cup percolator the motel provided. It smelled good.

But more urgently, she needed to talk to someone about what had happened last night. Stefan was her first choice, of course, but she'd found that out of body experiences weren't just to be had for the asking. What she needed to do was call Bonnie and Meredith. She had to talk to them - it was her right - but now, of all times, she couldn't. Intuitively, she felt that any contact between her and Fell's Church might be bad.

And Matt had never checked in. Not once. She had no idea where he was on the road, but he had better be in Sedona on time, that was all. He had deliberately cut off all communication between them. Fine. As long as he showed up when he had promised.

But...Elena still needed to talk. To express herself.

Of course! She was an idiot! She still had her faithful companion that never said a word, and never kept her waiting. Pouring herself a cup of scalding black coffee on the way, Elena dug her diary out of the bottom of her duffel bag and opened it to a fresh, clean page. There was nothing like a fresh page and an ink pen that ran smoothly to start her writing.

Fifteen minutes later there was a rattle at one window and a minute later Damon was stepping through. He had several paper bags with him and Elena felt unaccountably pleased and homey. She had provided coffee, which was rather good even if it came with dried cream substitute, and Damon had supplied...

"Gasoline," he said triumphantly, raising his eyebrows significantly at her as he set the bags on the table. "Just in case they try to use plants against us. No, thanks," he added, seeing she was standing with a full cup of coffee held in his direction. "I had a garage mechanic while I was buying this. I'll just go wash my hands."

And he disappeared, walking right past Elena.

Walking right past her, without a glance, even though she was wearing her only clean pair of clothes left: jeans and a subtly colored top that looked white at first glance and only in the brightest light revealed that it was ethereally rainbow-shaded.

Without a single look, Elena thought, feeling a strange sensation that somehow her life had just lapped itself.

She started to throw the coffee away but then decided she needed it herself and drank it in a few scalding gulps.

Then she went and stood by her diary, reading over the last two or three pages.

"Are you ready to go?" Damon was shouting over the sound of running water in the bathroom.

"Yes - in just a minute." Elena read the diary pages from the previous entry, and began skimming the one before that.

"We might as well go straight west from here," Damon shouted. "We can make it in one day. They'll think it's a feint for one particular gate and search all the small ones. Meanwhile we'll go on heading for the Kimon Gate and be days ahead of anyone tracking us. It's perfect."

"Uh-huh," Elena said, reading.

"We ought to be able to meet Mutt tomorrow - maybe even this evening, depending on what kind of trouble they cause."

"Uh-huh."

"But first I wanted to ask you: do you think it's a coincidence that our window is broken? Because I always put wards on them at night and I'm sure - " He passed a hand over his forehead. "I'm sure that I must have done that last night, as well. But something got through and broke the window and got away without a trace. That was why I bought all the gasoline. If they try something with trees, I'll blast them all back to Stonehenge."

And half the innocent residents of the state, Elena thought grimly. But she was in a state of such shock that not much could make an impression on top of it.

"What are you doing now?" Damon was clearly ready to get up and going.

"Getting rid of something I don't need," Elena said, and flushed the toilet, watching the torn-up bits of her diary swirl round and round before disappearing.

"I wouldn't worry about the window, though," she said, coming back into the bedroom and slipping her shoes on. "And don't get up for a minute, Damon. I've got to talk to you about something."

"Oh, come on. It can wait until we're on the road, can't it?"

"No, it can't, because we've got to pay for that window. You broke it last night, Damon. But you don't remember doing it, do you?"

Damon stared at her. She could tell that his first temptation was to laugh. His second temptation, to which he gave in, was to think that she was nuts.

"I'm serious," she said, once he had gotten up and started to pace toward the window with a distinct look of wanting to be a crow flying out of it. "Don't you dare go anywhere, Damon, because there's more."

"More stuff I did that I don't remember?" Damon lounged against the wall in one of his old, arrogant poses. "Maybe I smashed a few guitars, kept the radio on until four A.M.?"

"No. Not necessarily things from - last night," Elena said, looking away. She couldn't look at him. "Other things, from other days - "

"Like maybe I've been trying to sabotage this trip all along," he said, his voice laconic. He eyed the ceiling and sighed heavily. "Maybe I've done it just to be alone with you - "

"Shut up, Damon!"

Where had that come from? Well, she knew that, of course. From her feelings about last night. The problem was that she also had to get some other things settled - seriously, if he would take them. Come to think of it, that might be a better way to go about this.

"Do you think that your feelings about Stefan - well, have changed at all recently?" Elena asked.

"What?"

"Do you think" - oh, this was so difficult looking into black eyes the color of endless space. Especially when last night they had been full of myriads of stars - "do you think that you've come to think of him differently? To honor his wishes more than you used to do?"

Now Damon was openly examining her, just as she was examining him.

"Are you serious?" he said.

"Completely," she said, and, with a supreme effort, she sent her tears back where they were supposed to go.

"Something did happen last night," he said. He was looking intently at her face. "Didn't it?"

"Something happened, yes," Elena said. "It was - it was more of a - " She had to let out her breath, and with that almost everything went.

"Shinichi! Shinichi, che bastardo! Imbroglione! That thief! I'm going to kill him slowly!" Suddenly Damon was everywhere. He was beside her, his hands on her shoulders; the next minute he was shouting imprecations out the window, then he was back, holding both her hands.

But only one word mattered to Elena. Shinichi. The kitsune with his black, scarlet-tipped hair, who had made them give up so much just for the location of Stefan's cell.

"Mascalzone! Maleducato - " Elena lost track of Damon's cursing again. So it was true. Last night had been completely stolen from Damon, taken from his mind as simply and completely as the interval when she had used Wings of Redemption and Wings of Purification on him. The latter he had agreed to. But last night - and what other things had the fox been taking?

To cut out an entire evening and night - and this evening and night in particular, implied that...

"He never shut down the connection between my mind and his. He still can reach inside me any time he chooses." Damon had finally stopped swearing, and stopped moving. He was sitting on the couch opposite the bed with his hands drooping between his knees. He looked singularly forlorn.

"Elena, you have to tell me. What did he take from me last night? Please!" Damon looked as if he might fall on his knees in front of her, without melodrama. "If - if - it was what I think - "

Elena smiled, although tears were still running down her face. "It wasn't - what anyone would think, exactly, I suppose," she said.

"But - !"

"Let's just say that this time - was mine," Elena said. "If he's stolen anything else from you, or if he tries to do it in the future, then he's fair game. But this...will be my secret." Until maybe someday you break into your huge boulder of secrets, she thought.

"Until I tear it out of him, along with his tongue and his tail!" snarled Damon, and it was truly the snarl of an animal. Elena was glad it wasn't directed at her. "Don't worry," Damon added in a voice so chilling that it was almost more frightening than the animal fury. "I will find him, no matter where he tries to hide. And I will take it from him. I might just take his entire little furry hide off with it. I'll make you a pair of mittens out of it, how's that?"

Elena tried to smile and did a pretty good job. She was just coming to terms with what had happened herself, although she didn't believe for a minute that Damon would really leave her alone on the subject until he forced the memory back out of Shinichi. She realized that on some level she was punishing Damon for what Shinichi had done, and that was wrong. I promise no one will know about last night, she told herself. Not until Damon does. I won't even tell Bonnie and Meredith.

This made things a lot harder on her, and therefore probably more equitable.

As they were cleaning up the debris from Damon's most recent fit of fury, he suddenly reached up to brush a stray tear from Elena's cheek.

"Thank you - " Elena began. Then she stopped. Damon was touching his fingers to his lips.

He looked at her, startled and a little disappointed. Then he shrugged. "Still unicorn bait," he said. "Did I say that last night?"

Elena hesitated, then decided that his words didn't fall within the crucial time limits of secrecy.

"Yes, you did. But - you won't give me away, will you?" she added, suddenly anxious. "I've promised my friends not to say anything."

Damon was staring at her. "Why should I say anything about anybody? Unless you're talking about the little redheaded one?"

"I told you; I'm not saying anything. Except that obviously Caroline isn't a virgin. Well, with all the ruckus about her being pregnant - "

"But you remember," Damon interjected, "I came to Fell's Church before Stefan did; I just lurked in the shadows longer. The way you talked - "

"Oh, I know. We liked boys and boys liked us, and we already had reputations. So we just talked any way we felt like talking. Some of it may have been true, but a lot of it you could take two ways - and then of course you know how boys talk - "

Damon knew. He nodded.

"Well and so pretty soon everyone was talking about us as if we'd done everything with everyone. They even wrote stuff about it in the paper and the yearbook and on the bathroom walls. But we had a little poem, too, and sometimes we even wrote it with our signatures on it. How did it go?" Elena cast her mind back a year, two years, more. Then she recited:

"Just because you heard it, doesn't make it true. Just because you read it, doesn't make it so. The next time that you hear it, it may be about you. Don't think that you can change their minds, just 'cause you know - you know!"

As Elena finished, she looked at Damon, suddenly feeling the urgent need to get to Stefan. "We're almost there," she said. "Let's hurry."

Chapter 11

Arizona was as hot and barren a state as Elena had imagined. She and Damon drove directly to the Juniper Resort, and Elena was depressed, if not surprised, to see that Matt was not checked in.

"It can't have taken him longer than us to get here," she said, as soon as they'd been shown up to their rooms. "Unless - oh, God, Damon! Unless Shinichi caught him somehow."

Damon sat down on a bed and regarded Elena grimly. "I guess I hoped I wouldn't have to tell you this - that the jerk would at least have the courtesy to tell you himself. But I've been tracking his aura ever since he left us. It's been getting steadily farther away - in the direction of Fell's Church."

Sometimes, really bad news takes a while to sink in.

"You mean," Elena said, "that he's not going to show up here at all?"

"I mean that, as the crow flies, it wasn't all that far from where we got the cars to Fell's Church. He went in that direction. And he didn't come back."

"But why?" Elena demanded, as if logic could somehow conquer fact. "Why would he go off and leave me? Especially, why would he go to Fell's Church, where they're looking for him?"

"As for why he'd leave: I think he got the wrong idea about you and me - or maybe the right idea a little early" - Damon raised his eyebrows at Elena and she threw a pillow at him - "and decided to let us have some privacy. As for why Fell's Church..." Damon shrugged. "Look, you've known the guy longer than I have. But even I can tell he's the Galahad type. The parfait gentil knight, sans peur et sans reproche. If I had to say I'd say he went to meet Caroline's charges."

"Oh, no," Elena said, going to the door as a knock sounded. "Not after I told him and told him - "

"Oh, yes," Damon said, assuming a slight crouching position. "Even with your sage advice ringing in his ears - "

The door opened. It was Bonnie. Bonnie, with her petite frame, her curly strawberry hair, her wide, soulful brown eyes. Elena, in a state to disbelieve the evidence of her own eyes, and still not through with the argument with Damon, shut the door on her.

"Matt's going to get lynched," Elena almost screamed, vaguely annoyed that some knocking was going on somewhere.

Damon uncrouched. He passed Elena on the way to the door, said, "I think you'd better sit down," and then sat her down by putting her in a chair and holding her there until she stopped trying to get up again.

Then he opened the door.

This time it was Meredith knocking. Tall and willowy, with her hair falling in dark clouds around her shoulders, Meredith radiated the intention to go on knocking until the door stayed open. Something happened inside Elena, and she found that she could get her mind around more than one subject at once.

It was Meredith. And Bonnie. In Sedona, Arizona!

Elena leaped up from the chair where Damon had put her and flung her arms around Meredith, saying incoherently, "You came! You came! You knew I couldn't call you, so you came!"

Bonnie edged around the embrace and said to Damon in an undertone, "Is she back to kissing everyone she meets?"

"Unfortunately," Damon said, "no. But be prepared to be squeezed to death."

Elena turned on him. "I heard that! Oh, Bonnie! I just can't believe you two are really here. I wanted to talk to you so much!"

Meanwhile, she was hugging Bonnie, and Bonnie was hugging her, and Meredith was hugging both of them. Subtle velociraptor sisterhood signals were being passed from one to another at the same time - an arched eyebrow here, a slight nod there, a frown and shrug ending with a sigh. Damon didn't know it, but he had just been accused, tried, acquitted, and restored to duty - with the conclusion that extra surveillance was necessary in the future.

Elena snapped out of it first. "You must have met with Matt - he had to tell you about this place."

"He did, and then he sold the Prius and we sort of packed on the run and got plane tickets here and we've been waiting - we didn't want to miss you!" Bonnie said breathlessly.

"I don't suppose that would have been just about two days ago that you bought your tickets here," Damon asked the ceiling wearily as he lounged with an elbow on Elena's chair.

"Let me see - " Bonnie began, but Meredith said flatly, "Yes it was. What? It made something happen to you?"

"We were trying to keep things slightly ambiguous for the enemy," Damon said. "But as it turns out, it probably didn't matter."

No, Elena thought, because Shinichi can reach inside your brain whenever he wants and try to take away your memories and all you can do is try to fight him off.

"But it does mean that Elena and I should start off right away." Damon continued. "I have to do an errand first. Elena should pack. Take as little as you can, just the absolute essentials - but include food for two or three days."

"You said...starting now?" Bonnie breathed, and then she sat down abruptly on the floor.

"It makes sense, if we've already lost the element of surprise," Damon replied.

"I can't believe you two came to say good-bye to me while Matt watches over the town," Elena said. "That is so sweet!" She smiled radiantly before adding, in her own mind, And so dumb!

"Well - "

"Well, I still have an errand," Damon said, waving without turning around. "Let's say we'll leave here in half an hour."

"Stingy," Bonnie complained, when the door was safely shut behind him. "That might have only given us a few minutes to talk before we start."

"I can pack in less than five minutes," Elena said sadly, and then got tangled up in Bonnie's previous sentence. "'Before we start'?"

"I can't pack just essentials at all," Meredith was fretting quietly. "I couldn't store everything on my mobile, and I have no idea when I'll be able to recharge the batteries. I've got a suitcase of stuff on paper!"

Elena was looking back and forth at them nervously. "Um, I'm pretty sure I'm the one who's supposed to be packing," she said. "Because I'm the only one going...right?" Another look back and forth.

"As if we would let you set off into some other universe without us!" Bonnie said. "You need us!"

"Not another universe; only another dimension," Meredith said. "But the same principle applies."

"But - I can't let you come with me!"

"Of course you can't. I'm older than you," Meredith said. "You don't 'let' me do anything. But the truth is that we have a mission. We want to find Shinichi's or Misao's star ball if we can. If we could do that we think we could stop most of the stuff going on in Fell's Church immediately."

"Star ball?" Elena said blankly, while somewhere in the depths of her mind, an uneasy image stirred.

"I'll explain later."

Elena was shaking her head. "But - you left Matt to deal with whatever supernatural stuff is going on? When he's a fugitive and has to hide from the police?"

"Elena, even the police are scared of Fell's Church now - and frankly, if they put him in custody in Ridgemont it might be the safest place for him. But they're not going to do that. He's working with Mrs. Flowers and they're good together; they're a solid team." Meredith stopped to take a breath, and seemed to be considering how to say something.

Bonnie said it for her in a very small voice. "And I was no good, Elena. I'd started - well, I started to get hysterical and see and hear things that weren't there - or at least to imagine them and maybe even make them come true. I was scaring myself out of my mind, and I think I actually was putting people in danger. Matt's too practical to do that." She dabbed at her eyes. "I know the Dark Dimension is pretty bad, but at least I won't be able to put houses full of innocent people in danger."

Meredith nodded. "It was all...going bad with Bonnie there. Even if we hadn't wanted to come with you I would have had to get her out. I don't want to be overly dramatic, but I believe that the demons there were after her. And that since Stefan's gone, Damon may be the only one who can keep them away. Or maybe you can help her, Elena?"

Meredith...overly dramatic? But Elena could see the fine tremors running under Meredith's skin, and the light sheen of perspiration on Bonnie's forehead that was dampening her curls.

Meredith touched Elena's wrist. "We haven't just gone AWOL or anything. Fell's Church is a war zone now; it's true, but we didn't leave Matt without allies. Like Dr. Alpert - she's logical - she's the best country doctor there is - and she might even convince somebody that Shinichi and the malach are real. But besides all that, the parents have taken over. Parents and psychiatrists and newshounds. And they make it almost impossible to work openly anyway. Matt's not at any disadvantage."

"But - in just a week - "

"Take a look at this week's Sunday paper."

Elena took the Ridgemont Times from Meredith. It was the biggest paper in the area of Fell's Church. A banner headline read:

POSSESSION IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

Under the headline were many lines of gray print, but what really caught the eye was a photo of a three-way fight between girls, all of whom seemed to be undergoing seizures or contortions impossible to the human body. The expressions of two of the girls were simply those of pain and terror, but it was the third girl who froze the blood in Elena's veins. Her body was humped so that her face was upside down, and she was looking directly at the camera with her lips skinned back from her teeth. Her eyes - there was just no other way to put it - were demonic. They weren't rolled back in her head or malformed or anything. They weren't glowing eerily red. It was all in the expression. Elena had never seen eyes that made her sick to her stomach before.

Bonnie said quietly, "Do you ever sort of slip and get that feeling like, 'Oh, whoops, there goes the whole universe'?"

"Constantly, since meeting Stefan," Meredith said. "No offense meant, Elena. But the point is that all this has happened in just a couple of days; from the minute the adults who knew that there was something really going on got together."

