The Vampire Diaries #5: Nightfall (The Return Trilogy #1) (2009)

Chapter 20

"Ohhhh." Bonnie melted back into the bucket seat. "It was like...kapow! Zap! Zowie! Like...fireworks."

"You're smirking."

"I am not smirking," Bonnie said with dignity. "I am smiling in fond remembrance. Besides - "

"Besides, if you hadn't Called him, we'd still be stuck in that horror of a room. Thank you, Bonnie. You saved us." Abruptly Meredith was at her most serious and sincere.

"I guess Elena was maybe right when she said he didn't hate all humans," Bonnie said slowly. "But, you know, I just realized. I couldn't see his aura at all. All I could see was black: smooth hard black, like a shell around him."

"Maybe that's how he protects himself. He makes a shell so no one can see inside."

"Maybe," Bonnie said, but there was worried note in her voice. "And what about that message from Elena?"

"It says that Tami Bryce is definitely acting strangely and that she and Matt are going out to check out the Old Wood."

"Maybe that's who they're going to meet - Damon, I mean. At 4:44, like he said. Too bad we can't call her."

"I know," Meredith said grimly. Everyone in Fell's Church knew that there was no reception in the Old Wood or the cemetery area. "But go ahead and try anyway."

Bonnie did, and as usual got a no-service message. She shook her head. "No good. They must already be in the woods."

"Well, what she wants is for us to go ahead and get a look at Isobel Saitou - you know, because she's Jim Bryce's girlfriend." Meredith made a turn. "That reminds me, Bonnie: did you get a look at Caroline's aura? Do you think she has one of those things - inside her?"

"I guess so. I saw her aura, and yuck, I never want to see it again. She used to be a kind of deep bronzy-green, but now she's muddy brown with black lightning zigzagging all through. I don't know if that means one of those things was inside her, but she sure didn't mind cuddling up to them!" Bonnie shuddered.

"Okay," Meredith said soothingly. "I know what I would say if I had to make a guess - and if you're going to be sick, I'll stop."

Bonnie gulped. "I'm all right. But we're seriously going to Isobel Saitou's house?"

"We're very seriously going there. As a matter of fact, we're almost there. Let's just brush our hair, take a few deep breaths, and get it over with. How well do you know her?"

"Well, she's smart. We didn't have any classes together. But we both got out of athletics at the same time - she had a jumpy heart or something, and I used to get that terrible asthma...."

"From any exertion except dancing, which you could keep up all night," Meredith said dryly. "I don't know her very well at all. What's she like?"

"Well, nice. Looks a bit like you, except Asian. Shorter than you - Elena's height, but skinnier. Sort of pretty. A little shy - the quiet type, you know. Sort of hard to get to know. And...nice."

"Shy and quiet and nice sounds good to me."

"Me, too," Bonnie said, pressing her sweaty hands together between her knees. What sounded even better, she thought, was for Isobel to be not at home.

However, there were several cars parked in front of the Saitou house. Bonnie and Meredith knocked on the door hesitantly, mindful of what had happened the last time they had done this.

It was Jim Bryce who answered, a tall, lanky boy who hadn't filled out yet and stooped a bit. What Bonnie found amazing was the change in his face as he recognized Meredith.

When he'd answered he'd looked awful; his face white under a medium tan, his body somehow crumpled. When he saw Meredith, some of the color came to his cheeks and he seemed to...well, to smooth out like a piece of paper. He stood taller.

Meredith didn't say a word. She just stepped forward and put her arms around him. He clutched at her as if he was afraid she'd run away, and buried his face in her dark hair.

"Meredith."

"Just breathe, Jim. Breathe."

"You don't know what it's been like. My parents left because my great-grandpa's really sick - I think he's dying. And then Tami - Tami - "

"Tell me slowly. And keep breathing."

"She threw knives, Meredith. Butcher knives. She got me in the leg here." Jim plucked at his jeans to show a small slit of a hole in the fabric over the lower part of one thigh.

"Have you had a tetanus shot recently?" Meredith was at her most efficient.

"No, but it's not really a big cut. It's a puncture wound, mainly."

"Those are exactly the kind that are most dangerous. You need to call Dr. Alpert right away." Old Dr. Alpert was an institution in Fell's Church: a doctor who even made house calls, in a country where carrying around a little black bag and stethoscope was pretty much unheard-of behavior.

"I can't . I can't leave...." Jim jerked his head backward toward the interior of the house as if he couldn't bring himself to say a name.

Bonnie tugged at Meredith's sleeve. "I have a very bad feeling about this," she hissed.

Meredith turned back to Jim. "You mean Isobel? Where are her parents?"

"Isa-chan, I mean Isobel, I just call her Isa-chan, you know..."

"It's all right," said Meredith. "Just say what comes naturally. Go on."

"Well, Isa-chan only has her grandma, and Grandma Saitou doesn't even come downstairs much. I made her lunch a while ago and she thought I was - Isobel's father. She gets...confused."

Meredith glanced at Bonnie, and said, "And Isobel? Is she confused, too?"

Jim shut his eyes, looking utterly miserable. "I wish you'd go in and, well, just talk to her."

Bonnie's bad feeling was only getting worse. She really couldn't stand another scare like the one at Caroline's house - and she certainly didn't have the strength to Call again, even if Damon weren't in a hurry to get somewhere.

But Meredith knew all this, and Meredith was giving her the sort of look that couldn't be denied. It also promised that Meredith would protect Bonnie, no matter what.

"Is she hurting anybody? Isobel?" Bonnie heard herself ask as they crossed through the kitchen and toward a bedroom at the end of the hallway.

She could hardly hear Jim's whispered, "Yeah."

And then, as Bonnie groaned internally, he added, "Herself."

Isobel's room was just what you'd expect from a quiet and studious girl. At least one side was. The other side looked as if a tidal wave had picked everything up and thrown it down again randomly. Isobel was sitting in the middle of this mess like a spider on a web.

But that wasn't what made Bonnie's gut churn. It was what Isobel was doing. She had laid out beside her what looked a lot like Mrs. Flowers' kit for cleaning out wounds, but she wasn't healing anything.

She was piercing herself.

She had already done her lip, her nose, one eyebrow, and her ears, many times. Blood was dripping from all these places, dripping and falling onto the unmade sheets of her bed. Bonnie saw all that as Isobel looked up at them with a frown, except that the frown was only half there. On the pierced side, the eyebrow didn't move at all.

Her aura was shattered orange with black lashings through it.

Bonnie knew, all at once, that she was going to be sick. She knew it with the deep knowledge that overcame all embarrassment and which sent her flying to a wastebasket she didn't even remember seeing. Thank God, it had a white plastic bag lining it, she thought, and then she was completely occupied for a few minutes.

Her ears recorded a voice, even as she was thinking she was glad she hadn't had lunch.

"My God, are you crazy ? Isobel, what have you done to yourself? Don't you know the kind of infections you can get...the veins you can hit...the muscles you can paralyze...? I think you've already pierced the muscle in your eyebrow - and you shouldn't still be bleeding unless you've hit veins or arteries."

Bonnie retched dryly into the wastebasket, and spat.

And just then she heard a meaty thud.

She looked up, half knowing what she would see. But it still was a shock. Meredith was doubled over from what must have been a punch in the stomach.

The next thing Bonnie knew, she was beside Meredith. "Oh, my God, did she stab you?" A stab wound...deep enough into the abdomen...

Meredith clearly couldn't get her breath. From somewhere a bit of advice from her sister Mary, the nurse, floated into Bonnie's mind.

Bonnie pounded with both fists on Meredith's back, and suddenly Meredith took a huge gulp of air.

"Thanks," she was saying weakly, but Bonnie was already dragging her away, away from the laughing Isobel and a collection of the world's longest nails and the rubbing alcohol and other things that she had on a breakfast tray beside her.

Bonnie got to the door and almost collided with Jim, who had a wet washcloth in his hand. For her, she supposed. Or maybe for Isobel. All Bonnie was interested in was making Meredith pull up her top to make absolutely, positively sure that there were no holes in her.

"I got it - out of her hand - before she punched me," Meredith said, still breathing painfully as Bonnie anxiously scanned the area above her low-rise jeans. "I'll have a bruise, that's all."

"She hit you, too?" Jim said in dismay. Except that he didn't say it. He whispered it.

You poor guy, Bonnie thought, finally satisfied that Meredith wasn't perforated. What with Caroline and your sister Tami and your girlfriend, you don't have the first idea of what's going on. How could you?

And if we told you, you'd just think we were two more crazy girls.

"Jimmy, you have to call Dr. Alpert right away, and then I think they're going to have to go to the hospital in Ridgemont. Isobel's already done permanent damage to herself - God knows how much. All those piercings are almost certainly going to be infected. When did she start this?"

"Um, well...she first started acting weird after Caroline came to see her."

"Caroline!" Bonnie blurted, confused. "Was she crawling?"

Jim gave her a look. "Huh?"

"Never mind Bonnie; she was joking," Meredith said easily. "Jimmy, you don't have to tell us about Caroline if you don't want to. We - well, we know she was over at your house."

"Does everybody know?" Jim asked miserably.

"No. Just Matt, and he only told us so that somebody could go check on your little sister."

Jim looked guilty and stricken at once. The words poured out of him as if they'd been bottled up and now the cork was out of the bottle.

"I don't know what's going on anymore. All I can tell you is what happened. It was a couple days ago - late evening," Jim said. "Caroline came over, and - I mean, I never even had a crush on her. It's like, sure, she's good-looking, and my parents were away and all, but I never thought I was the kind of guy..."

"Never mind that now. Just tell us about Caroline and Isobel."