Meredith sighed and ran fingers with perfectly manicured nails through her hair before continuing. "Those girls are what Bonnie calls possessed in the modern sense. Or maybe they're possessed by Misao - female kitsune are supposed to do that. But if we could just find these things called star balls - or even one - we could force them to clean all this up."

Elena put the newspaper down so she wouldn't have to see those upside-down eyes staring into hers. "And while all this is happening, what is your boyfriend doing during the crisis?"

For the first time, Meredith looked genuinely relieved. "He may be on his way as we speak. I've written to him about everything that's happening, and he was actually the one who said to get Bonnie out." She flashed a glance of apology at Bonnie, who simply lifted her hands and face to the heavens. "And as soon as he's finished with his work on some island called Shinmei no Uma, he's coming to Fell's Church. This kind of thing is Alaric's specialty, and he doesn't get spooked easily. So even if we're gone for weeks, Matt will have a backup."

Elena threw her own hands up in a gesture similar to Bonnie's. "There's just one thing you'd better know before we start. I can't help Bonnie. If you're counting on me to do any of the things I did when we fought Shinichi and Misao last time - well, I can't. I've tried over and over, as hard as I could, to do all my wings attacks. But nothing has ever come of it."

Meredith said slowly, "Well, then, maybe Damon knows something - "

"Maybe he does, but, Meredith, don't push him right now. Not right this minute. What he knows for certain is that Shinichi can reach in and take his memories - and who knows, maybe even possess him again - "

"That lying kitsune!" Bonnie spat out, sounding almost proprietory. As if, Elena thought, Damon was her boyfriend. "Shinichi swore he wouldn't - "

"And he swore he'd leave Fell's Church alone, too. The only reason I have any faith at all in the clues that Misao gave me about the fox key, is that she was taunting me. She never thought we'd do a deal, and so she wasn't trying to lie or be too clever - I think."

"Well, that's why we're here with you, to get Stefan out," Bonnie said. "And if we're lucky, to find the star balls that will let us control Shinichi. Right?"

"Right!" Elena said fervently.

"Right," Meredith said solemnly.

Bonnie nodded. "Velociraptor sisterhood forever!"

They laid their right hands over one another's quickly, forming a three-spoked wheel. It reminded Elena of the days when there were four spokes.

"And what about Caroline?" she asked.

Bonnie and Meredith consulted each other with their eyes. Then Meredith shook her head. "You don't want to know. Really," she said.

"I can take it. Really," Elena said in almost a whisper. "Meredith, I've been dead, remember? Twice."

Meredith was still shaking her head. "If you can't look at that picture, you shouldn't hear about Caroline. We went to see her twice - "

"You went to see her twice," Bonnie interrupted. "The second time I fainted and you left me by the door."

"And I realized I could have lost you for good, and I've apologized - " Meredith broke off when Bonnie put a hand on her arm and gave her a little push.

"Anyway, it wasn't exactly a visit," Meredith said. "I went running into Caroline's room ahead of her mom and found her inside her nest - never mind what that is - eating something. When she saw me, she just giggled and went on eating."

"And?" Elena said, when the tension got to be too much for her. "What was it?"

"I think," Meredith said bleakly, "that it was worms and slugs. She would stretch them up and up and they'd squirm before she bit them. But that wasn't the worst. Look, you had to have been here to appreciate it, but she just smirked at me, and said in this thick voice, 'Have a bite?' and suddenly my mouth was filled with this wriggling mass - and it was going down my throat. So I was sick, right there on her carpet. Caroline just started laughing, and I ran down again and picked Bonnie up and ran out and we never went back. But...halfway down the path to the house, I realized Bonnie was suffocating. She had the - the worms and things - in her mouth and her nose. I know CPR; I managed to get most of them out before she woke up vomiting. But - "

"It was an experience I would really rather not have again." The very lack of expression in Bonnie's voice said more than any tone of horror could.

Meredith said, "I've heard that Caroline's parents have moved out of that house, and I can't say I blame them. Caroline's over eighteen. All I can add is that everybody's sort of praying that somehow the werewolf blood will win out in her, because that seems at least to be less horrible than the malach or the - the demonic. But if it doesn't win out..."

Elena rested her chin on her knees. "And Mrs. Flowers can deal with this?"

"Better than Bonnie can. Mrs. Flowers is glad to have Matt around; like I said, they're a solid team. And now that she has finally spoken to the human race of the twenty-first century, I think she likes it. And she's been practicing the craft constantly."

"The craft? Oh - "

"Yeah, that's what she calls witchcraft. I have no idea whether she's any good at it or not, because I don't have anything to compare her to - or with - "

"Her poultices work like magic!" Bonnie said firmly just as Elena said, "Her bath salts certainly work."

Meredith smiled faintly. "Too bad she isn't here instead of us."

Elena shook her head. Now that she had reconnected with Bonnie and Meredith she knew she could never go into the Darkness without them. They were more than her hands; they were so much more to her...and here they were, each prepared to risk their life for Stefan and for Fell's Church.

At that moment, the door to the room opened. Damon walked in, carrying a couple of brown paper bags in one hand.

"So everybody's said bye-bye nicely?" he asked. He seemed to have trouble looking at either of the two visitors, so he stared particularly hard at Elena.

"Well - not really. Not as such," Elena said. She wondered if Damon was capable of throwing Meredith out a fifth-story window. Best to break it easily to him, by degrees....

"Because we're going with you," Meredith said, and Bonnie said, "We forgot to pack, though."

Elena slid quickly so that she was between Damon and the others. But Damon just stared at the floor.

"It's a bad idea," he said very softly. "A very, very, very bad idea."

"Damon, don't Influence them! Please!" Elena waved both hands at him in a gesture of urgency, and Damon raised one of his hands in a gesture of negation - and somehow their hands brushed each other's - and tangled.

Electric shock. But a nice one, Elena thought - although she didn't really have time to think it. She and Damon were both trying desperately to get their hands back to themselves, but didn't seem to be able to. Little shockwaves were running from Elena's palm all through her body.

Finally, the disentanglement worked and then they both turned, in guilty unison, to look at Bonnie and Meredith, who were staring at them with enormous eyes. Suspicious eyes. Eyes that belonged in faces saying "Aha! What have we here?"

There was a long moment when no one moved or spoke.

Then Damon said seriously, "This isn't some kind of pleasure trip. We're going because there's no other choice."

"Not alone, you're not," Meredith said in a neutral tone. "If Elena goes, we all go."

"We know it's a bad place," Bonnie said, "but we are definitely going with you."

"Besides, we have our own agenda," Meredith added. "A way to cleanse Fell's Church of the harm Shinichi has done - and is still doing."

Damon shook his head. "You don't understand. You won't like it," he said tightly. He nodded at her mobile. "No electric power in there. Even owning one of those is a crime. And the punishment for just about any crime is torture and death." He took a step toward her.

Meredith refused to back away, her dark gaze fixed on his.

"Look, you don't even realize what you have to do just to get in," Damon said bleakly. "First, you need a vampire - and you're lucky to have one. Then you'll have to do all sorts of things you won't like - "

"If Elena can do it, we can do it," Meredith interrupted quietly.

"I don't want either of you to get hurt. I'm going in because it's for Stefan," Elena said hastily, speaking partly to her friends and partly to the innermost core of her being, which the shockwaves and pulses of electricity had reached at last. Such a strange, melting, throbbing sweetness for something that had started out as a shock. Such a fierce shock for simply touching another person's hand....

Elena manged to tear her eyes away from Damon's face and tune back into the argument that was going on.

"You're going in for Stefan, yes," Meredith was saying to her, "and we're going in with you."

"I'm telling you, you won't like it. You'll live to regret it - if you live, that is," Damon was saying flatly, his expression dark.

Bonnie simply gazed up at Damon with her brown eyes wide and pleading in her small heart-shaped face. Her hands were clasped together at the base of her throat. She looked like a picture on a Hallmark card, Elena thought. And those eyes were worth a thousand logical arguments.

Finally, Damon looked back at Elena. "You're probably taking them to their deaths, you know. You, I could probably protect. But you and Stefan, and your two little teenage girlfriends... I can't."

Hearing it put that way was a shock. Elena hadn't quite thought of it like that. But she could see the determined set of Meredith's jaw and the way Bonnie had gone up a little on her toes to try to look bigger.

"I think it's already been decided," she said quietly, aware that her voice shook.

There was a long moment as she stared into Damon's dark eyes, and then suddenly he flashed his 250-kilowatt smile at all of them, shut it off almost before it had begun, and said, "I see. Well, in that case, I have another errand. I may not be back for quite a while, so feel free to use the room - "

"Elena should come to our room," Meredith said. "I have a lot of material to show her. And if we can't take much with us, we'll have to go over it all tonight - "

"Then let's say we meet back here at dawn," Damon said. "We'll set off for the Demon Gate from here. And remember - don't bring money; it isn't any good there. And this is not a vacation - but you'll get that idea soon enough."

With a graceful, ironic gesture, he handed Elena her bag.

"The Demon Gate?" Bonnie said as they went to the elevator. Her voice shook.

"Hush," said Meredith. "It's only a name."

Elena wished she didn't know so well when Meredith was lying.

Chapter 12

Elena checked the edges of the hotel room's draperies for signs of dawn. Bonnie was curled up, drowsing in a chair by the window. Elena and Meredith had been up all night, and now they were surrounded by scattered printouts, newspapers, and pictures from the Internet.

"It's already spread beyond Fell's Church," Meredith explained, pointing to an article in one of the papers. "I don't know if it's following ley lines, or being controlled by Shinichi - or is just moving on its own, like any parasite."

"Did you try to contact Alaric?"

Meredith glanced at Bonnie's sleeping figure. She spoke softly, "That's the good news. I'd been trying to get him forever, and I finally managed. He'll be arriving in Fell's Church soon - he just has one more stop first."

Elena drew her breath in. "One more stop that's more important than what's going on in that town?"

"That's why I didn't tell Bonnie about him coming. Or Matt either. I knew they wouldn't understand. But - I'll give you one guess as to what kind of legends he's following up in the Far East." Meredith fixed dark eyes on Elena's.

"Not...it is, isn't it? Kitsune?"

"Yes, and he's going to a very ancient place where they were supposed to have destroyed the town - just as Fell's Church is being destroyed. Nobody lives there now. That name - Unmei no Shima - means the Island of Doom. Maybe he'll find something important about fox spirits there. He's doing some kind of multicultural independent study with Sabrina Dell. She's Alaric's age, but she's already a famous forensic anthropologist."

"And you're not jealous?" Elena said awkwardly. Personal issues were difficult to talk about with Meredith. Asking her questions always felt like prying.

"Well." Meredith tipped back her head. "It isn't as if we have any formal engagement."

"But you never told anybody about all this."

Meredith lowered her head and gave Elena a quick look. "I have now," she said.

For a moment the girls sat together in silence. Then Elena said quietly, "The Shi no Shi, the kitsune, Isobel Saitou, Alaric and his Island of Doom - they may not have anything to do with each other. But if they do, I'm going to find out what it is."

"And I'm going to help," Meredith said simply. "But I had thought that after I graduated..."

Elena couldn't stand it anymore. "Meredith, I promise, as soon as we get Stefan back and the town calmed down, we'll pin Alaric down with Plans A through Z," she said. She leaned forward and kissed Meredith's cheek. "That's a velociraptor sisterhood oath, okay?"

Meredith blinked twice, swallowed once, and whispered, "Okay." Then, abruptly, she was her old efficient self again. "Thank you," she said. "But cleaning up the town might not be such an easy job. It's already heading toward mass chaos there."

"And Matt wanted to be in the middle of it all? Alone?" Elena asked.

"Like we said, he and Mrs. Flowers are a solid team," Meredith said quietly. "And it's what he's chosen."

"Well," Elena said drily, "he may turn out to have the better deal in the end, after all."

They went back to the scattered papers. Meredith picked up several pictures of kitsune guarding shrines in Japan.

"It says they're usually depicted with a 'jewel' or key." She held up a picture of a kitsune holding a key in its mouth at the main gate of the Fushimi Shrine.

"Aha," Elena said. "Looks like the key's got two wings, doesn't it?"

"Exactly what Bonnie and I thought. And the 'jewels'...well, take a close look." Elena did and her stomach lurched. Yes, they were like the "snow globe" orbs that Shinichi had used to create unbreakable traps in the Old Wood.

"We found they're called hoshi no tama," Meredith said. "And that translates to 'star balls.' Each kitsune puts a measure of their power into one, along with other things, and destroying the ball is one of the only ways to kill them. If you find a kitsune's star ball, you can control the kitsune. That's what Bonnie and I want to do."

"But how do you find it?" Elena asked, excited by the idea of controlling Shinichi and Misao.

"Sa..." Meredith said, pronouncing the word "sah" like a sigh. Then she gave one of her rare brilliant smiles. "In Japanese, that means: 'I wonder; hmm; wouldn't want to comment; my gosh, golly, I really couldn't say.' We could use a word like that in English."

Despite herself, Elena giggled.

"But, then, other stories say that kitsune can be killed by the Sin of Regret or by blessed weapons. I don't know what the Sin of Regret is, but - " She rummaged in her luggage, and came up with an old-fashioned but serviceable-looking revolver.

"Meredith!"

"It was my grandpa's - one of a pair. Matt's got the other one. They're loaded with bullets blessed by a priest."

"What priest would bless bullets, for God's sake?" Elena demanded.

Meredith's smile turned bleak. "One that's seen what's happening in Fell's Church. You remember how Caroline got Isobel Saitou possessed, and what Isobel did to herself?"

Elena nodded. "I remember," she said tautly.

"Well, do you remember how we told you that Obaasan - Grandma Saitou - used to be a shrine maiden? That's a Japanese priestess. She blessed the bullets for us, all right, and specifically for killing kitsune. You should have seen how spooky the ritual was. Bonnie almost fainted again."

"Do you know how Isobel is doing now?"

Meredith shook her dark head slowly. "Better but - I don't think she even knows about Jim yet. That's going to be very tough on her."

Elena tried to quell a shudder. There was nothing but tragedy in store for Isobel even when she got well. Jim Bryce, her boyfriend, had spent only one night with Caroline, but now had Lesch-Nye disease - or so the doctors said. In that same dreadful night that Isobel had pierced herself everywhere, and cut her tongue so that it forked, Jim, a handsome star basketball player, had eaten away his fingers and his lips. In Elena's opinion they were both possessed and their injuries were only more reasons why the kitsune twins had to be stopped.

"We'll do it," she said aloud, realizing for the first time that Meredith was holding her hand as if Elena were Bonnie. Elena managed a faint but determined smile for Meredith. "We'll get Stefan out and we'll stop Shinichi and Misao. We have to do it."

This time it was Meredith who nodded.

"There's more," she said at last. "You want to hear it?"

"I need to know everything."

"Well, every single source I checked agrees that kitsune possess girls and then lead boys to destruction. What kind of destruction depends on where you look. It can be as simple as appearing as a will-o'-the-wisp and leading you into a swamp or off a cliff, or as difficult as shapeshifting."

"Oh, yes," Elena said tightly. "I knew that from what happened to you and Bonnie. They can look exactly like someone."

"Yes, but always with some small flaw if you have the wits to notice it. They can never make a perfect replicate. But they can have up to nine tails, and the more tails they have, the better at everything they are."

"Nine? Terrific. We've never even seen a nine-tailed one."

"Well, we may get to yet. They're supposed to be able to cross over freely from one world to another. Oh, yes. And they're specifically in charge of the 'Kimon' Gate between dimensions. Want to guess what that translates to?"

Elena stared at her. "Oh, no."

"Oh, yes."

"But why would Damon take us all the way across the country, just to get in through a Demon Gate that's run by fox spirits?"

"Sa...But when Matt told us you were headed to someplace near Sedona, that was really what decided Bonnie and me."

"Great." Elena ran her hands through her hair and sighed. "Anything else?" she asked, feeling like a rubber band that had been stretched to its utmost.

"Only this, which ought to really bake your cookies after all we've been through. Some of them are good. Kitsune, I mean."

"Some of them are good - good what? Good fighters? Good assassins? Good liars?"

"No, really, Elena. Some of them are supposed to be like gods and goddesses who sort of test you, and if you pass the test they reward you."

"Do you think we should count on finding one like that?"

"Not really."

Elena dropped her head to the coffee table where Meredith's printouts were scattered. "Meredith, seriously, how are we going to deal with them when we go through that Demon Gate? My Power is about as reliable as a low battery. And it's not just the kitsune; it's all the different demons and vampires - Old Ones, too! What are we going to do?"

She raised her head and looked deeply into the eyes of her friend - those dark eyes that she had never been able to classify as this color or that.

To her surprise, Meredith instead of looking sober, tossed back the dregs of a Diet Coke and smiled.

"No Plan A yet?"

"Well...maybe just an idea. Nothing definite yet. What about you?"

"A few that might qualify for Plans B and C. So what we're going to do is what we always do - try our best and fall all over ourselves and make mistakes until you do something brilliant and save us all."

"Merry" - Meredith blinked. Elena knew why - she hadn't used that diminutive for Meredith for more years than she could remember. None of the three girls liked pet names or used them. Elena went on very seriously, holding Meredith's eyes, "There's nothing I want more than to save everybody - everybody - from these kitsune bastards. I'd give my life for Stefan and all of you. But...this time it may be somebody else who takes the bullet."