"Well, Caroline came over wearing this outfit that was - well, the top was practically transparent. And she just - she said, did I want to dance and it was, like, slow dancing and she - she, like, seduced me. That's the truth. And the next morning she left - just about the time Matt came. That was the day before yesterday. And then I noticed Tami acting - crazy. Nothing I could do would stop her. And then I got a phone call from Isa-chan and - I've never heard her so hysterical. Caroline must have gone straight from my house to her house. Isa-chan said she was going to kill herself. And so I ran over here. I had to get away from Tami anyway because me being there at home just seemed to make it worse."

Bonnie looked at Meredith and knew that they were both thinking the same thing: and somewhere in there, both Caroline and Tami propositioned Matt, too.

"Caroline must have told her everything." Jim gulped. "Isa-chan and I haven't - we were waiting, you know? But all Isa-chan would say to me was that I was going to be sorry. ‘You'll be sorry; just wait and see,' over and over and over. And, God, I am sorry."

"Well, now you can stop being sorry and start calling the doctor. Right now , Jimmy." Meredith gave him a swat on the behind. "And then you need to call your parents. Don't give me those big brown puppy-dog eyes. You're over eighteen; I don't know what they can do to you for leaving Tami alone all this time."

"But - "

"But me no buts. I mean it, Jimmy."

Then she did what Bonnie knew she would, but was dreading. She approached Isobel again. Isobel's head was down; she was pinching her navel with one hand. In the other, she held a long, shining nail.

Before Meredith could even speak, Isobel said, "So you're in on it, too. I heard the way you called him ‘Jimmy.' You're all trying to take him away from me. All you bitches are trying to hurt me. Yurusenai! Zettai yurusenai! "

"Isobel! Don't! Can't you see that you're hurting yourself ?"

"I'm only hurting myself to take away the pain. You're the one who's really doing it, you know. You're pricking me with needles inside."

Bonnie jumped inside her own skin, but not just because Isobel suddenly gave a vicious thrust of the nail. She felt heat sweep up into her cheeks. Her heart began to pound even faster than it was already going.

Trying to keep one eye on Meredith, she pulled her mobile phone out of her back pocket where she'd stashed it after the visit to Caroline's house.

Still with half her attention on Meredith, she went on the Internet and rapidly entered just two search words. Then, as she made a couple of selections from her hits, she realized that she could never absorb all the information in a week, much less a few minutes. But at least she had a start.

Just now, Meredith was backing away from Isobel. She put her mouth close to Bonnie's ear and whispered, "I think we're just antagonizing her. Did you get a good look at her aura?"

Bonnie nodded.

"Then we probably should leave the room, at least."

Bonnie nodded again.

"Were you trying to call Matt and Elena?" Meredith was eyeing the mobile phone.

Bonnie shook her head and turned the phone so Meredith could see her two search words. Meredith stared, then lifted dark eyes to Bonnie's in a kind of horrified recognition.

Salem witches.

Chapter 21

"It actually makes a horrible kind of sense," Meredith said. They were in Isobel's family room, waiting for Dr. Alpert. Meredith was at a beautiful desk made of some black wood ornamented with designs in gilt, working at a computer that had been left on. "The Salem girls accused people of hurting them - witches, of course. They said they were pinching them and ‘pricking them with pins.'"

"Like Isobel blaming us," Bonnie said, nodding.

"And they had seizures and contorted their bodies into ‘impossible positions.'"

"Caroline looked as if she were having seizures in Stefan's room," said Bonnie. "And if crawling like a lizard isn't contorting your body into an impossible position...here, I'll try it." She got down on the Saitous' floor and tried to stick her elbows and knees out the way Caroline had. She couldn't do it.

"See?"

"Oh, my God!" It was Jim at the doorway of the kitchen, holding - almost dropping - a tray of food. The smell of miso soup was sharp in the air, and Bonnie wasn't sure if it made her feel hungry or if she was too sick to ever be hungry again.

"It's okay," she told him hastily, standing up. "I was just...trying something out."

Meredith stood up too. "Is that for Isobel?"

"No, it's for Obaasan - I mean Isa-chan's grandma - Grandma Saitou - "

"I told you to call everybody whatever comes out naturally. Obaasan is fine, just like Isa-chan," Meredith said softly and firmly to him.

Jim relaxed a hair. "I tried to get Isa-chan to eat, but she just throws the trays at the wall. She says that she can't eat; that somebody's choking her."

Meredith glanced significantly at Bonnie. Then she turned back to Jim. "Why don't you let me take it? You've been through a lot. Where is she?"

"Upstairs, second door on the left. If - if she says anything weird, just ignore it."

"All right. Stay near Bonnie."

"Oh, no," Bonnie said hastily. "Bonnie is going with." She didn't know if it was for her own protection or Meredith's, but she was going to stick like glue.

Upstairs, Meredith turned the hall light on carefully with her elbow. Then they found the second door on the left, which turned out to have a doll-like old lady in it. She was in the exact center of the room, lying on the exact center of a futon. She sat up and smiled when they came in. The smile turned a wrinkled face almost into the face of a happy child.

"Megumi-chan, Beniko-chan, you came to see me!" she exclaimed, bowing where she sat.

"Yes," Meredith said carefully. She put the tray down beside the old lady. "We came to see you - Ms. Saitou."

"Don't play games with me! It's Inari-chan! Or are you mad at me?"

"All these chans . I thought ‘Chan' was a Chinese name. Isn't Isobel Japanese?" whispered Bonnie from behind Meredith.

One thing, the doll-like old woman was not, was deaf. She burst into laughter, bringing up both hands to cover her mouth girlishly. "Oh, don't tease me before I eat. It adakimasu! " She picked up the bowl of miso soup and began to drink it.

"I think chan is something you put at the end of someone's name when you're friends, the way Jimmy was saying Isa-chan ," Meredith said aloud. "And Eeta-daki-mass-u is something you say when you start eating. And that's all I know."

Part of Bonnie's mind noted that the "friends" Grandma Saitou had just happened to have names starting with M and B . Another part was calculating where this room was with relation to the rooms below it, Isobel's room in particular.

It was directly above it.

The tiny old woman had stopped eating and was watching her intently. "No, no, you're not Beniko-chan and Megumi-chan. I know it. But they do visit me sometimes, and so does my dear Nobuhiro. Other things do, too, unpleasant things, but I was raised a shrine maiden - I know how to take care of them ." A brief look of knowing satisfaction passed over the innocent old face. "This house is possessed, you know." She added, "Kore ni wa kitsune ga karande isou da ne."

"I'm sorry, Ms. Saitou - what was that?" Meredith asked.

"I said, there's a kitsune involved in this somehow."

"A kit-su-nay?" Meredith repeated, quiz-zically.

"A fox, silly girl," the old woman said cheerfully. "They can turn into anything they like, don't you know? Even humans. Why, one could turn into you and your best friend wouldn't know the difference."

"So - a sort of were-fox, then?" Meredith asked, but Grandma Saitou was rocking back and forth now, her gaze on the wall behind Bonnie. "We used to play a circle game," she said. "All of us in a circle and one in the middle, blindfolded. And we would sing a song. Ushiro no shounen daare? Who is standing behind you? I taught it to my children, but I made up a little song in English to go with it."

And she sang, in the voice of the very old or the very young, with her eyes fixed innocently on Bonnie all the while.

"Fox and turtle

Had a race.

Who's that far behind you?

Whoever came in

Second place

Who's that near behind you?

Would make a nice meal

For the winner.

Who's that close behind you?

Lovely turtle soup

For dinner!

Who's that right behind you?"

Bonnie felt hot breath on her neck. Gasping, she whirled around - and screamed. And screamed .

Isobel was there, dripping blood onto the mats that covered the floor. She had somehow managed to get past Jim and to sneak into the dim upstairs room without anyone seeing or hearing her. Now she stood there like some distorted goddess of piercing, or the hideous embodiment of every piercer's nightmare. She was wearing only a pair of very brief bikini bottoms. Otherwise she was naked except for the blood and the different kinds of hoops and studs and needles she had put through the holes. She had pierced every area Bonnie had ever heard that you could pierce, and a few that Bonnie hadn't dreamed of. And every hole was crooked and bleeding.

Her breath was warm and fetid and nauseating - like rotten eggs.

Isobel flicked her pink tongue. It wasn't pierced. It was worse. With some kind of instrument she had cut the long muscle in two so that it was forked like a snake's.

The forked, pink thing licked Bonnie's forehead.

Bonnie fainted.

Matt drove slowly down the almost invisible lane. There was no street sign to identify it, he noticed. They went up a little hill and then down sharply into a small clearing.

"’Keep away from faerie circles,'" Elena said softly, as if she were quoting. "’And old oaks...'"

"What are you talking about?"

"Stop the car." When he did, Elena stood in the center of the clearing. "Don't you think it has a faerie sort of feeling?"

"I don't know. Where'd the red thing go?"

"In here somewhere. I saw it!"

"Me, too - and did you see how it was bigger than a fox?"

"Yes, but not as big as a wolf."

Matt let out a sigh of relief. "Bonnie just won't believe me. And you saw how quickly it moved - "

"Too quickly to be something natural."

"You're saying we didn't really see anything?" Matt said almost fiercely.

"I'm saying we saw something super natural. Like the bug that attacked you. Like the trees, for that matter. Something that doesn't follow the laws of this world."

But search as they would, they couldn't find the animal. The bushes and shrubs between the trees reached from the ground up in a dense circle. But there was no evidence of a hole or a hide or a break in the dense thicket.

And the sun was sliding down in the sky. The clearing was beautiful, but there was nothing of interest to them.