"Or the stake. I know. Bonnie knows. We talked about it while we were flying here. But we're still with you, Elena. You have to know that. We're all with you."

There was only one way to reply to that. Elena gripped Meredith's hand in both of hers. Then she let out her breath, and, like probing an aching tooth, tried to get news on a sore subject. "Does Matt - did he - well, how was Matt when you left?"

Meredith glanced at her sideways. Not much got past Meredith. "He seemed okay, but - distracted. He would go off into these fits where he'd just stare at nothing, and he wouldn't hear you if you spoke to him."

"Did he tell you why he left?"

"Well...sort of. He said that Damon was hypnotizing you and that you weren't - weren't doing all you could to stop him. But he's a boy and boys get jealous - "

"No, he was right about what he saw. It's just that I've - gotten to know Damon a little better. And Matt doesn't like that."

"Um-hm." Meredith was watching her from under lowered eyelids, barely breathing, as if Elena was a bird that mustn't be disturbed or she'd fly away.

Elena laughed. "It's nothing bad," she said. "At least I don't think so. It's just that...in some ways Damon needs help even more than Stefan did when he first came to Fell's Church."

Meredith's eyebrows shot up, but all she said was, "Um-hm."

"And...I think that really Damon's a lot more like Stefan than he lets on."

Meredith's eyebrows stayed up. Elena finally looked at her. She opened her mouth once or twice and then she just stared at Meredith. "I'm in trouble, aren't I?" she said helplessly.

"If all this comes from less than one week riding in a car with him...then, yes. But we have to remember that women are Damon's specialty. And he thinks he's in love with you."

"No, he really is - " Elena began, and then she caught her lower lip between her teeth. "Oh, God, this is Damon we're talking about. I am in trouble."

"Let's just watch and see what happens," Meredith said sensibly. "He's definitely changed, too. Before, he would have just told you that your friends couldn't come - and that was it. Today he stuck around and listened."

"Yes. I just have to - to be on my guard from now on," Elena said, a little unsteadily. How was she going to help the child inside Damon without getting closer to him? And how would she explain all she might need to do to Stefan?

She sighed.

"It'll probably be all right," Bonnie muttered sleepily. Meredith and Elena both turned to look at her and Elena felt a chill go up her spine. Bonnie was sitting propped up, but her eyes were shut and her voice was indistinct. "The real question is: what will Stefan say about that night at the motel with Damon?"

"What?" Elena's voice was sharp and loud enough to awaken any sleeper. But Bonnie didn't stir.

"What happened what night at what motel?" Meredith demanded. When Elena didn't answer immediately, she caught Elena's arm and swung her so that they were face-to-face.

At last Elena looked at her friend. But her eyes, she knew, gave away nothing.

"Elena, what's she talking about? What happened with Damon?"

Elena still kept her face perfectly expressionless, and used a word she'd learned just that night. "Sa..."

"Elena, you're impossible! You're not going to dump Stefan after you rescue him, are you?"

"No, of course not!" Elena was hurt. "Stefan and I belong together - forever."

"But still you spent a night with Damon where something happened between you."

"Something...I guess."

"And that something was?"

Elena smiled apologetically. "Sa..."

"I'll get it out of him! I'll put him on the defensive...."

"You can make a Plan A and Plan B and all," Elena said. "But it won't help. Shinichi took his memories away. Meredith, I'm sorry - you don't know how sorry. But I swore that nobody would ever know." She looked up at the taller girl, feeling tears pool in her eyes. Can't you just - once - let me leave it that way?"

Meredith sank bank. "Elena Gilbert, the world is lucky there is only one of you. You are the..." She paused, as if deciding whether to say the words or not. Then she said, "It's time to get to bed. Dawn is going to come early and so is the Demon Gate."

"Merry?"

"What now?"

"Thank you."

Chapter 13
  
The Demon Gate.

Elena glanced over her shoulder at the backseat of the Prius. Bonnie was blinking sleepily. Meredith, who'd gotten much less sleep but heard much more alarming news, was looking like a razor blade: keen, sharp as ice, and ready.

There was nothing else to see except Damon with his paper bags on the seat beside him, driving the Prius. Out the windows, where an arid Arizona dawn should be blinding its way across the horizon, was nothing but fog.

It was frightening and disorienting. They had taken a small road off Highway 179 and, gradually, the fog had crept in, sending tendrils of mist around the car, and finally engulfing it whole. It seemed to Elena that they were being deliberately cut off from the old ordinary world of McDonald's and Target, and were crossing a border into a place they weren't meant to know about, much less go.

There was no traffic in the other direction. None at all. And as hard as Elena peered out of her window, it was like trying to look through fast-moving clouds.

"Aren't we going too fast?" Bonnie asked, rubbing her eyes.

"No," Damon said. "It would be - a remarkable coincidence - if anyone else were on the same route at the same time we are."

"It looks a lot like Arizona," she said, disappointed.

"It may be Arizona, for all I know," Damon replied. "But we haven't crossed the Gate yet. And this isn't anywhere in Arizona you could just accidentally walk into. The path always has its little tricks and traps. The problem is that you never know what you'll be facing.

"Now listen," he added, looking at Elena with an expression she had gotten to know. It meant: I'm not joking around; I'm talking to you as an equal; I'm serious.

"You've gotten very good at showing only a human-sized aura," Damon said. "But that means that if you can learn one more thing before we go in, you can actually use your aura, make it do you some good when you want it to, instead of just hiding it until it pops up out of control and lifts three-thousand-pound cars."

"Like what kind of good?"

"Like what I'm going to show you. First of all just relax and let me control it. Then, little by little, I'll slacken the controls and you'll take them up. By the end, you should be able to send your Powers to your eyes - and see much better; to your ears - and hear much better; to your limbs - and move much more quickly and precisely. All right?"

"You couldn't have taught me this before we started on this little excursion?"

He smiled at her, a wild, reckless smile that made her smile, too, even if she didn't know what it was about. "Until you showed how well you could control your aura throughout the path - the way here - I didn't think you were ready," he said bluntly. "Now I do. There are things in your mind just waiting to be unlocked. You'll understand when we unlock them."

And we unlock them - with what? A kiss? Elena thought suspiciously.

"No. No. And that's the other reason you've got to learn this. Your telepathy is getting out of hand. If you don't learn how to keep from projecting your thoughts, you'll never make it past the checkpoint at the Gate as a human."

Checkpoint. That sounded ominous. Elena nodded and said, "All right; what do we do?"

"What we did before. Like I said, relax. Try to trust me."

He put his right hand just to the left of her breastbone, not touching the cloth of her deep gold top. Elena could feel herself flushing, and she wondered what Bonnie and Meredith must think of this if they were watching.

And then Elena felt something else.

It wasn't cold; it wasn't heat, but it was something like the furthest extremities of both of them. It was pure Power. It would have knocked her over if Damon hadn't been holding her by the arm with his other hand. She thought, he's using his own Power to prime mine, to do something -

- something that hurt -

No! Elena tried, vocally and telepathically, to tell Damon that the Power was too much, that it hurt. But Damon ignored her pleas even as he ignored the tears that spilled onto her cheeks. His Power was leading hers now, painfully, throughout her body. It was in her bloodstream, dragging her own Power behind it like a comet's tail. It was forcing her to take the Power to different parts of her body and let it build and build there, not letting her exhale it, not letting her move it on.

I'm going to burst -

All this time her eyes had been fixed on Damon's, broadcasting her feelings to him: from indignant anger to shock to agonized pain - and now...to...

Her mind exploded.

The rest of her Power went on circling, without causing any pain. Each new breath she drew added more Power to it, but it simply circulated through her bloodstream, not increasing her aura, but increasing the Power that was inside her. After two or three more quick breaths she realized that she was doing it effortlessly.

Now Elena's Power wasn't simply sliding around smoothly inside her, looking from the outside like any other human's. It was also filling several burst swollen nodes inside her and where it did that, it changed things.

She realized that she was looking at Damon with round eyes. He might have told her about how this would feel, rather than letting her go into it blind.

You really are a total bastard, aren't you? Elena thought, and, amazingly, she could feel Damon receive the thought, and could feel his automatic response, which was pleased agreement, rather than otherwise.

Then Elena forgot about him in the dawning of a new understanding. She was realizing that she could keep circulating her Power inside her, and even build it higher and higher, getting ready for a truly explosive burst, and show nothing of what it was doing on the surface.

And as for the nodes...

Elena looked around her at what a few minutes ago had been barren wilderness. It was like taking bullets of light through both her eyes. She was dazzled; she was enthralled. Colors seemed to come to life in a painful glory. She felt that she could see much farther than she ever had, on and on into the desert, and at the same time, she could distinguish Damon's pupils from his irises.

Why, they're both black, but different shades of black, she thought. Of course, they go together - Damon would never have irises that didn't complement his pupils. But the irises are more velvety, where his pupils are more silky and shiny. And yet it's a velvet that can hold light inside it - almost like the night sky with stars - like those kitsune star balls that Meredith told me about.

Right now those pupils were wide and set unyieldingly on her face, as if Damon didn't want to miss a moment of her reaction. Suddenly, the corner of his lip quirked in a faint smile.

"You did it. You learned to channel your Power to your eyes." He spoke in a bare whisper that she could never have detected before.

"And to my ears," she whispered back, listening to the amazing symphony of tiny sounds around her. High in the air, a bat squeaked on a frequency too high for any ordinary human ear to notice. As for the fall of grains of sand around her, they formed something like a tiny concerto as they struck rock and bounced with a tiny ping before falling to the ground below.

This is amazing, she told Damon, hearing the smugness in her own telepathic voice. And I can talk to you this way any time now? She would have to watch out for that - telepathy threatened to reveal more than she might want to send to a recipient.

It's best to be careful, Damon agreed, confirming her suspicions. She'd sent more than she'd meant to.

But Damon - can Bonnie do this, too? Should I try to show her?

"Who knows?" Damon replied aloud, making Elena wince. "Teaching humans how to use Power isn't exactly my forte."

And what about my different Wings Powers? Will I be able to control them, now?

"About those I have absolutely no idea. I've never seen anything like them." Damon looked thoughtful for a moment and then shook his head. "I think you'd need someone with more experience than I have to learn to control those." Before Elena could say anything else, he added, "We'd better get back to the others. We're almost at the Gate."

"And I suppose I shouldn't be using telepathy then."

"Well, it is a rather obvious giveaway - "

"But you'll teach me later, won't you? As much as you know about controlling Power?"

"Maybe your boyfriend should be doing that," Damon said almost roughly.

He's afraid, Elena thought, trying to keep her thoughts hidden under a wall of white noise so that Damon wouldn't pick them up. He's just as afraid that he'll reveal too much to me as I am afraid of him.

Chapter 14

"All right," Damon said as he and Elena reached Bonnie and Meredith. "Now comes the hard part."

Meredith looked up at him. "Now comes...?"

"Yes. The really hard part." Damon had finally unzipped his mysterious black leather bag. "Look," he said in a bare murmur, "this is the actual Gate that we have to get through. And while we're doing it, you can have all the hysterics you want because you're supposed to be captives." He pulled out a number of pieces of rope.

Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie had drawn together in an automatic show of velociraptor sisterhood.

"What," Meredith said slowly, as if to give Damon the final benefit of some lingering doubt, "are those ropes for?"

Damon put his head to one side in an oh-come-on gesture. "They're for tying your hands."

"For what?"

Elena was amazed. She had never seen Meredith so obviously angry. She herself couldn't even get a word in. Meredith had walked up and was looking at Damon from a distance of about four inches.

And her eyes are gray! some distant part of Elena's mind exclaimed in astonishment. Deep, deep, deep, clear gray gray. All this time I've thought they were brown, but they're not.

Meanwhile Damon was looking faintly alarmed at Meredith's expression. A T. rex would have looked alarmed at Meredith's expression, Elena thought.

"And you expect us to walk around with our hands tied up? While you do what?"

"While I act as your master," Damon said, suddenly rallying with a glorious smile that was gone almost before it was there. "The three of you are my slaves."

There was a long, long silence.

Elena waved the entire pile of objects away with a gesture. "We won't do that," she said simply. "We won't. There has to be some other way - "

"Do you want to rescue Stefan or not?" Damon demanded suddenly. There was a searing heat in the dark eyes he had fixed on Elena.

"Of course I do!" Elena flashed back, feeling heat in her cheeks. "But not as a slave, dragged along behind you!"

"That's the only way humans get into the Dark Dimension," Damon said flatly. "Tied or chained, as a vampire's or kitsune's or demon's property."

Meredith was shaking her head. "You never told us - "

"I told you that you wouldn't like the way in!"

Even while answering Meredith, Damon's eyes never left Elena. Underneath his outward coldness, he seemed to be pleading with her to understand, she thought. In the old days, she thought, he'd have just lounged against a wall and raised his eyebrows and said, "Fine; I didn't want to go anyway. Who's for a picnic?"

But Damon did want them to go, Elena realized. He was desperate for them to go. He just didn't know any honest way of conveying that. The only way he knew was to -

"You have to make us a promise, Damon," she said, looking him directly in the eyes. "And it has to be before we make the decision to go or not."

She could see the relief in his eyes, even if to the other girls it might seem as if his face was perfectly cold and impassive. She knew he was glad she wasn't saying that her previous decision was final, and that was that. "What promise?" Damon asked.

"You have to swear - to give your word - that no matter what we decide now or in the Dark Dimension, you won't try to Influence us. You won't put us to sleep by mind control, or nudge us to do what you want. You won't use any vampire tricks on our minds."

Damon wouldn't be Damon if he didn't argue. "But, look, suppose the time comes when you want me to do that? There are some things there that it might be better for you to sleep through - "

"Then we'll tell you we've changed our minds, and we'll release you from the promise. You see? There's no downside. You just have to swear."

"All right," Damon said, still holding her gaze. "I swear I won't use any kind of Power on your minds; I won't Influence you in any way, until you ask me to. I give my word."

"Right." At last Elena broke the stare down with the tiniest of smiles and nods. And Damon gave her an almost imperceptible nod in return.

She turned away to find herself looking into Bonnie's searching brown gaze.

"Elena," Bonnie whispered, tugging on her arm. "Come here for a sec, okay?" Elena could hardly help it. Bonnie was strong as a small Welsh pony. Elena went, casting a powerless look over her shoulder at Damon as she did.

"What?" she whispered when Bonnie finally stopped dragging her. Meredith had come along as well, figuring it might be sisterhood business. "Well?"

"Elena," Bonnie burst out, as if unable to hold the words back any longer, "the way you and Damon act - it's different than it used to be. You didn't used to...I mean, what really happened between you two when you were alone together?"

"This is hardly the time for that," Elena hissed. "We're having a big problem here, in case you hadn't noticed."

"But - what if - "

Meredith took up the unfinished sentence, pushing a dark lock of hair out of her eyes. "What if it's something Stefan doesn't like? Like 'what happened with Damon when you were alone in the motel that night'?" she finished, quoting Bonnie's words.

Bonnie's mouth fell open. "What motel? What night? What happened?" she almost shrieked, causing Meredith to try to quiet her and get bitten for her pains.

Elena looked at first one and then the other of her two friends - the two friends who had come to die with her if necessary. She could feel her breath come short. It was so unfair, but..."Can we just discuss this later?" she suggested, trying to convey with her eyes and eyebrows Damon can hear us!

Bonnie merely whispered, "What motel? What night? What - "

Elena gave up. "Nothing happened," she said flatly. "Meredith is only quoting you, Bonnie. You said those words last night while you were asleep. And maybe sometime in the future you'll tell us what you're talking about, because I don't know."

She finished by looking at Meredith, who just raised one perfect eyebrow. "You're right," Meredith said, completely undeceived. "The English language could use a word like 'sa.' It would make these conversations so much shorter, for one thing."

Bonnie sighed. "Well, then, I'll find out for myself," she said. "You may not think I can, but I will."

"Okay, okay, but meanwhile does anyone have anything helpful to say about Damon's rope stuff?"

"Such as, do we tell him where to stuff it?" Meredith suggested under her breath.

Bonnie was holding a length of rope. She ran a small, fair-skinned hand over it.

"I don't think this was bought in anger," she said, her brown eyes unfocusing and her voice taking on the slightly eerie tone it always did when she was in trance. "I see a boy and a girl, over a counter at a hardware store - and she's laughing, and the boy says, 'I'll bet you anything that you're going to school next year to be an architect,' and the girl gets all misty-eyed, and says, yes, and - "

"And that's all the psychic spying I care to hear today." Damon had come right up to them without making a sound. Bonnie jumped violently, and almost dropped the rope.

"Listen," Damon continued harshly, "just a hundred meters away is the final crossing. Either you wear these and you act like slaves or you don't get in to help Stefan. Ever. That's it."

Silently, the girls conferred with their eyes. Elena knew that her own expression said clearly that she wasn't asking either Bonnie or Meredith to go with her, but that she herself was going if it required crawling behind Damon on her hands and knees.

Meredith, looking directly into Elena's eyes, slowly shut her own and nodded, letting out her breath. Bonnie was nodding her head already, resigned.

In silence, Bonnie and Meredith let Elena tie their wrists in front of them. Elena then let Damon tie her wrists and thread a long rope between the three of them, as if they were a chain gang of prisoners.

Elena could feel a flush coming up from below her chest to burn in her cheeks. She couldn't meet Damon's eyes, not this way, but she knew without asking that Damon was thinking about the time that Stefan had dismissed him from his apartment like a dog, in front of just this audience, plus Matt.