Matt had just turned to say so to Elena when he saw her stand up quickly, in alarm.

"What's - ?" He followed her gaze and stopped.

A yellow Ferrari blocked the way back to the road.

They hadn't passed a yellow Ferrari on their way in. There was only room for one car on the one-lane road.

Yet there the Ferrari stood.

Branches broke behind Matt. He whirled.

"Damon!"

"Whom were you expecting?" The wraparound Ray-Bans concealed Damon's eyes completely.

"We weren't expecting anyone ," Matt said aggressively. "We just turned in here." The last time he'd seen Damon, when Damon had been banished like a whipped dog from Stefan's room, he'd wanted to punch Damon in the mouth very much, Elena knew. She could feel that he wanted it again now.

But Damon wasn't the same as he'd been when he'd left that room. Elena could see danger rising off him like heat waves.

"Oh, I see . This is – your private area for – private explorations," Damon translated, and there was a note of complicity in his voice that Elena disliked.

"No!" Matt snarled. Elena realized she was going to have to keep him under control. It was dangerous to antagonize Damon in this mood. "How can you even say that?" Matt went on. "Elena belongs to Stefan."

"Well - we belong to each other," Elena temporized.

"Of course you do," said Damon. "One body, one heart, one soul." For a moment there was something there - an expression inside the Ray-Bans, she thought, that was murderous.

Instantly, though, Damon's tone changed to an expressionless murmur. "But then, why are you two here?" His head, turning to follow Matt's movement, moved like a predator tracking prey. There was something more disquieting than usual about his attitude.

"We saw something red," Matt said before Elena could stop him. "Something like what I saw when I had that accident."

Prickles were now running up and down Elena's arms. Somehow she wished Matt hadn't said that. In this dim, quiet clearing in the evergreen grove, she was suddenly very much afraid.

Stretching her new senses to their utmost - until she could feel them distending like a gossamer garment pushed thin all around her, she felt the wrongness there, too, and felt it pass out of the reach of her mind. At the same time she felt birds go quiet all that long distance away.

What was most disturbing was to turn just then, just as the birdsong stopped, and find Damon turning at the same instant to look at her. The sunglasses kept her from knowing what he was thinking. The rest of his face was a mask.

Stefan, she thought helplessly, longingly.

How could he have left her - with this? With no warning, no idea of his destination, no way of ever contacting him again...It might have made sense to him, with his desperate desire not to make her into something he loathed in himself. But to leave her with Damon in this mood, and all of her previous powers gone -

Your own fault, she thought, cutting short the flood of self-pity. You were the one who harped on brotherhood. You were the one who convinced him Damon was to be trusted. Now you deal with the consequences.

"Damon," she said, "I've been looking for you . I wanted to ask you - about Stefan. You do know that he's left me."

"Of course. I believe the saying goes, for your own good. He left me to be your bodyguard."

"Then you saw him two nights ago?"

"Of course."

And - of course - you didn't try to stop him. Things couldn't have turned out better for you, Elena thought. She had never wished more for the abilities she'd had as a spirit, not even when she'd realized Stefan was really gone and beyond her all-too-human reach.

"Well, I'm not just letting him leave me," she said flatly, "for my own good or for any other reason. I'm going to follow him - but first I need to know where he might have gone."

"You're asking me ?"

"Yes. Please. Damon, I have to find him. I need him. I - " She was starting to choke up, and she had to be stern with herself.

But just then she realized that Matt was whispering very softly to her. "Elena, stop. I think we're just making him mad. Look at the sky."

Elena felt it herself. The circle of trees seemed to be leaning in all around them, darker than before, menacing. Elena tilted her chin slowly, looking up. Directly above them, gray clouds were pooling, piling in on themselves, cirrus overwhelmed by cumulus, turning to thunderheads - centered exactly over the spot where they stood.

On the ground, small whirlwinds began to form, lifting handfuls of pine needles and fresh green summer leaves off saplings. She had never seen anything like it before, and it filled the clearing with a sweet but sensuous smell, redolent of exotic oils and long, dark winter nights.

Looking at Damon, then, as the whirlwinds lifted higher and the sweet scent encircled her, resinous and aromatic, closing in until she knew it was soaking into her clothes and being impressed into her very flesh, she knew she had overstepped herself.

She couldn't protect Matt.

Stefan told me to trust Damon in his note in my diary. Stefan knows more about him than I do, she thought desperately. But we both know what Damon wants, ultimately. What he's always wanted. Me. My blood...

"Damon," she began softly - and broke off. Without looking at her, he held out a hand with the palm toward her.

Wait.

"There's something I have to do," he murmured. He bent down, every movement as unconsciously and economically graceful as a panther's, and picked up a small broken branch of what looked like ordinary Virginia pine. He waved it slightly, appraisingly, hefting it in his hand as if to feel weight and balance. It looked more like a fan than a branch.

Elena was now looking at Matt, trying with her eyes to tell him all the things she was feeling, foremost of which was that she was sorry: sorry that she had gotten him into this; sorry that she'd ever cared for him; sorry that she'd kept him bound into a group of friends who were so intimately intertwined with the supernatural.

Now I know a little bit of what Bonnie must have felt this last year, she thought, being able to see and predict things without having the slightest power to stop them.

Matt, jerking his head, was already moving stealthily toward the trees.

No, Matt. No .No!

He didn't understand. Neither did she, except to feel that the trees were only keeping their distance because of Damon's presence here. If she and Matt were to venture into the forest; if they left the clearing or even stayed in it too long...Matt could see the fear on her face, and his own face reflected grim understanding. They were trapped.

Unless -

"Too late," Damon said sharply. "I told you, there's something I have to do."

He had apparently found the stick he was looking for. Now he raised it, shook it slightly, and brought it down in a single motion; slashing sideways as he did.

And Matt convulsed in agony.

It was a kind of pain he had never dreamed of before: pain that seemed to come from inside himself, but from everywhere, every organ in his body, every muscle, every nerve, every bone, releasing a different type of pain. His muscles ached and cramped as if they were strained to their ultimate flexion, but were being forced to flex farther still. Inside, his organs were on fire. Knives were at work in his belly. His bones felt the way his arm had when he had shattered it once, when he was nine years old and a car had broadsided his dad's. And his nerves - if there was a switch on nerves that could be set from "pleasure" to "pain" - his had been set to "anguish." The touch of clothes on his skin was unbearable. The currents of air passing were agony. He endured fifteen seconds of it and passed out.

"Matt!" For her part, Elena had been frozen, her muscles locked, unable to move for what seemed like forever. Suddenly released, she ran to Matt, pulled him up into her lap, stared into his face.

Then she looked up.

"Damon, why ? Why?" Suddenly she realized that although Matt wasn't conscious, he was still writhing in pain. She had to keep herself from screaming the words, to only speak forcefully. "Why are you doing this? Damon! Stop it ."

She stared up at the young man dressed all in black: black jeans with a black belt, black boots, black leather jacket, black hair, and those damned Ray-Bans.

"I told you," Damon said casually. "It's something I need to do. To watch. Painful death."

"Death!" Elena stared at Damon in disbelief. And then she began gathering all her Power, in a way that had been so easy and instinctual just days ago while she had been mute and not subject to gravity, and that was so difficult and so foreign right now. With determination, she said, "If you don't let him go - now - I'll hit you with everything I've got."

He laughed. She'd never seen Damon really laugh before, not like this. "And you expect that I'll even notice your tiny Power?"

"Not that tiny." Elena weighed it grimly. It was no more than the intrinsic Power of any human being - the Power that vampires took from humans along with the blood they drank - but since becoming a spirit, she knew how to use it. How to attack with it. "I think you'll feel it, Damon. Let him go - NOW!"

"Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won't?" Damon murmured.

Elena let him have it.

Or at least she prepared to. She took the deep breath necessary, held her inner self still, and imagined herself holding a ball of white fire, and then -

Matt was on his feet. He looked as if he'd been dragged to his feet and was being held there like a puppet, and his eyes were involuntarily watering, but it was better than Matt writhing on the ground.

"You owe me," Damon said to Elena casually. "I'll collect later."

To Matt he said, in the tones of a fond uncle, with one of those instantaneous smiles that you could never be quite sure you saw, "Lucky for me that you're a hardy specimen, isn't it?"

"Damon." Elena had seen Damon in his let's-play-with-weaker-creatures mood, and it was the one she liked least. But there was something off today; something she couldn't understand. "Let's get down to it," she said, while the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck rose again. "What do you really want?"

But he didn't give the answer she expected.

"I was officially appointed as your caretaker. I'm officially taking care of you. And for one thing, I don't think you should be without my protection and companionship while my little brother is gone."

"I can handle myself," Elena said flatly, waving a hand so they could get down to the real issue.

"You're a very pretty girl. Dangerous and" - flash smile - "unsavory elements could be after you. I insist you have a bodyguard."

"Damon, right now the thing I need most is to be protected from you . You know that. What is this really about?"

The clearing was...pulsing.  Almost as if it were something organic, breathing. Elena had the feeling that beneath her feet - beneath Meredith's old, rugged hiking boots - the ground was moving slightly, like a great sleeping animal, and the trees were like a beating heart.

For what? The forest? There was more dead wood than live here. And she could swear that she knew Damon well enough to know that he didn't like trees or woods.

It was at times like this that Elena wished she still had wings. Wings and the knowledge - the hand motions, the Words of White Power, the white fire inside her that would allow her to know the truth without trying to figure it out, or to simply blast annoyances back to Stonehenge.

It seemed that all she'd been left with was being a greater temptation to vampires than ever, and her wits.

Wits had worked up until now. Maybe if she didn't let Damon know how afraid she was, she could win a stay of execution for them.