Vengeful cad, Elena thought as hard as she could in Damon's direction. She knew the last word would hurt the most. Damon prided himself on being a gentleman...

But "gentlemen" don't go into the Dark Dimension, Damon's voice in her head said mockingly.

"All right," Damon added aloud, and took the lead rope in one hand. He started walking briskly into the darkness of the cave, the three girls crowding and stumbling behind him.

Elena would never forget that brief journey, and she knew neither Bonnie nor Meredith would either. They walked across the shallow opening of the cave and into the small opening in the back, which gaped like a mouth. It took some maneuvering to get the three of them into it. On the other side the cavern flared out again, and they were in a large cavern. At least that was what Elena's enhanced senses told her. The everlasting fog had returned and Elena had no idea which way they were going.

Only a few minutes later a building reared up out of the thick fog.

Elena didn't know what she had been expecting from the Demon Gate. Possibly huge ebony doors, carved with serpents and encrusted with jewels. Maybe a rough-hewn, weathered colossus of stone, like the Egyptian pyramids. Perhaps even some sort of futuristic energy field that flickered and flashed with blue-violet lasers.

What she saw instead looked like a ramshackle depot of some kind, a place for holding and shipping goods. There was an empty pen, heavily fenced, topped with barbed wire. It stank, and Elena was glad that she and Damon had not channeled power to her nose.

Then there were people, men and women in fine clothes, each with a key in one hand, murmuring something before opening a door in one side of the building. The same door - but Elena would bet anything that they weren't all going to the same place, if the keys were like the one she had briefly "borrowed" from Shinichi's house a week or so ago. One of the ladies looked as if she were dressed for a fancy masquerade, with fox ears that blended into her long auburn hair. It was only when Elena saw under her ankle-length dress the swishing of a fox tail that she realized that the woman was a kitsune making use of the Demon Gate.

Damon hastily - and none too gently - led them to the other side of the building, where a broken-hinged door opened into a dilapidated room that, strangely, seemed larger on the inside than on the outside. All sorts of things were being bartered or sold here: many looked as if they had to do with the management of slaves.

Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie looked at one another, round-eyed. Obviously, people bringing wild slaves in from the outside considered torture and terror all in a day's work.

"Passage for four," Damon said briefly to the slump-shouldered but heavyset man behind the counter.

"Three savages all at once?" The man, eyes devouring what he could see of the three girls, turned to look at Damon suspiciously.

"What can I say? My job is also my hobby." Damon stared him straight in the eyes.

"Yeh, but..." The man laughed. "Lately we bin gettin' maybe one or two a month."

"They're legally mine. No kidnappings. Kneel," Damon added casually to the three girls.

It was Meredith who got it first and sank to the ground like a ballet dancer. Her dark, dark gray eyes were focused on something no one but she could see. Then Elena somehow untangled the single syllable from the others. She focused her mind on Stefan and pretended she was kneeling to kiss him on his prison pallet. It seemed to work; she was down.

But Bonnie was up. The most dependent, the softest, the most innocent member of the triumvirate found that her knees had gone solid.

"Redheads, eh?" the man said, eyeing Damon sharply even as he smirked. "Maybe you'd better buy a little tingler for that one."

"Maybe," Damon said tightly. Bonnie just looked at him blankly, looked at the girls on the ground and then threw herself into a prostrate position. Elena could hear her sobbing softly. "But I've found that a firm voice and a disapproving look actually work better."

The man gave up and slumped again. "Passage for four," he grunted and reached up and pulled on a dirty bell rope. By this time Bonnie was weeping in fear and humiliation, but no one seemed to notice, except the other girls.

Elena didn't dare to try to comfort her telepathically; that wouldn't fit in with the aura of a "normal human girl" at all, and who knew what traps or devices might be hidden here in addition to the man who kept undressing them over and over with his eyes? She just wished she could call up one of her Wings attacks, right here in this room. That would wipe the smug look off the man's face.

A moment later, something else wiped it off as completely as she could have desired. Damon leaned across the counter and whispered something to him that turned the slumped man's leering face a sickly color of green.

Did you hear what he said? Elena communicated this to Meredith using her eyes and eyebrows.

Meredith, her own eyes crinkling, positioned her hand in front of Elena's abdomen, then made a twisting, ripping motion.

Even Bonnie smiled.

Then Damon led them to wait outside the depot. They had only been standing a few minutes when Elena's new vision spotted a boat gliding silently through the mist. She realized that the building must be on the very bank of a river, but even with Power directed solely to her eyes she could barely make out where the nonreflective land gave way to shining water, and even with Power directed solely to her ears she could barely hear the sound of swift deep water running.

The boat stopped - somehow. Elena couldn't see any anchor dropped or anything to fasten it to. But the fact was that it did stop, and the slumped man put down a plank, which stayed in place as they boarded: first Damon, and then his bevy of "slaves."

On board, Elena watched Damon wordlessly offer six pieces of gold to the ferryman - two for each human who presumably wouldn't be coming back, she thought.

For a moment she was lost in the memory of being very young - only three or so, she must have been - and sitting on her father's lap while he read to her from a wonderfully illustrated book about the Greek myths. It told about the ferryman, Charon, who took spirits of the deceased over the river Styx to the land of the dead. And her father telling her that the Greeks put coins on the eyes of those who died so they could pay the ferryman....

There's no coming back from this journey! she thought suddenly and violently. No escape! They might as well be truly dead....

Strangely, it was horror that saved her from this morass of terror. Just as she lifted her head, perhaps to scream, the dim figure of the ferryman turned from his duties briefly as if to look back over the passengers. Elena heard Bonnie's shriek. Meredith, shaking, was frantically and illogically reaching for the bag in which her gun was stowed. Even Damon didn't seem to be able to move.

The tall specter in the boat had no face.

He had deep depressions where his eyes should be, a shallow hollow for a mouth, and a triangular hole where his nose should have protruded. The uncanny horror of it, on top of the stink from the depot pens, was simply too much for Bonnie, and she slumped sideways, limp against Meredith, in a faint.

Elena, in the midst of her terror, had a moment of revelation. In the dim, moist, dripping twilight, she had forgotten to stop trying to use all her senses to their fullest. She was undoubtedly better able to see the inhuman face of the ferryman than, say, Meredith. She could also hear things, like the sounds of long-dead miners tapping at the rock above them, and the scurrying of enormous bats or cockroaches or something, inside the stone walls all around them.

But now, Elena suddenly felt warm tears on her icy cheeks as she realized that she had completely underestimated Bonnie for as long as she'd known about her friend's psychic powers. If Bonnie's senses were permanently open to the kinds of horrors Elena was experiencing now, it was no wonder that Bonnie lived in fear. Elena found herself promising to be a hell of a lot more tolerant the next time Bonnie faltered or started screaming. In fact, Bonnie deserved some kind of an award for keeping a grip on sanity this far, Elena decided. But Elena didn't dare do any more than gaze at her friend, who was completely unconscious, and swear to herself that from now on Bonnie would find a champion in Elena Gilbert.

That promise and the warmth of it burned like a candle in Elena's mind, a candle she pictured held by Stefan, the light of it dancing in his green eyes and playing over the planes of his face. It was just enough to keep her from losing her own sanity on the rest of the journey.

By the time the boat docked - at a place just slightly more traveled than the one where they had embarked - all three of the girls were in a state of exhaustion brought on by prolonged terror and wrenching suspense.

But they hadn't really used the time to think over the words "Dark Dimension" or to imagine the number of ways its darkness might be manifested.

"Our new home," Damon said grimly. Watching him instead of the landscape, Elena realized from the tension in his neck and shoulders that Damon was not enjoying himself. She'd thought he'd be heading into his own particular paradise, this world of human slaves, and torture for entertainment, whose only rule was self-preservation of the individual ego. Now she realized that she had been wrong. For Damon this was a world of beings with Powers as great or greater than his own. He was going to have to claw out a foothold here among them, just like any urchin on the street - except that he couldn't afford to make any mistakes. They needed to find a way not just to live, but to live in luxury and mingle with high society, if they were to have any chance to rescue Stefan.

Stefan - no, she couldn't allow herself the luxury of thinking about him at that time. Once she started she would become undone, begin to demand ridiculous things, like that they go round to the prison, just to stare at it, like a junior high kid with a crush on an older boy, who just wanted to be driven "by his house" to worship it. And then what would that do to their plans for a jailbreak later? Plan A was: don't make mistakes, and Elena would stick to that until she found a better one.

That was how Damon and his "slaves" came to the Dark Dimension, through the Demon Gate. The smallest one needed to be revived with water in the face before she could get up and walk.

Chapter 15

Hurrying behind Damon, Elena tried not to look either to the left or the right. She could see too much of what to Meredith and Bonnie must have appeared to be featureless darkness.

There were depots on either side, places where slaves were obviously brought to be bought or sold or transported later. Elena could hear the whimpers of children in the darkness and if she hadn't been so frightened herself, she would have rushed off looking for the crying kids.

But I can't do that, because I'm a slave now, she thought, with a sense of shock that ran up from her fingertips. I'm not a real human being anymore. I'm a piece of property.

She found herself once again staring at the back of Damon's head and wondering how on earth she had talked herself into this. She understood what being a slave meant - in fact she seemed to have an intuitive understanding of it that surprised her - and it was Not a Good Thing to Be.

It meant that she could be...well, that anything could be done to her and it was no one's business but that of her owner. And her owner (how had he talked her into this again?) was Damon, of all people.

He could sell all three girls - Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie - and be out of here in an hour with the profits.

They hurried through this area of the docks, the girls with their eyes on their feet to prevent themselves from stumbling.

And then they crested a hill. Below them, in a sort of crater-shaped formation, was a city.

The slums were on the edges, and crowded almost up to where they were standing. But there was a chicken-wire fence in front of them, which kept them isolated even while allowing them a bird's-eye view of the city. If they had still been in the cave they had entered, this would have been the greatest underground cavern imaginable - but they weren't underground anymore.

"It happened sometime during the ferry ride," Damon said. "We made - well - a twist in space, say." He tried to explain and Elena tried to understand. "You went in through the Demon Gate, and when you came out you were no longer in Earth's Dimension, but in another one entirely." Elena only had to look up at the sky to believe him. The constellations were different; there was no Little or Big Dipper, no North Star.

Then there was the sun. It was much larger, but much dimmer than Earth's, and it never left the horizon. At any moment about half of it showed, day and night - terms which, as Meredith pointed out, had lost their rational meaning here.

As they approached a gate made of chicken wire that would finally let them out of the slave-holding area, they were stopped by what Elena would later learn was a Guardian.

She would learn that in a way, the Guardians were the rulers of the Dark Dimension, although they themselves came from another place far away and it was almost as if they had permanently occupied this little slice of Hell, trying to impose order on the slum king and feudal lords who divided the city among themselves.

This Guardian was a tall woman with hair the color of Elena's own - true gold - cut square at shoulder length, and she paid no attention at all to Damon but immediately asked Elena, who was first in line behind him, "Why are you here?"

Elena was glad, very glad, that Damon had taught her to control her aura. She concentrated on that while her brain hummed at supersonic speed, wondering what the right response to this question was. The response that would leave them free and not get them sent home.

Damon didn't train us for this, was her first thought. And her second was, no, because he's never been here before. He doesn't know how everything works here, only some things.

And if it looked as if this woman was going to try to interfere with him, he might just go crazy and attack her, a helpful little voice added from somewhere in Elena's subconscious. Elena doubled the speed of her scheming. Creative lying had once been a sort of specialty of hers, and now she said the first thing that popped into her head and got a thumbs-up: "I gambled with him and lost."

Well, it sounded good. People lost all sorts of things when they gambled: plantations, talismans, horses, castles, bottles of genii. And if it turned out not to be enough of a reason, she could always say that that was just the start of her sad story. Best of all, it was in a way, true. Long ago she'd given her life for Damon as well as for Stefan, and Damon had not exactly turned over a new leaf as she'd requested. Half a leaf, maybe. A leaflet.

The Guardian was staring at her with a puzzled look in her true blue eyes. People had stared at Elena all her life - being young and very beautiful meant that you fretted only when people didn't stare. But the puzzlement was a bit of a worry. Was the tall woman reading her mind? Elena tried to add another layer of white noise at the top. What came out was a few lines of a Britney Spears song. She turned the psychic volume up.

The tall woman put two fingers to her head like someone with a sudden headache. Then she looked at Meredith.

"Why...are you here?"

Usually Meredith didn't lie at all, but when she did she treated it as an intellectual art. Fortunately, she also never tried to fix something that wasn't broken. "The same for me," she said sadly.

"And you?" The woman was looking at Bonnie, who was looking as if she were going to be sick again.

Meredith gave Bonnie a little nudge. Then she stared at her hard. Elena stared at her harder, knowing that all Bonnie had to do was mumble "Me, too." And Bonnie was a good "me, too-er" after Meredith had staked out a position.

The problem was that Bonnie was also either in trance, or so close to it that it didn't matter.

"Shadow Souls," Bonnie said.

The woman blinked, but not the way you blink when someone says something totally unresponsive. She blinked in astonishment.

Oh, God, Elena thought. Bonnie's got their password or something. She's making predictions or prophesying or whatever.

"Shadow...souls?" the Guardian said, watching Bonnie closely.

"The city is full of them," Bonnie said miserably.

The Guardian's fingers danced over what looked like a palmtop computer. "We know that. This is the place they come."

"Then you should stop it."

"We have only limited jurisdiction. The Dark Dimension is ruled by a dozen factions of overlords, who have slumlords to carry out their orders."

Bonnie, Elena thought, trying to cut through Bonnie's mental haze even at the cost of the Guardian hearing her. These are the police.

At the same moment, Damon took over. "She's the same as the others," he said. "Except that she's psychic."

"No one asked your opinion," the Guardian snapped at him, without even glancing in Damon's direction. "I don't care what kind of bigwig you are down there" - she jerked her head contemptuously at the city of lights - "you're on my turf behind this fence. And I'm asking the little red-haired girl: is what he is saying the truth?"

Elena had a moment of panic. After all they'd been through, if Bonnie blew it now...

This time Bonnie blinked. Whatever else she was trying to communicate, it was true that she was the same as Meredith and Elena. And it was true that she was psychic. Bonnie was a terrible liar when she had too much time to think about things, but to this she could say without hesitation, "Yes, that's true."

The Guardian stared at Damon.

Damon stared back as if he could do it all night. He was a champion out-starer.

And the Guardian waved them away.

"I suppose even a psychic can have a bad day," she said, then added to Damon, "Take care of them. You realize that all psychics have to be licensed?"

Damon, with his best grand seigneur manner, said, "Madam, these are not professional psychics. They are my private assistants."

"And I'm not a 'Madam' I'm addressed as 'Your Judgment.' By the way, people addicted to gambling usually come to horrible ends here."

Ha, ha, Elena thought. If she only knew what kind of gamble we all are taking...well, we'd probably be worse off than Stefan is right now.

Outside the fence was a courtyard. There were litters here, as well as rickshaws and small goatcarts. No carriages, no horses. Damon got two litters, one for himself and Elena and one for Meredith and Bonnie.

Bonnie, still looking confused, was staring at the sun. "You mean it never finishes rising?"

"No," Damon said patiently. "And it's setting here, not rising. Perpetual twilight in the City of Darkness itself. You'll see more as we move along. Don't touch that," he added, as Meredith moved to untie the rope around Bonnie's wrists before either of them got on the litter. "You two can take the ropes off in the litter if you draw the curtains, but don't lose them. You're still slaves, and you have to wear something symbolic around your arms to show it - even if it's just matching bracelets. Otherwise I get in trouble. Oh, and you'll have to go veiled in the city."

"We - what?" Elena flashed a look of disbelief at him.

Damon just flashed back a 250-kilowatt smile and before Elena could say another word, he was drawing gauzy sheer fabrics from his black bag and handing them out. The veils were of a size to cover an entire body.

"But you only have to put it on your head or tie it on your hair or something," Damon said dismissively.

"What's it made of?" Meredith asked, feeling the light silky material, which was transparent and so thin that the wind threatened to whip it from her fingers.

"How should I know?"

"It's different colors on the other side!" Bonnie discovered, letting the wind transform her pale green veil into a shimmering silver. Meredith was shaking out a dramatic deep violet silk into a mysterious dark blue dotted with a myriad of stars. Elena, who had been expecting her own veil to be blue, found herself looking up at Damon. He was holding a tiny square of cloth in a clenched fist.

"Let's see how good you've gotten," he murmured, nodding her closer to him. "Guess what color."

Another girl might only have noticed the sloe black eyes and the pure, carven lines of Damon's face, or maybe the wild, wicked smile - somehow wilder and sweeter than ever here, like a rainbow in the middle of a hurricane. But Elena also made note of the stiffness in his neck and shoulders - places where tension built up. The Dark Dimension was already taking its toll on him, psychically, even as he mocked it.

She wondered how many soundings of Power by the merely curious he was having to block each second. She was about to offer to help by opening herself up to the eldritch world, when he snapped, "Guess!" in a tone that didn't make it a suggestion.

"Gold," Elena said instantly, surprising herself. When she reached to take the golden square from his hand a powerful, pleasurable feeling of electric current shot from her palm up her arm and seemed to skewer her straight through the heart. Damon clung to her fingers briefly as she took the square and Elena found she could still feel electricity pulsing from his fingertips.

The underside of her veil blew out white and sparkling as if set with diamonds. God, maybe they were diamonds, she thought. How could you tell with Damon?

"Your wedding veil, perhaps?" Damon murmured, lips close to her ear. The rope around Elena's wrists had come very loose and she stroked the diaphanous fabric helplessly, feeling the tiny jewels on the white side cool to the touch of her fingers.

"How did you know you'd need all this stuff?" Elena asked, with bruising practicality. "You didn't know everything, but you seemed to know enough."

"Oh, I did research in bars and other places. I found a few people who'd been here and had managed to get out again - or who had gotten kicked out." Damon's wild grin grew even wilder. "At night while you were asleep. At a little hidden store, I got those." He nodded at her veil, and added, "You don't have to wear that over your face or anything. Press it to your hair and it will cling to it."

Elena did so, wearing the gold side out. It fell to her heels. She fingered her veil, already able to see the flirtatious possibilities in it, as well as the dismissive ones. If only she could get this damned rope off her wrists...

After a moment, Damon retreated back into the persona of the imperturbable master and said, "For all our sakes, we ought to be strict about these things. The slum lords and nobility who run this abominable mess they call the Dark Dimension know that it's only two days away from revolution at any time, and if we add anything to the balance they're going to Make a Public Example of Us."

"All right," Elena said. "Here, hold my string and I'll get on the litter."

But there wasn't much point in the rope, not once they were both sitting in the same litter. It was carried by four men - not big men, but wiry ones, and all of the same height, which made for a smooth ride.

If Elena had been a free citizen, she would never have allowed herself to be carried by four people whom (she assumed) were slaves. In fact, she would have made a big noisy fuss over it. But that talk she'd had with herself at the docks had sunk in. She was a slave, even if Damon hadn't paid anyone to buy her. She didn't have the right to make a big noisy fuss about anything. In this crimson, evil-smelling place she could imagine that her fuss might even make problems for the litter bearers themselves - make their owner or whoever ran the litter-bearing business punish them, as if it were their fault.

Best Plan A for now: Keep Mouth Shut.

There was plenty to see anyway, now that they had passed on a bridge over bad-smelling slums and alleys full of tumbledown houses. Shops began to appear, at first heavily barred and made of unpainted stone, then more respectable buildings, and then suddenly they were winding their way through a bazaar. But even here the stamp of poverty and weariness appeared on too many faces. Elena had expected, if anything, a cold, black, antiseptic city with emotionless vampires and fire-eyed demons walking the streets. Instead, everyone she saw looked human, and they were selling things - from medicines to food and drink - that vampires didn't need.

Well, maybe the kitsune and the demons need them, Elena reasoned, shuddering at the idea of what a demon might want to eat. On the street corners were hard-faced, scantily clad girls and boys, and tattered, haggard people holding pathetic signs: A MEMORY FOR A MEAL.

"What do they mean?" Elena asked Damon, but he didn't answer her immediately.

"This is how the free humans of the city spend most of their time," he said. "So remember that, before you start going on one of your crusades - "

Elena wasn't listening. She was staring at one of the holders of such a sign. The man was horribly thin, with a straggly beard and bad teeth, but worse was his look of vacant despair. Every so often he would hold out a trembling hand on which there was a small, clear ball, which he balanced on his palm, muttering, "A summer's day when I was young. A summer's day for a ten-geld piece." As often as not there was no one near when he said this.

Elena slipped off a lapis ring Stefan had given her and held it toward him. She didn't want to annoy Damon by getting out of the litter, and she had to say, "Come here, please," while holding the ring toward the bearded man.

He heard, and came to the litter quickly enough. Elena saw something move in his beard - lice, perhaps - and she forced herself to stare at the ring as she said, "Take it. Quickly, please."

The old man stared at the ring as if it were a banquet. "I don't have change," he moaned, bringing up his hand and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He seemed about to drop to the ground unconscious. "I don't have change!"

"I don't want change!" Elena said through the huge swelling that had formed in her throat. "Take the ring. Hurry or I'll drop it."

He snatched it from her fingers as the litter bearers started forward again. "May the Guardians bless you, lady," he said, trying to keep up with the litter bearer's trot. "Hear me who may! May They bless you!"

"You really shouldn't," Damon said to Elena when the voice had died away behind them. "He's not going to get a meal with that, you know."

"He was hungry," Elena said softly. She couldn't explain that he reminded her of Stefan, not just now. "It was my ring," she added defensively. "I suppose you're going to say he'll spend it on alcohol or drugs."

"No, but he won't get a meal with it, either. He'll get a banquet."

"Well, so much the - "

"In his imagination. He'll get a dusty orb with some old vampire's memory of a Roman feast, or someone from the city's memory of a modern one. Then he'll play it over and over as he slowly starves to death."

Elena was appalled. "Damon! Quick! I have to go back and find him - "

"You can't, I'm afraid." Lazily, Damon held up a hand. He had a firm grip on her rope. "Besides, he's long gone."

"How can he do that? How could anyone do that?"

"How can a lung cancer patient refuse to quit smoking? But I agree that those orbs can be the most addictive substances of all. Blame the kitsune for bringing their star balls here and making them the most popular form of obsession."

"Star balls? Hoshi no tama?" Elena gasped.

Damon stared at her, looking equally surprised. "You know about them?"

"All I know is what Meredith researched. She said that kitsune were often portrayed with either keys" - she raised her eyebrows at him - "or with star balls. And that myths say they can put some or all of their power in the ball, so that if you find it, you can control the kitsune. She and Bonnie want to find Misao's or Shinichi's star balls and have control over them."

"Be still, my unbeating heart," Damon said dramatically, but the next second he was all business. "Remember what that old guy said? A summer's day for a meal? He was talking about this." Damon picked up the little marble that the old man had dropped on the litter and held it to Elena's temple.

The world disappeared.

Damon was gone. The sights and sounds - yes, and the smells - of the bazaar were gone. She was sitting on green grass which rippled in a slight breeze and she was looking at a weeping willow that bent down to a stream that was copper and deep, deep green at once. There was some sweet scent in the air - honeysuckle, freesia? Something delicious that stirred Elena as she leaned back to gaze at picture-perfect white clouds rolling in a cerulean sky.

She felt - she didn't know how to say it. She felt young, but somewhere in her mind she knew that she was actually younger than this alien personality that had taken hold of her. Still, she felt excited that it was springtime and every golden-green leaf, every springy little reed, every weightless white cloud seemed to be rejoicing with her.

Then suddenly her heart was pounding. She had just caught the sound of a footfall behind her. In one, springing joyous moment she was on her feet, arms held out in the extremity of her love, the wild devotion she felt for this...

...this young girl? Something inside the sphere user's brain seemed to fall back in bewilderment. Most of it, though, was taken up with cataloguing the perfections of the girl who had crept up so lightly in the waving grass: the clustering dark curls at her neck, the flashing green eyes below arching brows, the smooth glowing skin of her cheeks as she laughed with her lover, pretending to run away on feet as light as any elf's...!

Pursued and pursuer both fell down together on the soft carpet of long grass...and then things quickly got so steamy that Elena, the distant mind in the background, began wondering how on earth you made one of these things stop. Every time she put her hand to her temple, groping, she was caught and kissed breathless by...Allegra...that was the girl, Allegra. And Allegra was certainly beautiful, especially through this particular viewer's eyes. The creamy soft skin of her...

And then, with a shock just as great as she'd felt when the bazaar disappeared, it appeared again. She was Elena; she was riding on the litter with Damon; there was a cacophony of sounds around her - and a thousand different smells, too. But she was breathing hard and part of her was still resounding with John - that had been his name - with John's love for Allegra.

"But I still don't understand," she almost keened.

"It's simple," Damon said. "You put a blank star ball of the size you like to your temple and you think back to the time you want to record. The star ball does the rest." He waved off her attempted interruption and leaned forward with mischief in those fathomless black eyes of his. "Perhaps you got an especially warm summer day?" he said, adding suggestively, "These litters do have curtains you can draw closed."

"Don't be silly, Damon," Elena said, but John's feelings had sparked her own, like flint and tinder. She didn't want to kiss Damon, she told herself sternly. She wanted to kiss Stefan. But since a moment ago she had been kissing Allegra, it didn't seem as strong an argument as it could be.

"I don't think," she began, still breathless, as Damon reached for her, "that this is a very good..."

With a smooth flick of the rope, Damon untied her hands completely. He would have pulled it off both wrists, but Elena immediately half-turned, supporting herself with that hand. She needed the support.

In the circumstances, though, there was nothing more meaningful - or more...exciting...than what Damon had done.

He hadn't drawn the curtains, but Bonnie and Meredith were behind them on their own litter, out of sight. Certainly out of Elena's mind. She felt warm arms around her, and instinctively nestled into them. She felt a surge of pure love and appreciation for Damon, for his understanding that she could never do this as a slave with a master.

We're both of us unmastered, she heard in her head, and she remembered that when cooling down most of her psychic abilities she had forgotten to set the volume on low for this one. Oh, well, it might just come in handy....

But we both enjoy worship, she replied telepathically, and felt his laughter on her lips as he admitted the truth of it. There was nothing sweeter in her life these days than Damon's kisses. She could drift like this forever, forgetting the outside world. And that was a good thing, because she had the feeling that there was much depression in the outside and not too much happiness. But if she could always come back to this, this welcome, this sweetness, this ecstasy...

Elena jerked in the litter, throwing her weight back so fast that the men carrying it almost fell in a heap.

"You bastard," she whispered venomously. They were still psychically entangled, and she was glad to see that through Damon's eyes she was like a vengeful Aphrodite: her golden hair lifting and whipping behind her like a thunderstorm, her eyes shining violet in her elemental fury.

And now, worst of all, this goddess turned her face away from him. "Not one day," she said. "You couldn't even keep your promise for a single day!"

"I didn't! I didn't Influence you, Elena!"

"Don't call me that. We have a professional relationship now. I call you 'Master.' You can call me 'Slave' or 'Dog' or whatever you want."

"If we have the professional relationship of master and slave," Damon said, his eyes dangerous, "then I can just order you to - "

"Try it!" Elena lifted her lips in what really wasn't a smile. "Why don't you do that, and see just what happens?"

Chapter 16

Damon clearly decided to throw himself on the mercy of the court, and looked piteous and a little unbalanced, which he could easily do whenever he wanted. "I really didn't try to Influence you," he repeated, but then hastily added, "Maybe I can just change the subject for a while - tell you more about the star balls."

"That," Elena said in her most frosty voice, "might be a rather good idea."

"Well, the balls make recordings directly from your neurons, you see? Your neurons in your brain. Everything you've ever experienced is there in your mind somewhere, and the ball just draws it out."

"So you can always remember it and watch it over and over like a movie, too?" Elena said, twiddling with her veil to shade her face from him, and thinking that she would give a star ball to Alaric and Meredith before their wedding.

"No," Damon said, rather grimly. "Not like that. For one thing, the memory is gone from you - these are kitsune toys we're talking about, remember? Once the star ball has taken it from your neurons, you don't remember a thing about the event. Second, the 'recording' on the star ball gradually fades - with use, with time, with some other factors nobody understands. But the ball gets cloudier, and the sensations weaker, until finally it's just an empty crystal sphere."

"But - that poor man was selling a day of his life. A wonderful day! I should think he would want to keep it."

"You saw him."

"Yes." Once again Elena saw the louse-ridden, haggard, gray-faced old man. She felt something like ice down her spine at the thought that he had once been the laughing, joyous, young John that she had experienced. "Oh, how sad," she said, and she wasn't talking about memory.

But, for once, Damon hadn't followed her thoughts. "Yes," he said. "There are a lot of the poor and the old here. They worked themselves free of slavery, or had a generous owner die...and then this is where they end up."

"But the star balls? Are they just made for poor people? The rich ones can just travel to Earth and see a real summer day for themselves, right?"

Damon laughed without much humor. "Oh, no, they can't. Most of them are bound here."

He said bound oddly. Elena ventured, "Too busy to go on vacation?"

"Too busy, too powerful to get through the wards protecting Earth from them, too worried about what their enemies will do while they're gone, too physically decrepit, too notorious, too dead."

"Dead?" The horror of the tunnel and the corpse-smelling fog seemed ready to envelope Elena.

Damon flashed one of his evil smiles. "Forgot that your boyfriend is de mortius? Not to mention your honorable master? Most people, when they die, go to another level than this - much higher or much lower. This is the place for the bad ones, but it's the upper level. Farther down - well, nobody wants to go there."

"Like Hell?" Elena breathed. "We're in Hell?"

"More like Limbo, at least where we are. Then there's the Other Side." He nodded toward the horizon where the lowering sun still sat. "The other city, which may have been where you went on your 'vacation' to the afterlife. Here they just call it 'The Other Side.' But I can tell you two rumors I heard from my informants. There, they call it the Celestial Court. And there, the sky is crystal blue and the sun is always rising."

"The Celestial Court..." Elena forgot that she was speaking aloud.

She knew instinctively that it was the

queens-and-knights-and-sorceresses kind of court, not a court of law. It would be like Camelot. Just saying the words brought up an aching nostalgia, and - not memories, but the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that memories were locked right behind a door. It was a door, however, that was securely locked, and all Elena could see through the keyhole were ranks of more women like the Guardians, tall, golden-haired, and blue-eyed, and one - child-sized among the grown women - who glanced up, and, piercingly, from a long way off, met Elena's gaze directly.

The litter was moving out of the bazaar into more slums, which Elena took in with darting quick glances on either side of her, hiding in her veil. They seemed like any earthly slums, barrios, or favella - only worse. Children, their hair turned red by the sun, crowded around Elena's litter, their hands held out in a gesture with universal meaning.

Elena felt a tearing at her insides that she had nothing of real value to give them. She wanted to build houses here, make sure these children had food and clean water, and education, and a future to look forward to. Since she had no idea how to give them any of these things, she watched them dash off with treasures such as her Juicy Fruit gum, her comb, her minibrush, her lip gloss, her water bottle, and her earrings.

Damon shook his head, but didn't stop her until she began fumbling with a lapis and diamond pendant Stefan had given her. She was crying as she tried to disengage the clasp when suddenly the last bit of the rope around her wrist came up short.

"No more," Damon said. "You don't understand anything. We haven't even entered the city proper yet. Why don't you have a look at the architecture instead of worrying about useless brats who're likely to die anyway?"

"That's cold," Elena said, but she couldn't think of any way to make him understand, and she was too angry with him to try.

Still, she stopped fumbling with the chain and looked beyond the slums as Damon had suggested. There she could see a breathtaking skyline, with buildings that seemed meant to last for eternity, made of stones that looked the way the Egyptian pyramids and Mayan ziggurats must have looked when they were new. Everything, though, was colored red and black by a sun now concealed by sullen crimson cloudbanks. That huge red sun - it gave the air a different look for different moods. At times it seemed almost romantic, glinting on a large river Elena and Damon passed, picking out a thousand tiny wavelets in the slow-moving water. At other times, it simply seemed alien and ominous, showing clearly on the horizon like a monstrous omen, tingeing the buildings, no matter how magnificent, the color of blood. When they turned away from it, as the litter bearers moved down into the city where the huge buildings were, Elena could see their own long and menacing black shadow thrown ahead of them.

"Well? What do you think?" Damon seemed to be trying to placate her.

"I still think it looks like Hell," Elena said slowly. "I'd hate to live here."

"Ah, but whoever said that we should live here, my Princess of Darkness? We'll go back home, where the night is velvet black and the moon shines down, making everything silver." Slowly, Damon traced one finger from her hand, up her arm to her shoulder. It sent an inner shiver through her.

She tried holding the veil up as a barrier against him, but it was too transparent. He still flashed that brilliant smile at her, dazzling through the diamond-dotted white - well, shell pink, of course, because of the light - that was on her side of the veil.

"Does this place have a moon?" she asked, trying to distract him. She was afraid - afraid of him - afraid of herself.

"Oh, yes: three or four of them, I think. But they're very small and of course the sun never goes down, so you can't see them as well. Not...romantic." He smiled at her, again, slowly this time, and Elena looked away.

And in looking, she saw something in front of her that captured her entire attention. In a side street a cart had overturned, spilling large rolls made out of fur and leather. There was a thin, hungry-looking old woman attached to the cart like a beast, who was lying on the ground, and a tall angry man standing over her, raining down blows with a whip on her unprotected body.

The woman's face was turned toward Elena. It was contorted in a grimace of anguish, as she tried ineffectually to roll into a ball, her hands over her stomach. She was naked from the waist up, but as the whip lashed into her flesh, her body from throat to waist was being covered by a coating of blood.

Elena felt herself swelling with Wing Powers, but somehow none would come. She willed with all her circulating life-force for something - anything - to break free from her shoulders, but it was no good. Maybe it had something to do with wearing the remains of slave bracelets. Maybe it was Damon, beside her, telling her in a forceful voice not to get involved.

To Elena, his words were no more than punctuation to the heartbeat pounding in her ears. She jerked the rope sharply out of his hands, and then scrambled out of the litter. In six or seven leaps she was beside the man with the whip.

He was a vampire, his fangs elongated at the sight of the blood before him, but never stopping his frenzied lashing. He was too strong for Elena to handle, but...

With one more step Elena was straddling the woman, both her arms flung out in the universal gesture of protection and defiance. Rope dangled from one wrist.