"Damon, I thank you for being concerned about me. Now would you mind leaving Matt and me for a moment so that I can tell if he's still breathing?"

From inside the Ray-Bans, she thought she could discern a single flash of red.

"Somehow I thought you might say that," Damon said. "And, of course, it's your right to have consolation after being so treacherously abandoned. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, for example."

Elena wanted to swear. Carefully, she answered, "Damon, if Stefan appointed you as my bodyguard, then he hardly ¡®treacherously abandoned' me, did he? You can't have it both - "

"Just indulge me in one thing, all right?" Damon said in the voice of one whose next words are going to beBe careful orDon't do anything I wouldn't do .

There was silence. The dust devils had stopped whirling. The smell of sun-warmed pine needles and pine resin in this dim place was making her languid, dizzy. The ground was warm, too, and the pine needles were all aligned, as if the slumbering animal had pine needles for fur. Elena watched dust motes turn and sparkle like opals in the golden sunlight. She knew she wasn't at her best right now; not her sharpest. Finally, when she was sure her voice would be steady, she asked, "What do you want?"

"A kiss."

Chapter 22

Bonnie was disturbed and confused. It was dark.

"All right," a voice that was brusque and calming at once was saying. "That's two possible concussions, one puncture wound in need of a tetanus shot - and - well, I'm afraid I've got to sedate your girl, Jim. And I'm going to need help, but you're not allowed to move at all. You just lie back and keep your eyes shut."

Bonnie opened her own eyes. She had a vague memory of falling forward onto her bed. But she wasn't at home; she was still at the Saitou house, lying on a couch.

As always, when in confusion or fear, she looked for Meredith. Meredith was just returning from the kitchen with a makeshift ice pack. She put it on Bonnie's already wet forehead.

"I just fainted," Bonnie explained, as she herself figured it out. "That's all."

"I know you fainted. You cracked your head pretty hard on the floor," Meredith replied, and for once her face was perfectly readable: worry and sympathy and relief were all visible. She actually had tears pooling in her eyes. "Oh, Bonnie, I couldn't get to you in time. Isobel was in the way, and those tatami mats don't cushion the floor much - and you've been out for almost half an hour! You scared me."

"I'm sorry." Bonnie fumbled a hand out a blanket she seemed to be wrapped in and gave Meredith's hand a squeeze. It meant velociraptor sisterhood is still in action . It also meant thank you for caring .

Jim was sprawled on another couch holding an ice pack to the back of his head. His face was greenish-white. He tried to stand up but Dr. Alpert - it was her voice that was both crusty and kind - pushed him back onto the couch.

"You don't need any more exertion," she said. "But I do need an assistant. Meredith, can you help me with Isobel? It sounds as if she's going to be quite a handful."

"She hit me in the back of the head with a lamp," Jim warned them. "Don't ever turn your back on her."

"We'll be careful," Dr. Alpert said.

"You two stay here ," Meredith added firmly.

Bonnie was watching Meredith's eyes. She wanted to get up to help them with Isobel. But Meredith had that special look of determination that meant it was better not to argue.

As soon as they left, Bonnie tried to stand up. But immediately she began to see the pulsating gray nothingness that meant she was going to pass out again.

She lay back down, teeth gritted.

For a long time there were crashes and shouts from Isobel's room. Bonnie would hear Dr. Alpert's voice raised, and then Isobel's, and then a third voice - not Meredith, who never shouted if she could help it, but what sounded like Isobel's voice, only slowed down and distorted.

Then, finally, there was silence, and Meredith and Dr. Alpert came back carrying a limp Isobel between them. Meredith had a bloody nose and Dr. Alpert's short pepper-and-salt hair was standing on end, but they had somehow gotten a T-shirt onto Isobel's abused body and Dr. Alpert had managed to hang on to her black bag as well.

"Walking wounded, stay where you are. We'll be back to lend you a hand," the doctor said in her terse way.

Next Dr. Albert and Meredith made another trip to take Isobel's grandmother with them.

"I don't like her color," Dr. Albert said briefly. "Or the tick of her tocker. We might as well all go get checked up."

A minute later they returned to help Jim and Bonnie to Dr. Albert's SUV. The sky had clouded over, and the sun was a red ball not far from the horizon.

"Do you want me to give you something for the pain?" the doctor asked, seeing Bonnie eyeing the black bag. Isobel was in the very back of the SUV, where the seats had been folded down.

Meredith and Jim were in the two seats in front of her, with Grandma Saitou between them, and Bonnie - at Meredith's insistence - was in the front with the doctor.

"Um, no, it's okay," Bonnie said. Actually, she had been wondering whether the hospital actually could cure Isobel of infection any better than Mrs. Flowers' herbal compresses could.

But although her head throbbed and ached and she was developing a lump the size of a hard-boiled egg on her forehead, she didn't want to cloud her thinking. There was something nagging at her, some dream or something she'd had while Meredith said she'd been unconscious.

What was it?

"All right then. Seat belts on? Here we go." The SUV pulled away from the Saitou house. "Jim, you said Isobel has a three-year-old sister asleep upstairs, so I called my granddaughter Jayneela to come over here. At least it will be somebody in the house."

Bonnie twisted around to look at Meredith. They both spoke at once.

"Oh, no! She can't go in! Especially not into Isobel's room! Look, please, you have to - " Bonnie babbled.

"I'm really not sure if that's a good idea, Dr. Alpert," Meredith said, no less urgently but much more coherently. "Unless she does stay away from that room and maybe has someone with her - a boy would be good."

"A boy?" Dr. Alpert seemed bewildered, but the combination of Bonnie's distress and Meredith's sincerity seemed to convince her. "Well, Tyrone, my grandson, was watching TV when I left. I'll try to get him."

"Wow!" Bonnie said involuntarily. "That's the Tyrone who's offensive tackle on the football team next year, huh? I heard that they call him the Tyre-minator."

"Well, let's say I think he'll be able to protect Jayneela," Dr. Alpert said after making the call. "But we're the ones with the, ah, overexcited girl in the vehicle with us. From the way she fought the sedative, I'd say she's quite a ‘terminator' herself."

Meredith's mobile phone beeped out the tune it used for numbers not in its memory, and then announced, "Mrs. T. Flowers is calling you. Will you take the - " In a moment Meredith had hit thetalk button.

"Mrs. Flowers?" she said. The hum of the SUV kept anything Mrs. Flowers might be saying from Bonnie and the others, so Bonnie went back to concentrating on two things: what she knew about the "victims" of the Salem "witches," and what that elusive thought while she was unconscious had been.

All of which promptly flew away when Meredith put down her mobile phone.

"What was it? What? What? " Bonnie couldn't get a clear view of Meredith's face in the dusk, but it looked pale, and when she spoke she sounded pale, too.

"Mrs. Flowers was doing some gardening and she was about to go inside when she noticed that there was something in her begonia bushes. She said it looked as if someone had tried to stuff something down between the bush and a wall, but a bit of fabric stuck up."

Bonnie felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. "What was it?"

"It was a duffel bag, full of shoes and clothes. Boots. Shirts. Pants. All Stefan's."

Bonnie gave a shriek that caused Dr. Alpert to swerve and then recover, the SUV fishtailing.

"Oh, my God; oh, my God - he didn't go!"

"Oh, I think he went all right. Just not of his own free will," Meredith said grimly.

"Damon," Bonnie gasped, and slumped back into her own seat, tears welling up in her eyes and overflowing. "I couldn't help wanting to believe..."

"Head getting worse?" Dr. Alpert asked, tactfully ignoring the conversation that had not included her.

"No - well, yes, it is," Bonnie admitted.

"Here, open the bag and give me a look inside. I've got samples of this and that...all right, here you go. Anybody see a water bottle back there?"

Jim listlessly handed one over. "Thanks," Bonnie said, taking the small pill and a deep gulp. She had to get her head right. If Damon had kidnapped Stefan, then she should be Calling for him, shouldn't she? God only knew where he would end up this time. Why hadn't any of them even thought of it as a possibility?

Well, first, because the new Stefan was supposed to be so strong, and second, because of the note in Elena's diary.

"That's it!" she said, startling even herself. It had all come flooding back, everything that she and Matt had shared....

"Meredith!" she said, oblivious to the side look which Dr. Alpert gave her, "while I was unconscious I talked with Matt . He was unconscious, too - "

"Was he hurt?"

"God, yes. Damon must have been doing something awful. But he said to ignore it, that something had been bothering him about the note Stefan left for Elena ever since he saw it. Something about Stefan talking to the English teacher about how to spell judgment last year. And he just kept saying, Look for the backup file. Look for the backup...before Damon does ."

She stared at Meredith's dim face, aware as they cruised slowly to stop at an intersection that Dr. Alpert and Jim were both staring at her. Tact had its limits.

Meredith's voice broke the silence. "Doctor," she said, "I'm going to have to ask you something. If you take a left here and another one at Laurel Street and then just drive for about five minutes to Old Wood, it won't be too far out of your way. But it'll let me get to the boardinghouse where the computer Bonnie's talking about is. You may think I'm crazy, but I need to get to that computer."

"I know you're not crazy; I'd have noticed it by now." The doctor laughed mirthlessly. "And I have heard some things about young Bonnie here...nothing bad, I promise, but a little difficult to believe. After seeing what I saw today, I think I'm beginning to change my opinion about them." The doctor abruptly took a left turn, muttering, "Somebody's taken the stop sign from this road, too." Then she continued, to Meredith, "I can do what you ask. I'd drive you all the way to the old boardinghouse - "

"No! That would be much too dangerous!"