The slave owner was not impressed. He was already launching the next whiplash, and it struck Elena across the cheek and simultaneously opened a great gap in her thin summer top, slicing through her camisole and scoring the flesh underneath. As she gasped, the tail of the whip cut through her jeans as if denim were butter.

Tears formed involuntarily in Elena's eyes, but she ignored them. She had managed not to make a sound other than that initial gasp. And she still stood exactly where she had first landed in protection. Elena could feel the wind whip at her tattered blouse, while her untouched veil waved behind her, as if to protect the poor slave who had collapsed against the ruined cart.

Elena was still desperately trying to bring out any kind of Wings. She wanted to fight with real weapons, and she had them, but she couldn't force them to save either her or the poor slave behind her. Even without them Elena knew one thing. That bastard in front of her wasn't going to touch his slave again, not unless he cut Elena into pieces first.

Someone stopped to stare, and someone else came out of a shop, running. When the children who'd been trailing her litter surrounded her, wailing, a crowd of sorts gathered.

Apparently it was one thing to see a merchant beating his worn-out drab - the people around here must have seen that almost daily. But to see this beautiful new girl having her clothes slashed away, this girl with hair like golden silk under a veil of gold and white, and eyes that perhaps reminded some of them of a barely remembered blue sky - that was quite another thing. Moreover, the new girl was obviously a fresh barbarian slave who had clearly humiliated her master by tearing the lead ropes from his hands and was standing now with her sanctity veil made into a mockery.

Terrific street theater.

And even given all of that, the slave owner was preparing for another stroke, raising his arm high and preparing to put his back into it. A few people in the crowd gasped; others were muttering indignantly. Elena's new sense of hearing, turned up high, could catch their whispering. A girl like this wasn't meant for the slums at all; she must have been destined for the heart of the city. Her aura alone was enough to show that. In fact, with that golden hair and those vivid blue eyes, she might even be a Guardian from the Other Side. Who knew - ?

The lash that was raised never descended. Before it could, there was a flash of black lightning - pure Power - that sent half the crowd scattering. A vampire, young in appearance and dressed in the clothing of the upper world, Earth, had made his way to stand between the golden girl and the slave owner - or rather to loom over the now cringing slave owner. The few in the crowd not stirred by the girl immediately felt their hearts pulse at the sight of him. He was the girl's owner, surely, and now he would see to the situation.

At that instant, Bonnie and Meredith arrived on the scene. They were reclining on their litter, decorously draped in their veils, Meredith in starry midnight blue and Bonnie in soft pale green. They could have been an illustration for The Arabian Nights.

But the moment they saw Damon and Elena, they most indecorously jumped off the litter. By now the crowd was so thick that working their way to the front required using elbows and knees, but in only seconds they were at Elena's side, hands defiantly unbound or trailing rope that hung defiantly free, veils floating in the wind.

When they did arrive beside Elena, Meredith gasped. Bonnie's eyes opened wide and stayed that way. Elena understood what they were seeing. Blood was flowing freely from the cut across her cheekbone and her blouse kept opening in the wind to reveal her torn and bloody camisole. One leg of her jeans was rapidly turning red.

But, drawn up into the protection of her shadow, was a far more pitiful figure. And as Meredith raised Elena's diaphanous veil to help keep her blouse closed and once more enshroud her in decency, the woman herself raised her head, to look at the three girls with the eyes of a dumb and hunted animal.

Behind them, Damon said softly, "I shall quite enjoy this," as he lifted the heavy man into the air with one hand and then struck his throat like a cobra. There was a hideous scream, which went on and on.

No one tried to interfere, and no one tried to cheer the slave owner on to make a fight.

Elena, scanning the faces of the crowd, realized why. She and her friends had become used to Damon - or as used as you could become to his half-tamed air of ferocity. But these people were getting their first look at the young man dressed all in black, of medium height and slim build, who made up for his lack of bulging muscle with a supple and deadly grace. This was enhanced by the gift of somehow dominating all the space around him, so that he effortlessly became the focal point of any picture - the way a black panther might become the focal point if it were walking lazily down a crowded city street.

Even here, where menace and an aspect of outright evil were commonplace, this young man exuded a quality of danger that made people want to stay out of his line of sight, much less his way.

Meanwhile Elena and both Meredith and Bonnie were looking around for some sort of medical assistance, or even for something clean that would staunch wounds. After about a minute, they realized that it wasn't just going to appear, so Elena appealed to the crowd.

"Does anyone know a doctor? A healer?" she shouted. The audience merely watched her. They seemed loath to get involved with a girl who had obviously defied the black-clad demon now wringing the slave owner's neck.

"So you all think it's just fine," Elena shouted, hearing the loss of control, the disgust and fury in her own voice, "for a bastard like that to be whipping a starving pregnant woman?"

There were a few downcast eyes, a few scattered replies on the theme of "He was her master, wasn't he?" But one youngish man who had been leaning against a stopped wagon, straightened up. "Pregnant?" he repeated. "She doesn't look pregnant!"

"She is!"

"Well," the young man said slowly, "if that's true, he's only harming his own merchandise." He glanced nervously over to where Damon was now standing above the deceased slave owner, whose face was cast into a ghastly death grimace of agony.

This still left Elena with no help for a woman she was afraid was about to die. "Doesn't anyone know where I can find a doctor?" There were now mutterings in various tones from the crowd members.

"We might get further on if we could offer them some money," Meredith was saying. Elena immediately reached for her pendant, but Meredith was quicker, unfastening a fancy amethyst necklace from around her neck and holding it up. "This goes to whoever shows us a good doctor first."

There was a pause while everyone seemed to be assessing the reward and the risk. "Don't you have any star balls?" a wheezing voice asked, but a high, light voice cried, "That's good enough for me!"

A child - yes, a genuine street urchin - darted to the front of the crowd, grabbed Elena's hand and pointed, saying, "Dr. Meggar, right up the street. It's only a couple of blocks; we can walk it."

The child was wrapped in a tattered old dress, but that might only be to keep warm, because he or she was also wearing a pair of trousers. Elena couldn't even figure out whether it was a boy or a girl until the child gave her an unexpectedly sweet smile and whispered, "I'm Lakshmi."

"I'm Elena," Elena said.

"Better hurry, Elena," Lakshmi said. "Guardians will get here soon."

Meredith and Bonnie had gotten the dazed slave woman to her feet, but she seemed to be in too much pain to understand if they meant to help her or kill her.

Elena remembered how the woman had huddled in the shadow of Elena's own body. She put a hand on the woman's bloody arm and said quietly, "You're safe now. You're going to be fine. That man - your...your master - is dead and I promise that nobody will hurt you again. I swear it."

The woman stared at her in disbelief, as if what Elena was saying was impossible. As if living without being beaten constantly - even with all the blood Elena could see old scars, some of them like cords, on the woman's skin - was something too far from reality to imagine.

"I swear it," Elena said again, not smiling, but grimly. She understood that this was a burden she was taking on for life.

It's all right, she thought, and realized that for some time now she had been sending her thoughts to Damon. I know what I'm doing. I'm ready to be responsible for this.

Are you sure? Damon's voice came to her, as uncertain as she'd ever heard him. Because I'm sure as hell not going to take care of some old hag when you get tired of her. I'm not even sure I'm ready to deal with whatever it's going to cost me for killing that bastard with the whip.

Elena turned to look at him. He was serious. Well, then why did you kill him? she challenged.

Are you joking? Damon gave her a shock with the vehemence and venom of his thought. He hurt you. I should have killed him more slowly, he added, ignoring one of the litter bearers who was kneeling beside him, undoubtedly asking what to do next. Damon's eyes, however, were on Elena's face, on the blood still flowing from her cut. Il figlio de cafone, Damon thought, his lips drawing back from his teeth as he looked down on the corpse, so that even the litter bearer scurried away on hands and knees.

"Damon, don't let him leave! Bring them all over here right now - " Elena began, and then, as there was a sort of universal gasp around her, she continued nonverbally, Don't let the litter bearers leave. We need a litter to carry this poor woman to the doctor. And why is everyone staring at me?

Because you're a slave, and you've just done things no slave should do and now you're giving me, your master, orders. Damon's telepathic voice was grim.

It's not an order. It's a - look, any gentleman would help a lady in distress, right? Well, there are four of us over here and one is more distressed than you want to look at. No, three are. I think I'm going to need some stitches, and Bonnie is about to collapse. Elena was striking methodically at weak points, and knew that Damon knew she was doing it. But he ordered one of the sets of litter bearers to come and pick up the slave woman and the other to take his girls.

Elena stuck with the woman and ended up in a litter with the curtains all closed around it. The smell of blood was a copper taste in her mouth, making her want to cry. Even she didn't want to look closely at the slave woman's injuries, but blood was running onto the litter. She found herself taking off her blouse and camisole and putting back only the blouse so that she could use the camisole to hold to a great diagonal slash across the woman's chest. Every time the woman raised dark brown, frightened eyes to her, Elena tried to smile at her encouragingly. They were down deep somewhere in the trenches of communication, where a look and a touch meant more than words.

Don't die, Elena was thinking. Don't die, just as you have something to live for. Live for your freedom, and for your baby.

And maybe some of what she was thinking got through to the woman, because she relaxed against the litter cushions, holding on to Elena's hand.

Chapter 17

"Her name's Ulma," a voice said, and Elena looked down to find Lakshmi holding back the curtains of the litter with a hand over her head. "Everybody knows Old Drohzne and his slaves. He beats 'em until they pass out and then expects 'em to pick up his rickshaw and go on carrying a load. He kills five or six a year."

"He didn't kill this one," Elena murmured. "He got what he deserved." She squeezed Ulma's hand.

She was vastly relieved when the litter stopped and Damon himself appeared, just as she was about to start bargaining with one of the litter bearers to carry Ulma in their arms to the doctor. Without regard for his clothing, Damon still somehow managed to convey disinterest even as he picked up the woman - Ulma - and nodded to Elena to follow him. Lakshmi skipped around him and took the lead into an intricately patterned stone courtyard and then down a crooked hallway with some solid, respectable-looking doors. Finally, she knocked on one and a wizened man with a huge head and the faintest remnant of a wispy beard opened the door cautiously.

"I don't keep any ketterris here! No hexen, no zemeral! And I don't do love spells!" Then, peering short-sightedly, he seemed to focus on the little group.

"Lakshmi?" he said.

"We've brought a woman who needs help," Elena said shortly. "She's pregnant, too. You're a doctor, aren't you? A healer?"

"A healer of some limited ability. Come in, come in."

The doctor was hurrying into a back room. They all followed him, Damon still carrying Ulma. Once she arrived, Elena saw that the healer was in the corner of what looked like a crowded wizard's sanctuary, with quite a bit of voodoo and witch doctor thrown in.

Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie glanced at one another nervously, but then Elena heard water splashing and realized that the doctor was in the corner because there was a basin of water there, and the healer was washing his hands thoroughly, rolling his sleeves up to his elbows and making a lot of frothy bubbles. He might call himself a "healer," yet he did understand basic hygiene, she thought.

Damon had put Ulma onto what looked like a clean white-sheeted examining table. The doctor nodded to him. Then, tch-tching, he pulled out a tray of instruments and set Lakshmi about fetching cloths to clean the cuts and staunch the profuse bleeding. He also opened various drawers to pull out strong-smelling bags and stood on a ladder to pull down clumps of herbs that were strung from the ceiling. Finally he opened a small box and took a pinch of snuff, himself.

"Please hurry," Elena said. "She's lost a lot of blood."

"And you've lost not a little," the man said. "My name is Kephar Meggar - and this would be Master Drohzne's slave, yes?" He peered at them, looking somehow as if he were wearing glasses, which he wasn't. "And you would be slaves, too?" He stared at the single rope Elena was still wearing, and then at Bonnie and Meredith, each wearing the same.

"Yes, but - " Elena stopped. Some infiltrator she was. She'd very nearly said "But not really; it's just to satisfy convention. She settled for saying, "But our master is very different from hers." They were very different, she thought. Damon didn't have a broken neck, for one thing. And for another, no matter how vicious and deadly he might be, he would never strike a woman, much less do something like this to one. He seemed to have some kind of internal block against it - except when he was possessed by Shinichi, and couldn't control his own muscles.

"And yet Drohzne allowed you to bring this woman to a healer?" The little man looked doubtful.

"No, he wouldn't have let us, I'm sure," Elena said flatly. "But please - she's bleeding and she's going to have a baby...."

Dr. Meggar's eyebrows went up and down. But without asking anyone to leave while he treated her, he pulled out an old-fashioned stethoscope and listened carefully to Ulma's heart and lungs. He smelled her breath, and then gently palpated her abdomen below Elena's bloody camisole, all with a professional air, before tipping to her lips a brown bottle, from which she drank a few sips, then sank back, her eyes fluttering closed.

"Now," the little man said, "she's resting comfortably. She'll need quite a bit of stitching of course, and you could use a few stitches yourself, but that's as your master says, I suppose." Dr. Meggar said the word master with a definite implication of dislike. "But I can almost promise you that she won't die. About her babe I don't know. It may come out marked as a result of this business - striped birthmarks, perhaps - or it may be perfectly all right. But with food and rest" - Dr. Meggar's eyebrows went up and down again, as if the doctor would have liked to say this to Master Drohzne's face - "she should recover."

"Take care of Elena first, then," Damon said.

"No, no!" Elena said, pushing the doctor away. He seemed like a nice man, but obviously around here, masters were masters - and Damon was more masterful and intimidating than most.

But not, at this moment, to Elena. She didn't care about herself right now. She'd made a promise - the doctor's words meant that she might be able to keep it. That was what she cared about.

Up and down, up and down. Dr. Meggar's eyebrows looked like two caterpillars on one elastic string. One lagged a little behind the other. Clearly, the behavior he was seeing was abnormal, even liable to be punished by serious means. But Elena only noticed him peripherally, the way she was noticing Damon.

"Help her," she said vehemently - and watched the doctor's eyebrows shoot up as if they were aimed for the ceiling.

She'd let her aura escape. Not completely, thank God, but a blast had definitely discharged, like a flash of sheet lightning in the room.

And the doctor, who wasn't a vampire, but just an ordinary citizen, had noticed it. Lakshmi had noticed it; even Ulma stirred on the examining table uneasily.

I'm going to have to be a whole lot more careful, Elena thought. She cast a quick look at Damon, who was about to explode, himself - she could tell. Too many emotions, too much blood in the room, and the adrenaline of killing still pulsing in his bloodstream.

How did she know all that?

Because Damon wasn't perfectly in control, either, she realized. She was sensing things directly from his mind. Best to get him out of here quickly. "We'll wait outside," she said, catching his arm, to Dr. Meggar's obvious shock. Slaves, even beautiful ones, didn't act that way.

"Go and wait in the courtyard then," the doctor said, carefully controlling his face and speaking to the air in between Damon and Elena. "Lakshmi, give them some bandages so they can staunch the young girl's bleeding. Then come back; you can help me."

"Just one question," he added as Elena and the others were walking out of the room. "How did you know that this woman is pregnant? What sort of spell can tell you that?"

"No spell," Elena said simply. "Any woman watching her should have known." She saw Bonnie flash her an injured look, but Meredith remained inscrutable.

"That horrible slaver - Drogsie - or whatever - was whipping her from the front," Elena said. "And look at those gashes." She winced, looking over two stripes that crossed Ulma's sternum. "In that case, any woman would be trying to protect her breasts, but this one was trying to cover her belly. That meant she was pregnant, and far along enough to be sure about it, too."

Dr. Meggar's eyebrows drew down and together - and then he looked up at Elena as if peering over glasses. Then he nodded slowly. "You take some bandages and stop your own bleeding," he said - to Elena, not to Damon. Apparently, slave or not, she had won some kind of respect from him.

On the other hand, Elena seemed to have lost stature with Damon - or at least, he'd cut his mind off from hers quite deliberately, leaving her with a blank wall to stare at. In the doctor's waiting room, he waved an imperious hand at Bonnie and Meredith.

"Wait here in this room," he said - no, he ordered. "Don't leave it until the doctor comes out. Don't let anyone in the front door - lock it now, and keep it locked. Good. Elena is coming with me into the kitchen - that's the back door. I do not want to be disturbed by anyone unless an angry mob is threatening the house with arson, do you understand? Both of you?"

Elena could see Bonnie about to blurt out, "But Elena's still bleeding!" and Meredith was with her eyes and brows calling council on whether or not they needed to hold an immediate velociraptor sisterhood rebellion. They all knew Plan A for this: Bonnie would throw herself into Damon's arms, passionately weeping or passionately kissing him, whichever best fit the situation, while Elena and Meredith came at him from the sides and did - well, whatever had to be done.

Elena, with one flash of her own eyes, had categorically nixed this. Damon was angry, yes, but she could sense that it was more with Drohzne than with her. The blood had agitated him, yes, but he was used to controlling himself in bloody situations. And she needed help with her wounds, which had begun to hurt seriously, ever since she'd heard that the woman she had rescued would live, and might even have her baby. But if Damon had something on his mind, she wanted to know what it was - now.

With one last comforting glance at Bonnie, Elena followed Damon through the kitchen door. It had a lock on it. Damon looked at it and opened his mouth; Elena locked it. Then she looked up at her "master."

He was standing by the kitchen sink, methodically pumping water, with one hand clenched against his forehead. His hair hung over his eyes, getting splashed, getting wet. He didn't seem to care.

"Damon?" Elena said uncertainly. "Are you...all right?"

He didn't answer.

Damon? she tried telepathically.

I let you get hurt. I'm fast enough. I could have killed that bastard Drohzne with one blast of Power. But I never imagined you'd get hurt. His telepathic voice was at once filled with the darkest kind of menace imaginable and a strange, almost gentle, calm. As if he were trying to keep all the ferocity and anger locked away from her.

I couldn't even tell him - I couldn't even send words to him to tell him what he was. I couldn't think. He was a telepath; he would have heard me. But I didn't have any words. I could only scream - in my mind.

Elena felt a bit light-headed - a little more light-headed than she'd already been feeling. Damon was feeling this anguish - for her? He wasn't angry about her flagrantly breaking rules in front of crowds, maybe breaking their cover? He didn't mind looking bedraggled?

"Damon," she said. He'd surprised her into speaking out loud. "It - it - doesn't matter. It's not your fault. You would never even have let me do it - "

"But I should have known you wouldn't ask! I thought you were going to attack him, to jump on his shoulders and throttle him, and I was ready to help you do that, to take him down like two wolves taking down a big buck. But you're not a sword, Elena. Whatever you think, you're a shield. I should have known that you would take the next blow yourself. And because of me, you got - " His eye drifted to her cheekbone and he winced.

Then he seemed to get a grip on himself. "The water is cold, but it's pure. We need to clean those slashes and stop that bleeding now."

"I don't suppose there's any Black Magic around," Elena said, half jokingly. This was going to hurt.

Damon, however, immediately began opening cupboards. "Here," he said after checking only three, triumphantly coming up with a half-full bottle of Black Magic. "Lots of doctors keep this as a medicine and anesthetic. Don't worry; I'll pay him well."

"Then I think you should have some, too," Elena said boldly. "Come on, it'll do us both good. And it won't be the first time."

She knew that the last sentence would clinch it with Damon. It would be a way of getting back something that Shinichi had taken from him.

I'll get the whole of his memories back from Shinichi somehow, Elena decided, doing her best to screen her thoughts from Damon with white noise. I don't know how to do it, and I don't know when I'll get the chance, but I swear I will. I swear.

Damon had filled two goblets with the rich, heady-smelling wine and was handing one to Elena. "Just sip at first," he said, helpless but to fall into the role of instructor. "This is a good year."

Elena sipped, then simply gulped. She was thirsty and Clarion Loess Black Magic wine didn't have any alcohol - as such - in it. It certainly didn't taste like regular wine. It tasted like remarkably refreshing effervescent spring water that was flavored with sweet, deep, velvety grapes.

Damon, she noticed, had forgotten to sip as well, and when he offered her a second glass to match his, she accepted willingly.

His aura sure had calmed down a lot, she thought, as he picked up a wet cloth and began, gently, to clean the cut that almost exactly followed the line of her cheekbone. It had been the one to stop bleeding first, but now he needed to get the blood flowing again, to cleanse it. With two glasses of Black Magic on top of no food since breakfast, Elena found herself relaxing against the back of the chair, letting her head drop back a little, and shutting her eyes. She lost track of time, as he stroked the cut smoothly. And she lost strict control of her aura.

When she opened her eyes it was in response to no sound, no visual stimulus. It was a blaze in Damon's aura, one of sudden determination.

"Damon?"

He was standing over her. His darkness had flared out behind him like a shadow, tall and wide and almost mesmerizing. Definitely almost frightening.

"Damon?" she said again, uncertainly.

"We're not doing this right," he said, and her thoughts flashed at once to her disobedience as a slave, and Bonnie and Meredith's less serious infractions. But his voice was like dark velvet, and her body responded to it more accurately than her mind. It shivered.

"How...do we do it right?" she asked, and then she made the mistake of opening her eyes. She found that he was stooping over her as she sat on the chair, stroking - no, just touching - her hair so softly that she hadn't even felt it.

"Vampires know how to take care of wounds," he said confidently, and his great eyes that seemed to hold their own universe of stars caught and held her. "We can clean them. We can start them bleeding again - or stop them."

I've felt like this before, Elena thought. He's talked to me like this before, too, even if he doesn't remember. And I - I was too frightened. But that was before...

Before the motel. The night when he'd told her to run, and she hadn't. The night that Shinichi had taken, just as he'd taken the first time they'd shared Black Magic together.

"Show me," whispered Elena. And she knew that something else in her mind was whispering too, whispering different words. Words that she would never have said if she had for a moment thought of herself as a slave.

Whispering, I'm yours...

That was when she felt his mouth lightly brush her mouth.

And then she just thought, Oh! and Oh, Damon...until he moved to gently touch her cheek with his silky soft tongue, manipulating chemicals first to make cleansing blood flow, and finally when the impurities had all been so softly swept away, to stop the blood and to heal the wound. She could feel his Power now, the dark Power that he had used in a thousand fights, to inflict hundreds of mortal wounds, being held tightly in check to concentrate on this simple, homely task, to heal the mark of a whiplash on a girl's cheek. Elena thought it was like being stroked with the petals of that Black Magic rose, its cool smooth petals gently sweeping away the pain, until she shivered in delight.

And then it stopped. Elena knew that she'd once again had too much wine. But this time she didn't feel sick. The deceptively light drink had gone to her head, making her tipsy. Everything had taken on an unreal, dreamlike quality.

"It will finish healing well now," Damon said, again touching her hair so softly that she could barely feel it. But this time she did feel it, because she sent out fingers of Power to meet the sensation and enjoy every moment of it. And once again he kissed her - so lightly - his lips barely brushing hers. When her head fell back, though, he didn't follow, even when, disappointed, she tried to put pressure on the back of his neck. He simply waited until Elena thought things out...slowly.

We shouldn't be kissing. Meredith and Bonnie are right next door. How do I get myself in situations like this? But Damon isn't even trying to kiss...and we're supposed to be - oh! Her other wounds.

They really hurt now. What cruel person had thought up a whip like that, Elena thought, with a razor-thin lash that cut so deeply it didn't even hurt at first - or not that much...but got worse and worse over time? And kept bleeding...we're supposed to be stopping the bleeding until the doctor can see me....

But her next wound, the one that burned like fire now, was diagonally across her collarbone. And the third was near her knee....

Damon started to get up, to get another cloth from the sink and cleanse the cut with water.

Elena held him back. "No."

"No? Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"All I want to do is cleanse it...."

"I know." She did know. His mind was open to hers, all its turbulent power running clear and tranquilly. She didn't know why it had opened to her like this, but it had.

"But let me advise you, don't go donating your blood to some dying vampire; don't let anyone sample it. It's worse than Black Magic - "

"Worse?" She knew he was complimenting her, but she didn't understand.

"The more you drink, the more you want to drink," Damon answered, and for a moment Elena saw the turbulence she had caused in those calm waters. "And the more you drink, the more Power you can absorb," he added seriously. Elena realized that she had never even thought of this as a problem, but it was. She remembered the agony it had been to try to absorb her own aura before she had learned how to keep it moving with her bloodstream.

"Don't worry," he added, still serious. "I know who you're thinking about." He made a move again to get a cloth. But without knowing it, he had said too much, presumed too far.

"You know who I'm thinking about?" Elena said softly, and she was surprised at how dangerous her own voice could sound, like the soft padding of heavy tigress feet. "Without asking me?"

Damon tried to finesse his way out. "Well, I assumed...."

"No one knows what I'm thinking about," Elena said. "Until I tell

them." She moved and made him kneel to look at her, questioningly.

Hungrily.

Then, just as it was she who had made him kneel, it was she who drew him to her wound.

Chapter 18

Elena came back to the real world slowly, fighting it all the way. She sank her nails into the leather of Damon's jacket, found herself wondering briefly if removing it would help, and then her mood was shattered again by that sound - a sharp, imperative knock.

Damon raised his head and snarled.

We are a pair of wolves, aren't we? Elena thought. Fighting nail and tooth.

But, another part of her mind supplied, that isn't stopping the knocking. He warned those girls....

Those girls! Bonnie and Meredith! And he'd said not to interrupt unless the house was on fire!

But, the doctor - oh, God, something's happened to that poor, wretched woman! She's dying!

Damon was still snarling, a trace of blood on his lips. It was only a trace, because her second wound had really been healed just as thoroughly as the first, the one across her cheekbone. Elena had no idea how long it had been since she had pulled Damon to her to kiss this cut. But now, with her blood in his veins and his pleasure interrupted, he was like an untamed black panther in her arms.

She didn't know whether she could stop him or even slow him down without using raw Power on him.

"Damon!" she said aloud. "Out there - those are our friends. Remember? Bonnie and Meredith and the healer."

"Meredith," Damon said, and again his lips peeled back, exposing terrifyingly long canines. He still wasn't in reality. If he saw Meredith now, he wouldn't be frightened, Elena thought - and, oh yes, she knew how her logical, thoughtful friend made Damon uneasy. They saw the world through such different eyes. She irked him like a pebble in his shoe. But right now he might deal with that unease in a way that would leave Meredith a savaged corpse.

"Let me go see," she said, as the knock came again - couldn't they stop that? Didn't she have enough to deal with?

Damon's arms merely tightened around her. She felt a flash of heat, because she knew that, even as he restrained her, he was holding back so much of his strength. He didn't want to crush her, as he could if he used a tenth of the power in his hard muscles alone.

The wave of feeling that washed over her made her shut her eyes briefly, helplessly, but she knew she had to be the voice of sanity here.

"Damon! They could be warning us - or Ulma may have died."

Death got through to him. His eyes were slits, the bloodred light from the kitchen shutters throwing bars of scarlet and black across his face, making him look more handsome - and more demonic - than ever.

"You'll stay here." Damon said it flatly, with no idea of being a "master" or a "gentleman." He was a wild beast protecting his mate, the only creature in the world that wasn't competition or food.

There was no arguing with him, not in this state. Elena would stay here. Damon would go to do whatever needed to be done. And Elena would stay for as long as he thought necessary.

Elena truly didn't know whose thoughts these last were. She and Damon were still trying to untangle their emotions. She decided to watch him and only if he really got out of control...

You don't want to see me out of control.

Feeling him snap from raw animal instinct to icy, perfect mental dominance was even scarier than the animal alone. She didn't know whether Damon was the sanest person she had ever met or just the one best able to cover up his wildness. She held her torn blouse together and watched as he moved with effortless grace to the door and then, suddenly, violently, wrenched it almost off its hinges.

No one fell; no one had been listening in on their private conversation. But Meredith stood, restraining Bonnie with one hand, and with the other hand raised, ready to knock again.

"Yes?" Damon said in glacial tones. "I thought I told you - "

"You did, and there is," Meredith said, interrupting this Damon in an unusual attempt to commit suicide.

"There is what?" Damon snarled.

"There's a mob outside threatening to burn the whole building down. I don't know if they're upset about Drohzne, or about us taking Ulma, but they're enraged about something, and they've got torches. I didn't want to interrupt Elena's - treatment - but Dr. Meggar says they won't listen to him. He's a human."

"He used to be a slave," Bonnie added, wresting free of the chokehold that Meredith had on her. She looked up at Damon with streaming brown eyes, hands outstretched. "Only you can save us," she said, translating the message of her gaze aloud - which meant that things were really serious.

"All right, all right. I'll go take care of them. You take care of Elena."

"Of course, but - "

"No." Damon had either gone reckless with the blood - and the memories that were still keeping Elena from forming a coherent sentence - or he had somehow overcome all his fear of Meredith. He put a hand on each of her shoulders. He was only one and a half or two inches taller than she was, so he had no trouble holding her eyes. "You, personally, take care of Elena. Tragedies happen here every minute of the day: unforeseeable, horrible, deadly tragedies. I do not want one happening to Elena."

Meredith looked at him for a long moment, and for once didn't consult Elena with her eyes before answering a question involving her. She simply said, "I'll protect her," in a low voice that nevertheless carried. From her stance, from her tone, one could almost hear the unspoken addition, "with my life" - and it didn't even seem melodramatic.

Damon let go of her, strode out the door, and without a backward glance disappeared from Elena's sight. But his mental voice was crystalline in her mind: You'll be safe if there is any way to save you. I swear it.

If there was any way to save her. Wonderful. Elena tried to kickstart her brain.

Meredith and Bonnie were both staring at her. Elena took a deep breath, automatically sucked for a moment back into the old days, when a girl fresh from a hot date could expect a long and serious debriefing.

But all Bonnie said was, "Your face - it looks much better now!"

"Yes," Elena said, using the two ends of her blouse to tie a makeshift top around her. "My leg's the problem. We didn't - didn't finish it yet."

Bonnie opened her mouth, but closed it determinedly, which from Bonnie was a display of heroics similar to Meredith's promise to Damon. When she opened it again it was to say, "Take my scarf and tie it around your leg. We can fold it sideways and then tie a bow over the side that got hurt. That'll keep pressure on it."

Meredith said, "I think Dr. Meggar has finished with Ulma. Maybe he can see you."

In the other room, the doctor was once again washing his hands, using a large pump to get more water into the basin. There were deeply red-stained cloths in a pile and a smell that Elena was grateful the doctor had camouflaged with herbs. Also in a large, comfortable-looking chair there sat a woman whom Elena did not recognize.

Suffering and terror could change a person, Elena knew, but she could never have realized how much - nor how much relief and freedom from pain could change a face. She had brought with her a woman who huddled until she was almost child-size in Elena's mind, and whose thin, ravaged face, twisted with agony and unrelenting dread, had seemed almost a sort of abstract drawing of a goblin hag. Her skin had been sickly gray in color, her thin hair had scarcely seemed enough to cover her head, and yet it had hung down in strands like seaweed. Everything about her screamed out that she was a slave, from the iron bands around her wrists, to her nakedness and scarred, bloody body, to her bare and rusty feet. Elena could not even have told you the color of the woman's eyes, for they had seemed as gray as the rest of her.

Now Elena was confronted by a woman who was perhaps in her early-to mid-thirties. She had a lean, attractive, somehow aristocratic face, with a strong, patrician nose, dark, keen-looking eyes, and beautiful eyebrows like the wings of a flying bird. She was relaxing in the armchair, with her feet up on an ottoman, slowly brushing her hair, which was dark with occasional streaks of gray that lent an air of dignity to the simple deep blue housecoat she was wearing. Her face had wrinkles that lent it character, but overall one sensed a sort of yearning tenderness about her, perhaps because of the slight bulge in her abdomen, which she now gently laid a hand on. When she did this her face bloomed with color and her whole aspect glowed.

For an instant Elena thought this must be the doctor's wife or housekeeper and she had a temptation to ask whether Ulma, the poor wreck of a slave, had died.

Then she saw what one cuff of the deep blue housecoat could not quite conceal: a glimpse of an iron bracelet.

This lean dark aristocratic woman was Ulma. The doctor had worked a miracle.

A healer, he had called himself. It was obvious that, like Damon, he could heal wounds. No one who had been whipped as Ulma had could have come round to this state without some powerful magic. Trying to simply stitch up the bloody mess that Elena had brought in had obviously been impossible, and so Dr. Meggar had healed her.

Elena had never experienced a situation like this, so she fell back upon the good manners that had been bred into her as a Virginian.

"It's nice to meet you, ma'am. I'm Elena," she said, and held out her hand.

The brush fell onto the chair. The woman reached out with both hands to take Elena's into hers. Those keen dark eyes seemed to devour Elena's face.

"You're the one," she said, and then, swinging her slippered feet off the ottoman, she went down on her knees.

"Oh, no, ma'am! Please! I'm sure the doctor told you to rest. It's best to sit quietly now."

"But you are the one." For some reason, the woman seemed to need confirmation. And Elena was willing to do anything to pacify her.

"I'm the one," Elena said. "And now I think you should sit down again."

Obedience was immediate, and yet there was a sort of joyful light about everything Ulma did. Elena understood it after only a few hours of slavery. Obeying when one had a choice was entirely different from obeying because disobedience could mean death.

But even as Ulma sat, she held out her arms. "Look at me! Dear seraph, goddess, Guardian - whatever you are: look at me! After three years of living as a beast I have become human again - because of you! You came like an angel of lightning and stood between me and the lash." Ulma began to weep, but they seemed to be tears of joy. Her eyes searched Elena's face, lingering on the scarred cheekbone. "But you're no Guardian; they have magicks that protect them and they never interfere. For three years, they never interfered. I saw all my friends, my fellow slaves, fall to his whip and his rage." She shook her head, as if physically unable to say Drohzne's name.

"I'm so sorry - so sorry...." Elena was fumbling. She glanced back and saw that Bonnie and Meredith were similarly stricken.

"It doesn't matter. I heard your mate killed him on the street."

"I told her that," Lakshmi said proudly. She had entered the room without anyone noticing her.

"My mate?" Elena faltered. "Well, he's not my - I mean, he and I - we - "

"He's our master," Meredith said bluntly, from behind Elena.

Ulma was still looking at Elena with her heart in her eyes. "Every day, I will pray for your soul to ascend from here."

Elena was startled. "Souls can ascend from here?"

"Of course. Repentance and good deeds may accomplish it, and the prayers of others are always taken into consideration, I think."

You sure don't talk like a slave, Elena mused. She tried to think of a way to put it delicately, but she was confused and her leg hurt and her emotions were in turmoil. "You don't sound like - well, like what I'd expect from a slave," she said. "Or am I just being an idiot?"

She could see the tears form in Ulma's eyes.