" - but I've got to get Isobel to a hospital as soon as possible. Not to mention Jim. I think he really does have a concussion. And Bonnie - "

"Bonnie," Bonnie said, enunciating distinctly, "is going to the boardinghouse, too."

"No, Bonnie! I'm going to run , Bonnie, do you understand that? I'm going to run as fast as I can - and I can't let you hold me up." Meredith's voice was grim.

"I won't hold you up, I swear it. You go ahead and run. I'll run, too. My head feels fine, now. If you have to leave me behind, you keep on running. I'll be coming after you."

Meredith opened her mouth and then closed it again. There must have been something in Bonnie's face that told her any kind of argument would be useless, Bonnie thought. Because that was the truth of the matter.

"Here we are," Dr. Alpert said a few minutes later. "Corner of Laurel and Old Wood." She pulled a small flashlight out of her black bag and shone it in each of Bonnie's eyes, one after another. "Well, it still doesn't look as if you have concussion. But you know, Bonnie, that my medical opinion is that you shouldn't be running anywhere. I just can't force you to accept to take treatment if you don't want it. But I can make you take this." She handed Bonnie the small flashlight. "Good luck."

"Thank you for everything," Bonnie said, for an instant laying her pale hand on Dr. Alpert's long-fingered, dark brown one. "You be careful, too - of fallen trees and of Isobel, and of something red in the road."

"Bonnie, I'm leaving." Meredith was already outside the SUV.

"And lock your doors! And don't get out until you're away from the woods!" Bonnie said, as she tumbled down from the vehicle beside Meredith.

And then they ran. Of course, all that Bonnie had said about Meredith running in front of her, leaving her behind, was nonsense, and they both knew it. Meredith seized Bonnie's hand as soon as Bonnie's feet had touched the road and began running like a greyhound, dragging Bonnie along with her, at times seeming to whirl her over dips in the road.

Bonnie didn't need to be told how important speed was. She wished desperately that they had a car. She wished a lot of things, primarily that Mrs. Flowers lived in the middle of town and not way out here on the wild side.

At last, as Meredith had foreseen, she was winded, and her hand so slick with sweat that it slipped out of Meredith's hand. She bent almost double, hands on her knees, trying to get her breath.

"Bonnie! Wipe your hand! We have to run!"

"Just - give me - a minute - "

"We don't have a minute! Can't you hear it? Come on! "

"I just need - to get - my breath."

"Bonnie, look behind you. And don't scream!"

Bonnie looked behind her, screamed, and then discovered that she wasn't winded after all. She took off, grabbing Meredith's hand.

She could hear it, now, even above her own wheezing breath and the pounding in her ears. It was an insect sound, not a buzzing but still a sound that her brain filed under bug . It sounded like the whipwhipwhip of a helicopter, only much higher in pitch, as if a helicopter could have insect-like tentacles instead of blades. With that one glance, she had made out an entire gray mass of those tentacles, with heads in front - and all the heads were open to show mouths full of white sharp teeth.

She struggled to turn on the flashlight. Night was falling, and she had no idea how long it would be until moonrise. All she knew was that the trees seemed to make everything darker, and that they were after her and Meredith.

The malach.

The whipping sound of tentacles beating the air was much louder now. Much closer. Bonnie didn't want to turn around and see the source of it. The sound was pushing her body beyond all sane limits. She couldn't help hearing over and over Matt's words: like putting my hand in a garbage disposal and turning it on. Like putting my hand in a garbage disposal...

Her hand and Meredith's were covered with sweat again. And the gray mass was definitely overtaking them. It was only half as far away as it had been at first, and the whipping noise was getting higher-pitched.

At the same time her legs felt like rubber. Literally. She couldn't feel her knees. And now they felt like rubber dissolving into gelatin.

Vipvipvipvipveeee...

It was the sound of one of them, closer than the rest. Closer, closer, and then it was in front of them, its mouth open in an oval shape with teeth all around the perimeter.

Just like Matt had said.

Bonnie had no breath to scream with. But she needed to scream. The headless thing with no eyes or features - just that horrible mouth - had turned ahead of them and was coming right for her. And her automatic response - to beat at it with her hands - could cost her an arm. Oh God, it was coming for her face....

"There's the boardinghouse," gasped Meredith, giving her a jerk that lifted her off her feet. "Run!"

Bonnie ducked, just as the malach tried to collide with her. Instantly, she felt tentacles whip whip whip into her curly hair. She was abruptly yanked backward to a painful stumble and Meredith's hand was torn out of hers. Her legs wanted to collapse. Her guts wanted her to scream.

"Oh, God, Meredith, it's got me! Run! Don't let one get you!"

In front of her, the boardinghouse was lit up like a hotel. Usually it was dark except for maybe Stefan's window and one other. But now it shone like a jewel, just beyond her reach.

"Bonnie, shut your eyes!"

Meredith hadn't left her. She was still here. Bonnie could feel vine-like tentacles gently brushing her ear, lightly tasting her sweaty forehead, working toward her face, her throat...She sobbed.

And then there was a sharp, loud crack mixed with a sound like a ripe melon bursting, and something damp scattered all over her back. She opened her eyes. Meredith was dropping a thick branch she had been holding like a baseball bat. The tentacles were already sliding out of Bonnie's hair.

Bonnie didn't want to look at the mess behind her.

"Meredith, you - "

"Come on - run!"

And she was running again. All the way up the gravel boardinghouse driveway, all the way up the path to the door. And there, in the doorway, Mrs. Flowers was standing with an old-fashioned kerosene lamp.

"Get in, get in," she said, and as Meredith and Bonnie skittered to a stop, sobbing for air, she slammed the door shut behind them. They all heard the sound that came next. It was like the sound the branch had made - a sharp crack plus a bursting, only much louder, and repeated many times over, like popcorn popping.

Bonnie was shaking as she took her hands away from her ears and slid down to sit on the entry-hall rug.

"What in heaven's name have you girls been doing to yourselves?" Mrs. Flowers said, eyeing Bonnie's forehead, Meredith's swollen nose, and their general state of sweaty exhaustion.

"It takes too - long to explain," Meredith got out. "Bonnie! You can sit down - upstairs."

Somehow or other Bonnie made it upstairs. Meredith went at once to the computer and turned it on, collapsing on the desk chair in front of it. Bonnie used the last of her energy to pull off her top. The back was stained with nameless insect juices. She crumpled it into a ball and threw it into a corner.

Then she fell down on Stefan's bed.

"What exactly did Matt say?" Meredith was getting her breath back.

"He said Look in the backup – or Look for the backup file or something. Meredith, my head...it isn't good."

"Okay. Just relax. You did great out there."

"I made it because you saved me. Thanks...again...."

"Don't worry about it. But I don't understand," Meredith added in her talking-to-herself murmur. "There's a backup file of this note in the same directory, but it's no different. I don't see what Matt meant."

"Maybe he was confused," Bonnie said reluctantly. "Maybe he was just in a lot of pain and sort of off his head."

"Backup file, backup file...wait a minute! Doesn't Word automatically save a backup in some weird place, like under the administrator directory or somewhere?" Meredith was clicking rapidly through directories. Then she said, in a disappointed voice, "No, nothing there."

She sat back, letting her breath out sharply. Bonnie knew what she must be thinking. Their long and desperate run through danger couldn't all be for nothing. It couldn't .

Then, slowly, Meredith said, "There are a lot of temp files in here for one little note."

"What's a temp file?"

"It's just a temporary storage of your file while you're working on it. Usually it just looks like gibberish, though." The clicking started again. "But I must as well be thorough - oh!" She interrupted herself. The clicking stopped.

And then there was dead silence.

"What is it?" Bonnie said anxiously.

More silence.

"Meredith! Talk to me! Did you find a backup file? "

Meredith said nothing. She seemed not even to hear. She was reading with what looked like horrified fascination.

Chapter 23

A cold frisson went down Elena's back, the most delicate of shivers. Damon didn't ask for kisses.

This wasn't right .

"No," she whispered.

"Just one."

"I'm not going to kiss you, Damon."

"Not me. Him." Damon denoted "him" with a tilt of his head toward Matt. "A kiss between you and your former knight."

"You want  what ?" Matt's eyes snapped open and he got the words out explosively before Elena could open her mouth.

"You'd like it," Damon's voice had dropped to its softest, most insinuating tones. "You'd like to kiss her. And there's no one to stop you."

"Damon." Matt struggled up out of Elena's arms. He seemed, if not entirely recovered, perhaps eighty percent of the way there, but Elena could hear his heart laboring. Elena wondered how long he'd lain feigning unconsciousness to get his strength back. "The last thing I knew you were trying to kill me. That doesn't exactly get you on my good side. Second, people just don't go around kissing girls because they're pretty or their boyfriend takes a day off."

"Don't they?" Damon hiked an eyebrow in surprise. "I do."

Matt just shook his head, dazed. He seemed to be trying to keep one idea fixed in his mind. "Will you move your car so we can leave?" he said.

Elena felt as if she were watching Matt from very far away; and as if he was caged somewhere with a tiger and didn't know it. The clearing had become a very beautiful, wild, and dangerous place, and Matt didn't know that either. Besides, she thought with concern, he's making himself stand up. We need to leave - and quickly, before Damon does anything else to him.

But what was the real way out?

What was Damon's real agenda?

"You can go," Damon said. "As soon as she kisses you. Or you kiss her," he added, as if making a concession.

Slowly, as if he realized what it was going to mean, Matt looked at Elena and then back at Damon. Elena tried to communicate silently with him, but Matt wasn't in the mood. He looked Damon in the face and said, "No way."

Shrugging, as if to say, I did everything I could , Damon lifted the shaggy pine rod -

"No," cried Elena. "Damon, I'll do it."