"Oh, God! Please, forget I asked. Please - "

"No! There is no one I would rather tell. If you wish to hear how I came to this degraded state." Ulma waited, watching Elena - it was clear that Elena's least wish was to Ulma, a command.

Elena looked at Meredith and Bonnie. She couldn't hear any more noises of yelling outside on the street and the building certainly didn't seem to be on fire.

Fortunately, at that moment, Dr. Meggar wandered in again. "Everybody getting acquainted?" he asked, his eyebrows working in opposition now; one up, one down. He had the remnants of a bottle of Black Magic in his hand.

"Yes," Elena said, "but I was just wondering if we should be trying to evacuate or anything. Apparently there was a mob - "

"Elena's mate is going to give them something to think about," Lakshmi said with relish. "They've all gone to the Meeting Place to resolve the stuff about Drohzne's property. I bet he'll bash a few heads in and be back in no time," she added cheerfully, leaving no doubt as to he was. "Wish I was a boy so I could see it."

"You were braver than the boys; you were the one who led us here," Elena told her. Then she consulted Meredith and Bonnie with her eyes. It sounded as if the commotion had moved on elsewhere, and Damon was a master at getting himself out of commotions. He might also...need to fight, to rid himself of excess energy from Elena's blood. A commotion might actually be good for him, Elena thought.

She looked at Dr. Meggar. "Will my - will our master be all right, do you think?"

Dr. Meggar's eyebrows went up and down. "He'll probably have to pay Old Drohzne's relatives a blood price, but it shouldn't be too high. Then he can do what he likes with the old bastard's property," he said. "I'd say the safest place for you right now is here, away from the Meeting Place." He went on to enforce that opinion by pouring them all glasses - liqueur glasses, Elena noted - of Black Magic wine. "Good for the nerves," he said and took a sip.

Ulma smiled her beautiful, heartwarming smile at him, as he took the tray around. "Thank you - and thank you - and thank you," she said. "I won't bore you with my story - "

"No, tell us; tell us, please!" Now that there was no immediate danger to her friends or to Damon, Elena was eager to hear the tale. Everyone else was nodding.

Ulma flushed a little, but began sedately, "I was born in the reign of Kelemen II," she said. "I'm sure that means nothing to our visitors but much to those who knew him and his - indulgences. I studied under my mother, who became a very popular designer of fashions in fabrics. My father was a designer of jewelry almost as famous as she was. They had an estate on the outskirts of the city and could afford a house as fine as many of their wealthiest customers - though they were careful not to show the true extent of their wealth. I was the young Lady Ulma then, not Ulma the hag. My parents did their best to keep me out of sight, for my own safety. But..."

Ulma - Lady Ulma, Elena thought, stopped and took a deep sip of her wine. Her eyes had changed; she was seeing the past, and trying not to upset her listeners. But just as Elena was about to ask her to stop, at least until she felt better, she continued.

"But despite all their care...someone...saw me anyway and demanded my hand in marriage. Not Drohzne, he was just a furrier from the Outlands, and I never saw him until three years ago. This was a lord, a General, a demon with a terrible reputation - and my father refused his demand. They came on us in the night. I was fourteen when it happened. And that is how I became a slave."

Elena found that she was feeling emotional pain directly from Lady Ulma's mind. Oh, my God, I've done it again, she thought, hurriedly trying to tune down her psychic senses. "Please, you don't need to tell us this. Maybe another time..."

"I would like to tell you - you - so you will know what you have done. And I would prefer to say it only once. But if you do not wish to hear it - "

Politeness was warring with politeness here. "No, no, if you want - go ahead. I - I just want you to know how sorry I am." Elena glanced at the doctor, who was patiently waiting by the table for her with the brown bottle in his hands. "And if you don't mind, I'd like to get my leg...healed?" She was aware that she'd said the last word doubtfully, wondering how any one being could have the power to heal Ulma like this. She was not surprised when he shook his head. "Or stitched up, rather, while you talk, if you don't mind," she said.

It took several minutes to overcome Lady Ulma's shock and distress that she had left her savior waiting, but at last Elena was on the table and the doctor was encouraging her to drink from the bottle, which smelled like cherry cough syrup.

Oh, well, she might as well try the Dark Dimension version of anesthetic - especially since the stitching was bound to hurt, Elena thought. She took a sip from the bottle and felt the room reel around her. She waved away the offer of a second sip.

Dr. Meggar undid Bonnie's ruined scarf, and then began to cut off her blood-soaked jeans leg above the knee.

"Well - you are so good to listen," Lady Ulma said. "But I knew you were good already. I will spare us both the painful details of my slavery. Perhaps it's enough to say that I was passed from one master to another over the years, always a slave, always going down. At last, as a joke, someone said, 'Give her to Old Drohzne. He'll squeeze the last use out of her if anyone can.'"

"God!" Elena said, and hoped that everyone would attribute it to the story and not to the bite of the cleansing solution the doctor was swabbing over her swollen flesh. Damon was so much better at this, she thought. I didn't even realize how lucky I was before. Elena tried not to wince as the doctor began to use his needle, but her grip on Meredith's hand tightened until Elena was afraid she was breaking bones. She tried to ease the grip, but Meredith squeezed back hard. Her long, smooth hand was almost like a boy's, but softer. Elena was glad to be able to squeeze as hard as she liked.

"My strength has been giving out on me lately," Lady Ulma said softly. "I thought it was that" - here she used a particularly crude expression for her owner - "that was leading me to death. Then I realized the truth." All at once radiance changed her face, so much that Elena could see what she must have looked like when she was in her teens and so beautiful that a demon would demand her as a wife. "I knew that new life stirred within me - and I knew that Drohzne would kill it if he had the chance - "

She didn't seem to recognize the expressions of astonishment and horror on the three girl's faces. Elena, however, had the feeling that she was groping through a nightmare, on the edge of a black crevasse, and that she would have to keep groping in the dark, around treacherous, unseen fissures in the ice in the Dark Dimension until she reached Stefan and got him free of this place. This casual reference to abomination wasn't the first of her steps around a crevasse, but it was the first she had recognized and counted.

"You young women are very new here," Lady Ulma said, as the silence stretched and stretched. "I did not mean to say anything out of place...."

"We're slaves here," Meredith replied, picking up a length of rope. "I think the more we learn the better."

"Your master - I've never seen anyone so quick to fight Old Drohzne before. Many people clucked their tongues, but that was all most dared to do. But your master - "

"We call him Damon," Bonnie put in pointedly.

It went right over Lady Ulma's head. "Master Damon - do you think he might keep me? After he pays the blood price to - to Drohzne's relatives, he will get first pick of all Drohzne's property. I am one of the few slaves he has not killed." The hope in the woman's face was almost too painful for Elena to look at.

It was only then that she consciously realized how long it had been since she'd seen Damon. How long should Damon's business be taking? She looked at Meredith anxiously.

Meredith understood exactly what the look meant. She shook her head helplessly. Even if they had Lakshmi take them to the Meeting Place, what could they do?

Elena bit back a wince of pain and smiled at Lady Ulma.

"Why don't you tell us about when you were a girl?" she said.

Chapter 19

Damon wouldn't have thought a sadistic old fool who whipped a woman to pieces for not being able to pull a cart meant for a horse would have any friends. And Old Drohzne, indeed, may not have had any. But that wasn't the issue.

Neither, strangely, was murder the issue. Murder was an everyday affair around the slums and the fact that Damon had initiated and won a fight was of no surprise to the inhabitants of these dangerous alleyways.

The issue lay in making off with a slave. Or perhaps it went deeper. The issue lay in how Damon treated his own slaves.

A crowd of men - all men, no women, Damon noticed - had indeed gathered in front of the doctor's building, and they did in fact have torches.

"Mad vampire! Mad vampire on the loose!"

"Drive him out here for justice to be done!"

"Burn the place down if they won't turn him out!"

"The elders say to bring him to them!"

This seemed to have the effect the crowd desired, clearing the streets of the more decent people and leaving only the bloody-minded sort who'd been hanging about at a loose end, and were only too glad of a fight. Most of them, of course, were vampires themselves. Most of them were fit vampires. But none of them, Damon thought, flashing a diamond-bright smile around the circle that was closing in on him, had the motivation of knowing that the lives of three young human girls depended on him - and that one of them was the jewel in the crown of humanity, Elena Gilbert.

If he, Damon, was torn to pieces in this fight, those three girls would lead lives of hell and degradation.

However, even this logic didn't seem to help him prevail as Damon was kicked, bitten, head-butted, punched, and stabbed with wooden daggers - the kind that slice vampire flesh. At first he thought he had a chance. Several of the youngest and fittest vampires fell prey to his cobra-quick strikes and his sudden strafes of Power. But the truth was that there were simply too many of them, Damon thought, as he snapped the neck of a demon whose two long tusks had already scored his arm almost through the muscle. And here came a huge vampire, clearly in training, with an aura that made Damon feel bile at the back of his throat. That one went down with a foot in the face, but he didn't stay down; he came up, clinging to Damon's leg and allowing several smaller vampires with wooden daggers to dart in and hamstring him. Damon felt black dismay as his legs went out from under him.

"Sunlight damn you," he grated through a mouthful of blood as another tusked, red-skinned demon punched him in the mouth. "Damn you all to the lowest hells...."

It was no good. Dully, still fighting, still using great swaths of Power to maim and kill as many as he could, Damon realized this. And then everything became dreamlike and dazed - not like his dream of Elena, whom he seemed to see constantly in his side-eye, weeping. But dreamlike in a feverish, nightmare sense. He could no longer use his muscles efficiently. His body was battered and even as he healed his legs, another vampire scored a great cut across his back. He was feeling more and more as if he were in a nightmare where he could not move except in slow motion. At the same time, something in his brain was whispering for him to rest. Just rest...and it would all be over.

Eventually, the greater numbers bore him down, and somebody appeared with a stake.

"Good riddance to new rubbish," the stake bringer said, his breath reeking of stale blood, his leering face grotesque, as he used leprous-looking fingers to open Damon's shirt so as not to make a hole in the fine black silk.

Damon spat on him and had his face stamped on hard in return.

He blacked out for a moment and then, slowly, came back to pain.

And noise. The gleeful crowd of vampires and demons, drunk on cruelty, were all doing a stomping, rhythmic, improvised dance around Damon, roaring with laughter as they thrust imaginary stakes, working themselves into a frenzy.

That was when Damon realized that he was actually going to die.

It was a shocking realization, even though he'd known how much more dangerous this world was than the one he'd recently left, and even in the human world he had only escaped death by a hairsbreadth more than once. But now he had no powerful friends, no weaknesses in the crowd to exploit. He felt as if seconds were suddenly stretching into minutes, each one of incalculable worth. What was important? Telling Elena...

"Blind him first! Get that stick blazing!"

"I'll take his ears! Someone help me hold his head!"

Telling Elena...something. Something...sorry...

He gave up. Another thought was trying to break into his consciousness.

"Don't forget to knock out his teeth! I promised my girlfriend a new necklace!"

I thought I was prepared for this, Damon thought slowly, each word coming separately. But...not so soon.

I thought I'd made my peace...but not with the one person who mattered...yes, who mattered the most.

He didn't give himself time to think about that subject further.

Stefan, he sent out on the most powerful but clandestine jettison of Power he could manage in his foggy state. Stefan, hear me! Elena's come for you - she'll save you! She has Powers that my death will let loose. And I am...I am...s -

At that moment there was a stumbling in the dance around him. Silence descended on the drunken revelers. A few of them hastily bowed their heads or looked away.

Damon went still, wondering what could possibly have stopped the frenzied crowd in the very midst of their revelry.

Someone was walking toward him. The newcomer had long bronze hair that hung in separate unruly tangles down to his waist. He was naked to the waist, too, exposing a body that the strongest demon might envy. A chest that looked as if it had been carved out of gleaming bronze stone. Exquisitely sculpted biceps. Abs - a perfect six pack. There was not a spare ounce of fat on his entire tall leonine frame. He wore unadorned black trousers with muscles rippling under them at every step.

All along one bare arm he had a vivid tattoo of a black dragon eating a heart.

Nor was he alone. He held no leash, but by his side was a handsome and uncannily intelligent-looking black dog that stood at alert attention every time he paused. It must have weighed close to two hundred pounds, but there was not an ounce of fat on it, either.

And on one shoulder he carried a large falcon.

It wasn't hooded as most hunting birds were on forays out of their mews. It also wasn't standing on anything padded. It gripped the bare shoulder of the bronze young man, digging its three front talons into the flesh and sending small streams of blood down his chest. He didn't seem to notice. There were similar, dried streams beside the fresh ones, undoubtedly from previous journeys. In the back, a single talon made a lonely red trail.

An absolute hush had fallen on the crowd and the last few demons between the tall man and the bloody, supine figure on the ground scrambled out of his way.

For a moment, the leonine man was still. He said nothing, did nothing, emitted no trace of Power. Then he nodded at the dog, which padded forward heavily and sniffed at Damon's bleeding arms and face. After that it sniffed at his mouth and Damon could see the hairs go up on its body.

"Good dog," said Damon dreamily as the moist, cool nose tickled his cheek.

Damon knew this particular animal and he knew also that it did not fit the popular stereotype of a "good dog." Rather, it was a hellhound who was used to taking vampires by the throat and shaking them until their arteries spouted blood six feet high into the air.

That kind of thing could keep you so occupied that having a stake slipped into your heart might seem an afterthought, Damon mused, holding perfectly still.

"Arrtez-le!" said the bronze-haired youth.

The dog obediently backed off, never taking its shining black eyes off Damon's, who never took his own eyes off it until it was some feet away.

The bronze-haired youth glanced over the crowd briefly. Then he said with no particular vehemence, "Laissez-le seul." Clearly, to the vampires no translation was necessary, and they began to edge away immediately. The unlucky ones were those who didn't edge fast enough and were still around when the bronze young man took another leisurely look about him. Everywhere he looked, he met downcast eyes and cringing bodies, frozen in the act of edging but apparently turned to stone now in an attempt not to attract attention.

Damon found himself relaxing. His Power was returning, allowing him to make repairs. He realized that the dog was going from individual to individual and sniffing at each one with interest.

When Damon was able to lift his head again, he smiled faintly at the newcomer. "Sage. Think of the devil."

The bronze man's brief smile was grim. "You compliment me, mon cher. You see? I'm blushing."

"I ought to have known you might be here."

"There is infinite space to wander, mon petit tyran. Even if I must do it alone."

"Ah, the pity. Tiny violins are playing - " Suddenly Damon couldn't do it anymore. He just couldn't. Maybe it was because of being with Elena before. Maybe it was because this hideous world depressed him unutterably. But when he spoke again, his voice was entirely different. "I never knew I could feel so grateful. You've saved five lives, though you don't know it. Though how you stumbled on us..."

Sage crouched down, looked at him with concern. "What is it that has happened?" he said in a serious voice. "Is it that you hit your head? You know: news travels fast here. I heard you arrived with a harem - "

"That's true! He did!" Damon's ears caught a bare whisper of sound at the edge of the street where he'd been ambushed. "If we take the girls hostage - torture them - "

Sage's eyes met Damon's briefly. Clearly, he had heard the whisper as well. "Saber," he said to the dog. "Just the speaker." He jerked his head, once, in the direction of the whisper.

Instantly, the black dog jumped forward, and faster than it took for Damon to describe it in his own mind, had sunk his teeth into the throat of the whisperer, flipped him over once, causing a distinctive crack, and was bounding back, dragging the body between his legs.

The words: Je vous ai inform au sujet de ceci! blasted by on a surge of Power that made Damon wince. And Damon thought, yes, he did tell them before - but not what the consequences would be.

Laissez lui et ses amis dans la paix! Meanwhile, Damon was slowly getting up, only too glad to accept Sage's protection for himself and his friends.

"Well that certainly should have done it," he said. "Why not come back and have a friendly drink with me?"

Sage peered at him as if he'd gone mad. "You know the answer to that is no."

"Why not?"

"I told you: no."

"That's not a reason."

"The reason I will not come back for a friendly drink...mon ange...is that we are not friends."

"We pulled some pretty scams together."

"Il y a longtemps." Abruptly, Sage took one of Damon's hands. There was a deep and bloody scratch on it, which Damon hadn't got around to healing. Under Sage's gaze it closed, the flesh turned pink, and it healed.

Damon let Sage continue to hold the hand for a moment, and then, not ungently, retrieved it.

"Not such a very long time ago," he said.

"Away from you?" A sarcastic smile formed on Sage's lips. "We count time very differently, you and I, mon petit tyran."

Damon was full of befuddled cheer. "What's one drink?"

"Along with your harem?"

Damon tried to picture Meredith and Sage together. His mind balked. "But you've made yourself responsible for them anyway," he said flatly. "And the truth is that none of them are mine. I give my word on that." He felt a twinge when he thought about Elena, but his word was true.

"Responsible for them?" Sage seemed to be reasoning it out. "You pledged to save them, then. But I only inherit your pledge if you die. But if you die..." The tall man made a helpless gesture.

"You have to live, to save Stefan and Elena and the others." "I'd say no, but that would make you unhappy. So I'll say yes - " "And if you don't perform, I swear I'll come back to haunt you." Sage regarded him for a moment. "I don't think I've ever been accused of being unable to perform before," he said. "But of course that was before I became un vampire."

Yes, Damon thought, the meeting of the "harem" and Sage was bound to be interesting. At least it would be if the girls discovered who

Sage really was.

But maybe no one would tell them.