Damon smiled the smile and held it for a moment, until Elena looked away and went to Matt. His face was still pale, cool. Elena leaned her cheek against his and said almost soundlessly into his ear, "Matt, I've dealt with Damon before. And you can't just defy him. Let's play along - for now. Then maybe we can get away." And then she made herself say, "For me? Please?"

The truth was that she knew too much about stubborn males. Too much about how to manipulate them. It was a trait she'd come to hate, but right now she was too busy trying to think of ways to save Matt's life to debate the ethics of pressuring him.

She wished it were Meredith or Bonnie instead of Matt. Not that she would wish such pain on anyone, but Meredith would be coming up with Plans C and D even as Elena came up with A and B. And Bonnie would already have lifted tear-filled, heart-melting brown eyes to Damon....

Suddenly Elena thought of the single red flash she'd seen under the Ray-Bans, and she changed her mind. She wasn't sure she wanted Bonnie around Damon now.

Of all of the guys she'd known, Damon had been the only one Elena couldn't break.

Oh, Matt was stubborn, and Stefan could be impossible sometimes. But they both had brightly colored buttons somewhere inside them, labeled PUSH ME , and you just had to fiddle with the mechanism a little - okay, sometimes more than a little - and eventually even the most challenging male could be mastered.

Except one...

"All right, kiddies, enough time out."

Elena felt Matt pulled from her arms and held up - she didn't know by what, but he was standing. Something held him in place, upright, and she knew it wasn't his muscles.

"So where were we?" Damon was walking back and forth, with the Virginia pine branch in his right hand, tapping it on his left palm. "Oh, that's right " - as if making a great discovery - "the girl and the stalwart knight are going to kiss."

In Stefan's room, Bonnie said, "For the last time, Meredith, did you find a backup file for Stefan's note or not?"

"No," Meredith said in a flat voice. But just as Bonnie was about to collapse again, Meredith said, "I found a different note completely. A letter, really."

"A different note? What does it say?"

"Can you stand up at all? Because I think you'd better have a look at this."

Bonnie, who had only just gotten back her breath, managed to hobble over to the computer.

She read the document on the screen - complete except for what seemed to be its final words, and gasped.

"Damon did something to Stefan!" she said, and felt her heart plummet and all her internal organs follow it. So Elena had been wrong. Damon was evil, through and through. By now, Stefan might even be...

"Dead," Meredith said, her mind obviously following the same track that Bonnie's had taken. She lifted dark eyes to Bonnie's. Bonnie knew that her own eyes were wet. "How long," Meredith asked, "has it been since you called Elena or Matt?"

"I don't know; I don't know what time it is. But I called twice after we left Caroline's house and once at Isobel's; and when I've tried after that, I either get a message that their mailboxes are full or it won't connect at all."

"That's about exactly what I've gotten. If they went near the Old Wood - well, you know what it does to phone reception."

"And now, even if they come out of the woods, we can't leave them a message because we've filled up their voicemail - "

"E-mail," Meredith said. "Good old e-mail; we can use that to send Elena a message."

"Yes!" Bonnie punched the air. Then she deflated. She hesitated for an instant and then almost whispered, "No." Words from Stefan's real note kept echoing in her mind: I trust Matt's instinctive protectiveness for you, Meredith's judgment, and Bonnie's intuition. Tell them to remember that.

"You can't tell her what Damon's done," she said, even as Meredith began busily typing. "She probably already knows - and if she doesn't, it'll just make more trouble. She's with Damon."

"Matt told you that?"

"No. But Matt was out of his mind with pain."

"Couldn't it have been from those - bugs?" Meredith looked down at her ankle where several red welts still showed on the smooth olive flesh.

"It could be, but it wasn't. It didn't feel like the trees, either. It was just...pure pain. And I don't know, not for certain, how I know that it's Damon doing it. I just - know."

She saw Meredith's eyes unfocus and knew that she was thinking about Stefan's words, too. "Well, my judgment tells me to trust you," she said. "By the way, Stefan spells ‘judgment' the preferred American way," she added. "Damon spells it with ane . That may have been what was bothering Matt."

"As if Stefan would really leave Elena alone with everything that's been going on," Bonnie said indignantly.

"Well, Damon fooled all of us and made us think so," Meredith pointed out. Meredith tended to point out things like that.

Bonnie started suddenly. "I wonder if he stole the money?"

"I doubt it, but let's see." Meredith pulled the rocking chair away, saying, "Grab me a hanger."

Bonnie grabbed one from the closet and grabbed herself one of Elena's tops to put on at the same time. It was too big, since it was Meredith's top given to Elena, but at least it was warm.

Meredith was using the hooked end of the wire hanger on all sides of the floorboard that looked most promising. Just as she managed to pry it up, there was a knock at the open door. They both jumped.

"It's only me," said the voice of Mrs. Flowers from behind a large duffel bag and a tray of bandages, mugs, sandwiches, and strong-smelling cheesecloth bags like the ones she'd used on Matt's arm.

Bonnie and Meredith exchanged a glance and then Meredith said, "Come in and let us help you." Bonnie was already taking the tray, and Mrs. Flowers was dumping the duffel bag on the floor. Meredith continued prying the board up.

"Food!" Bonnie said gratefully.

"Yes, turkey-and-tomato sandwiches. Help yourselves. I'm sorry I was away so long, but you can't hurry the poultice for swellings," Mrs. Flowers said. "I remember, long ago, my younger brother always said - oh, my goodness gracious!" She was staring at the place where the floorboard had been. A good-sized hollow was filled with hundred-dollar bills, neatly wrapped in packets with bank-bands still around them.

"Wow," Bonnie said. "I never saw so much money!"

"Yes." Mrs. Flowers turned and began distributing cups of cocoa and sandwiches. Bonnie bit into a sandwich hungrily. "People used to simply put things behind the loose brick in the fireplace. But I can see that the young man needed more space."

"Thank you for the cocoa and sandwiches," Meredith said after a few minutes spent wolfing them down while working on the computer at the same time. "But if you want to treat us for bruises and things - well, I'm afraid we just can't wait."

"Oh, come." Mrs. Flowers took a small compress that smelled to Bonnie like tea and pressed it to Meredith's nose. "This will take the swelling down in minutes. And you, Bonnie - sniff out the one that's for that bump on your forehead."

Once again Meredith's and Bonnie's eyes met. Bonnie said, "Well, if it's only a few minutes - I don't know what we're doing next anyway." She looked the poultices over and picked a round one that smelled of flowers and musk to put on her forehead.

"Exactly right," Mrs. Flowers said without turning around to look. "And of course, the long thin one is for Meredith's ankle."

Meredith drank the last of her cocoa, then reached down to gingerly touch one of the red marks. "That's okay - " she began, when Mrs. Flowers interrupted.

"You're going to need that ankle at full capacity when we go out."

"’When we go out'?" Meredith stared at her.

"Into the Old Wood," Mrs. Flowers clarified. "To find your friends."

Meredith looked horrified. "If Elena and Matt are in the Old Wood, then I agree: we have to go look for them. But you can't go, Mrs. Flowers! And we don't know where they are, anyway."

Mrs. Flowers drank from the cup of cocoa in her hand, looking thoughtfully at the one window that wasn't shuttered. For a moment Meredith thought she hadn't heard or didn't mean to answer. Then she said, slowly, "I daresay you all think I'm just a batty old woman who's never around when there's trouble at hand."

"We would never think that," Bonnie said staunchly, but thinking that they'd found out more about Mrs. Flowers in the last two days than in the entire nine months since Stefan had moved in here. Before that, all she'd ever heard were ghost stories or rumors about the crazy old lady in the boardinghouse. She'd been hearing them since she could remember.

Mrs. Flowers smiled. "It's not easy having the Power and never being believed when you use it. And then, I've lived for so long - and people don't like that. It worries them. They start to make up ghost stories or rumors - "

Bonnie felt her eyes go round. Mrs. Flowers just smiled again and nodded gently. "It's been a real pleasure having a polite young man in the house," she said, taking the long poultice from the tray and wrapping it around Meredith's ankle. "Of course, I had to get over my prejudices. Dear Mama always said that if I kept the place, I might have to take in boarders, and to be sure not to take in foreigners. And then of course, the young man is a vampire as well - "

Bonnie almost sprayed cocoa across the room. She choked, then went into a spasm of coughing. Meredith had her no-expression expression on.

" - but after a while I got to understand him better and to sympathize with his problems," Mrs. Flowers continued, ignoring Bonnie's attack of coughing. "And now, the blond girl is involved as well...poor young thing. I often speak to Mama" - still with the accent on the second syllable - "about it."

"How old is your mother?" Meredith asked. Her tone was one of polite inquiry, but to Bonnie's experienced eyes her expression was one of slightly morbid fascination.

"Oh, she died back at the turn of the century."

There was a pause, and then Meredith rallied.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "She must have lived a long - "

"I should have said, the turn of the previous century. Back in 1901, it was."

This time it was Meredith who had the choking fit. But she was more quiet about it.

Mrs. Flowers' gentle gaze had drifted back to them. "I was a medium in my day. On vaudeville, you know. So hard to achieve a trance in front of a roomful of people. But, yes, I really am a White Witch. I have the Power. And now, if you've finished your cocoa, I think it's time we went into the Old Wood to find your friends. Even though it's summertime, my dears, you'd both better dress warmly," she added. "I have."

Chapter 24

No peck on the lips was going to satisfy Damon, Elena thought. On the other hand, Matt was going to need outright seduction before he would give in. Fortunately Elena had broken the Matt Honeycutt code long ago. And she planned to be remorseless in using what she had learned on his weakened, susceptible body.

But Matt could be far too stubborn for his own good. He allowed Elena to put her soft lips against his, he allowed her to put her arms around him. But when Elena tried to do some of the things he liked most - like running her nails down his spine, or touching her tongue tip lightly to his closed lips - he clamped his teeth shut. He wouldn't put an arm around her.

Elena let go of him and sighed. Then she felt a crawling sensation between her shoulder blades, as if she were being watched but a hundred times stronger. She glanced back to see Damon standing at a distance with his Virginia pine rod, but she couldn't find anything unusual. She glanced back once more - and had to cram a fist into her mouth.

Damon was there ; right behind her; so close that you couldn't have gotten two fingers between the front of her body and the front of his. She didn't know why her arm hadn't hit him. Her whirl actually trapped her in between two male bodies.

But how had he done it? There had been no time to travel the distance of the clearing from where Damon had been standing to one inch behind her in the second that she had glanced away. Nor had there been any sound as he'd walked across the pine needles toward them; like the Ferrari, he was just - there.

Elena swallowed the scream that was desperately trying to get out of her lungs, and tried to breathe. Her own body was rigid with fear. Matt was trembling slightly behind her. Damon was leaning in, and all she could smell was the sweetness of pine resin.

Something's wrong with him. Something's wrong.

"You know what," Damon said, leaning forward even farther so that she had to lean backward against Matt, so that, even spooned against Matt's shaking body, she was looking straight into the Ray-Bans from a distance of three inches. "That gets you a grade of a D minus."

Now Elena was shaking as well as Matt. But she had to get a grip on herself, had to meet this aggression head-on. The more passive she and Matt were, the more time Damon had to think.

Elena's mind was in feverish scheming mode. He may not be reading our minds, she thought, but he can certainly tell if we're telling the truth or lying. That's normal for a vampire who drinks human blood. What can we make of that? What can we do with it?

"That was a greeting kiss," she said boldly. "It's to identify the person that you're meeting, so you'll always know them afterwards. Even - even prairie hamsters do it. Now - please - could we move just a little, Damon? I'm getting crushed."

And this is just much too provocative a position, she thought. For everybody involved.

"One more chance," Damon said, and this time he didn't smile. "I want to see a kiss - a real kiss - between you. Or else."

Elena twisted in the tight space. Her eyes searched Matt's. They had, after all, been boyfriend and girlfriend for quite a while last year. Elena saw the look in Matt's blue eyes: he wanted to kiss her, as much as he could want anything after that pain. And he realized that she'd had to go through all that fancy footwork to save him from Damon.

Somehow, we'll get out, Elena thought to him. Now, will you cooperate? Some boys didn't have buttons in the selfish sensations area of their brain. Some, like Matt, had buttons labeled HONOR or GUILT .

Now Matt held still as she took his face between her hands, tilting it down and going up on her toes to kiss him, because he'd grown so much. She thought of their first real kiss, in his car on the way home from a minor school dance. He'd been terrified, his hands damp, his whole interior quaking. She'd been cool, experienced, gentle.

And so she was now, drawing a warm tongue tip to melt his frozen lips apart. And just in case Damon was eavesdropping on her thoughts, she kept them strictly on Matt, on his sunshiny looks and his warm friendship and on the gallantry and courtesy that he had always shown to her, even when she broke up with him. She wasn't aware when his arms went around her shoulders or when he took control of the kiss, like a person dying of thirst who's finally found water. She could see it clearly in his mind: he'd never thought he'd kiss Elena Gilbert like this again.

Elena didn't know how long it lasted. Finally she unwound her arms from around Matt's neck and stepped back.

And then she realized something. It was no accident that Damon had sounded like a film director. He was holding up a palm-sized video camera, staring into the viewfinder. He'd captured the whole thing.

With Elena clearly visible. She had no idea what had happened to the disguising baseball cap and dark glasses. Her hair was disordered and her breathing came quickly, involuntarily. The blood had risen to the surface of her skin. Matt didn't look much more together than she felt.

Damon looked up from the viewfinder.

"What do you want that for?" Matt growled in tones completely unlike his normal voice. The kiss had affected him, too, Elena thought. More so than her.

Damon picked up his branch again and again waved the end of it like a Japanese fan. Pine aroma wafted by Elena. He looked considering, as though he might ask for a retake, then changed his mind, smiled brilliantly at them, and tucked the video camera into a pocket.

"All you need to know is that it was a perfect take."

"Then we're leaving." The kiss seemed to have given Matt new strength, even if it was for saying the wrong type of things. "Right now."

"Oh, no, but keep that dominant, aggressive attitude. As you remove her shirt."

"What?"

Damon repeated the words in the tones of a director giving an actor complicated instructions.

"Undo the buttons of her shirt, please, and take it off."

"You're crazy ." Matt turned and looked at Elena, stopped aghast to see the expression on her face, the single tear running down the eye not hidden.

"Elena..."

He moved around, but she moved too. He couldn't get her to look him in the face. At last, she stopped, stood with her eyes down and leaking tears. He could feel the heat radiating from her cheeks.

"Elena, let's fight him. Don't you remember how you fought the bad things in Stefan's room?"

"But this is worse, Matt. I've never felt anything this bad before. This strong. It's - pressing on me."

"You don't mean we should give in to him...?"That was what Matt said and he sounded as if he were on the verge of being ill. What his clear blue eyes said was simpler. They said: No. Not if he kills me for refusing.

"I mean..." Elena turned suddenly back to Damon. "Let him go," she said. "This is between you and me. Let's settle it ourselves." She was damned well going to save Matt, even if he didn't want to be saved.

I'll do what you want, she thought as hard as she could to Damon, hoping he would pick some of it up. After all, he'd bled her against her will - at least initially - before. She could live through him doing it again.

"Yes, you'll do everything I want," Damon said, proving that he could read her thoughts even more clearly than she'd imagined. "But the question is, after how much?" He didn't say how much what. He didn't have to. "Now, I know I just gave you an order," he added, half turning toward Matt but with his eyes still on Elena, "because I can still see you picturing it in your mind. But - "

Elena saw the look in Matt's eyes then, and the flaming of his cheeks, and she knew - and immediately tried to hide the knowledge from Damon - what he was going to do.

He was going to commit suicide.

"If we can't talk you out of it, we can't talk you out of it," Meredith said to Mrs. Flowers. "But - there are things out there - "

"Yes, dear, I know. And the sun is going down. It's a bad time to be outside. But as my mother always said, two witches are better than one." She gave Bonnie an absent smile. "And as you very kindly did not say before, I am very old. Why, I can remember the days before the first motorcars and airplanes. I might have knowledge that would help you in your quest for your friends - and on the other hand, I am dispensable."

"You certainly are not," Bonnie said fervently. They were using up Elena's wardrobe now, piling on the clothes. Meredith had picked up the duffel bag with Stefan's clothes in it and dumped it on his bed, but the first time she picked up a shirt, she dropped it again.

"Bonnie, you might take something of Stefan's with you as we go," she said. "See if you get any impressions from it. Um, maybe you too, Mrs. Flowers?" she added. Bonnie understood. It was one thing to let somebody call themselves a witch; it was another thing to call someone very much your senior one.

The last layer of Bonnie's wardrobe was one of Stefan's shirts, and Mrs. Flowers tucked one of his socks in her pocket.

"But I won't go out the front door," Bonnie said adamantly. She couldn't even bear to imagine the mess.

"All right, so we go out the back," Meredith said, flipping Stefan's lamp off. "Come on."

They were actually walking out the back door when the front doorbell rang.

They all three exchanged glances. Then Meredith wheeled, "It could be them!" And she hastened back to the dim front of the house. Bonnie and Mrs. Flowers followed more slowly.

Bonnie shut her eyes as she heard the door open. When there were no immediate exclamations about the mess, she opened them a slit.

There was no sign that anything unusual had happened outside the door. No smashed insect bodies - no dead or dying bugs on the front porch.

Hairs on the back of Bonnie's neck rose. Not that she wanted to see the malach. But she did want to know what had happened to them. Automatically, one hand went to her hair, to feel if a tendril had been left behind. Nothing.

"I'm looking for Matthew Honeycutt." The voice cut into Bonnie's reverie like a hot knife through butter, and Bonnie's eyes snapped all the way open.

Yes, it was Sheriff Rich Mooseburger and he was all there, from shiny boots to crisp collar. Bonnie opened her mouth, but Meredith spoke first.

"This is not Matt's house," she said, her tone quiet, her voice even.

"In fact I have already been to the Honeycutt house. And to the Sulez house and the McCulloughs'. Every one of them, in fact, suggested that if Matt weren't at one of those places, he might be out here with you."

Bonnie wanted to kick him in the shins. "Matt hasn't been stealing stop signs! He would never, ever, ever do something like that. And I wish to God I knew where he was, but I don't. None of us do!" She stopped, with the feeling that she might have said too much.

"And your names are?"

Mrs. Flowers took over. "This is Bonnie McCullough, and Meredith Sulez. I am Mrs. Flowers, the owner of this boardinghouse, and I believe I can second Bonnie's remarks about the stop signs - "

"In fact this is more serious than missing road signs, ma'am. Matthew Honeycutt is under suspicion of assaulting a young woman. There is considerable physical evidence to support her story. And she claims that they have known each other since childhood, so there can be no mistake as to identity."

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Bonnie almost shouted, "She? She who ?"

"Miss Caroline Forbes is the complainant. And I would in fact suggest, if any of the three of you should happen to see Mr. Honeycutt, that you advise him to turn himself in. Before he is taken by force into custody." He took a step toward them as if threatening to come through the door, but Mrs. Flowers silently barred the way.

"In fact," Meredith said, regaining her composure, "I'm sure you realize that you need a warrant to enter these premises. Do you have one?"

Sheriff Mossberg didn't answer. He made a sharp little right turn, walked down the pathway to his sheriff's car, and disappeared.

Chapter 25

Matt lunged at Damon in a rush that clearly demonstrated the skills that had gotten him a college football scholarship. He accelerated from utter stillness to a blur of motion, trying to tackle Damon, to bring him down.

"Run," he shouted, at the same instant. "Run!"

Elena stood still, trying to come up with Plan A after this disaster. She had been forced to watch Stefan's humiliation at Damon's hands at the boardinghouse, but she didn't think she could stand to see this.

But when she looked again, Matt was standing about a dozen yards from Damon, white-faced and grim, but alive and on his feet. He was preparing to rush Damon again.

And Elena...couldn't run. She knew that it would probably be the best thing - Damon might punish Matt briefly but most of his attention would be turned to hunting her down.

But she couldn't be sure. And she couldn't be sure that the punishment wouldn't kill Matt, or that he would be able to get away before Damon found her and had leisure time to think of him again.

No, not this Damon, pitiless and remorseless as he was.

There must be some way - she could almost feel wheels spinning in her own head.

And then she saw it.

No, not that...

But what else was there to do?

Matt was, indeed, rushing Damon again, and this time as he went for him, lithe and unstoppable and fast as a darting snake, she saw what Damon did. He simply sidestepped at the last moment, just when Matt was about to ram him with a shoulder. Matt's momentum kept him going, but Damon simply turned in place and faced him again. Then he picked up his damned pine branch. It was broken at the end where Matt had trampled it.

Damon frowned at the stick, then shrugged, lifting it - and then both he and Matt stopped frozen. Something came sailing in from the sidelines to settle on the ground between them. It lay there, stirring in the breeze.

It was a maroon and navy Pendleton shirt.

Both of the boys turned slowly toward Elena, who was wearing a white lacy camisole. She shivered slightly and wrapped her arms around herself. It seemed unusually cold for this time of evening.

Very slowly, Damon lowered the pine branch.

"Saved by your inamorata ," he said to Matt.

"I know what that means and it's not true," Matt said. "She's my friend, not my girlfriend."

Damon just smiled distantly. Elena could feel his eyes on her bare arms. "So...on to the next step," he said.

Elena wasn't surprised. Heartsick but not surprised. Neither was she surprised to see, when Damon turned to look from her to Matt and back, a flash of red. It seemed to be reflected on the inside of his sunglasses.

"Now," he said to Elena. "I think we'll put you over there on that rock, sort of half reclining. But first - another kiss." He looked back at Matt. "Get with the program, Matt; you're wasting time. First, maybe you kiss her hair, then she throws her head back and you kiss her neck, while she puts her arms around your shoulders...."

Matt, thought Elena. Damon had said Matt . It had slipped out so easily, so innocently. Suddenly her entire brain, and her body, too, seemed to be vibrating as if to a single note of music, seemed to be flooded by an icy shower-bath. And what the note was saying was not shocking, because it was something that somehow, at a subliminal level, she already knew....

That's not Damon.

This wasn't the person she had known for - was it really only nine or ten months? She had seen him when she was a human girl, and she had defied him and desired him in equal measure - and he had seemed to love her best when she was defying him.

She had seen him when she was a vampire and had been drawn to him with all her being, and he had cared for her as if she were a child.

She had seen him when she was a spirit, and from the afterlife she had learned a great deal.

He was a womanizer, he could be callous, he drifted through his victims' lives like a chimera, like a catalyst, changing other people while he himself remained unchanging and unchanged. He mystified humans, confused them, used them - leaving them bewildered, because he had the charm of the devil.

And never once had she seen him break his word. She had a rock-bottom feeling that this wasn't something that was a decision, it was so much a part of Damon, lodged so deep in his subconscious, that even he couldn't do anything to change it. He couldn't break his word. He'd starve first.

Damon was still talking to Matt, giving him orders. "...and then take off her..."

So what about his word to be her bodyguard, to keep her from harm?

He was talking to her now. "So you know when to throw your head back? After he - "

"Who are you?"

"What?"

"You heard me. Who are you? If you had really seen Stefan off and promised him to take care of me, none of this would have happened. Oh, you might be messing with Matt, but not in front of me. You're not - Damon's not stupid. He knows what a bodyguard is. He knows that watching Matt in pain hurts me as well. You're not Damon. Who...are...you?"

Matt's strength and fast-as-a-rattlesnake speed hadn't done any good. Maybe a different approach would work. As Elena spoke, she had been very slowly reaching up to Damon's face. Now, with one motion, she pulled his sunglasses off.

Eyes red as fresh new blood shone out at her.

"What have you done?" she whispered. "What have you done to Damon?"

Matt was out of the range of her voice but had been inching around, trying to get her attention. She wished fervently that Matt would just make a run for it himself. Here, he was just another way for this creature to blackmail her.

Without seeming to move quickly, the Damon-thing reached down and snatched the sunglasses from her hand. It was too fast for her to resist.

Then he seized her wrist in a painful grip.

"This would be a lot easier on both of you if you'd cooperate," he said casually. "You don't seem to realize what might happen if you make me angry."

His grip was forcing her down, forcing her to kneel. Elena decided not to let it. But unfortunately her body didn't want to cooperate; it sent urgent messages of pain to her mind, of agony, of burning, searing agony. She had thought that she could ignore it, could stand to let him break her wrist. She was wrong. At some point something in her brain blacked out completely, and the next thing she knew she was on her knees with a wrist that felt three times the right size and burned fiercely.

"Human weakness," Damon said scornfully. "It will get you every time.... You should know better than to disobey me, by now."

Not Damon, Elena thought, so vehemently that she was surprised the imposter didn't hear her.

"All right," Damon's voice continued above her as cheerfully as if he'd simply given her a suggestion. "You go sit on that rock, leaning backward, and Matt, if you'll just come over here, facing her." The tone was of polite command, but Matt ignored it and was beside her already, looking at the finger marks on Elena's wrist as if he didn't believe them.

"Matt stands up, Elena sits, or the opposite one gets the full treatment. Have fun, kiddies." Damon had the palm-camera out again.

Matt consulted Elena with his eyes. She looked at the imposter and said, enunciating carefully, "Go to hell, whoever you are."

"Been there, done that, bought the brimstone," the not-Damon creature rattled off. He gave Matt a smile that was both luminescent and terrifying. Then he waggled the pine branch.

Matt ignored it. He waited, his face stoic, for the pain to hit.

Elena struggled up to stand by him. Side by side, they could defy Damon.

Who seemed for a moment to be out of his mind. "You're trying to pretend you're not afraid of me. But you will be. If you had any sense, you would be now."

Belligerently, he took a step toward Elena. "Why aren't you afraid of me?"

"Whoever you are, you're just an oversized bully. You've hurt Matt. You've hurt me. I'm sure you can kill us. But we're not afraid of bullies."

"You will be afraid." Now Damon's voice had dropped to a menacing whisper. "Just wait."

Even as something was ringing in Elena's ears, telling her to listen to those last words, to make a connection - who did that sound like? - the pain hit.

Her knees were knocked out by it. But she wasn't just kneeling now. She was trying to roll into a ball, trying to curl around the agony. All rational thought was swept from her head. She sensed Matt beside her, trying to hold her, but she could no more communicate with him than she could fly. She shuddered and fell to her side, as if having a seizure. Her entire universe was pain, and she only heard voices as if they came from far away.

"Stop it!" Matt sounded frantic. "Stop it! Are you crazy? That's Elena , for God's sake! Do you want to kill her ?"

And then the not-Damon-thing advising him mildly, "I wouldn't try that again," but the only sound Matt made was a scream of primal rage.

"Caroline!" Bonnie was raging, pacing back and forth in Stefan's room while Meredith did something else with the computer. "How dare she?"

"She doesn't dare try to attack Stefan or Elena outright - there's the oath," Meredith said. "So she's thought this up to get at all of us."

"But Matt - "

"Oh, Matt's handy," Meredith said grimly. "And unfortunately there's the matter of the physical evidence on both of them."

"What do you mean? Matt doesn't - "

"The scratches, my dear," put in Mrs. Flowers, looking sad, "from your razor-toothed bug. The poultice I put on will have healed them so that they'll look like a girl's fingernail scratches - about now. And the mark it left on your neck..." Mrs. Flowers coughed delicately. "It looks like what in my day was called a ‘love bite.' Perhaps a sign of a tryst that ended in force? Not that your friend would ever do anything like that."

"And remember how Caroline looked when we saw her, Bonnie?" Meredith said dryly. "Not the crawling around - I'll bet anything she's walking just fine now. But her face. She had a black eye coming in and a swollen cheek. Perfect for the time frame."

Bonnie felt as if everyone was two steps ahead of her. "What time frame?"

"The night the bug attacked Matt. It was the morning after that that the sheriff called and talked to him. Matt admitted that his mother hadn't seen him all night, and that Neighborhood Watch guy saw Matt drive up to his house and, basically, pass out."

"That was from the bug poison. He'd just been fighting the malach!"

"We know that. But they'll say he'd just come back from attacking Caroline. Caroline's mother will hardly be fit to testify - you saw how she was. So who's to say that Matt wasn't over at Caroline's? Especially if he was planning assault."

"We are! We can vouch for him - " Bonnie suddenly stumbled to a halt. "No, I guess it was after he left that this was supposed to have happened. But, no, this is all wrong!" She took up pacing again. "I saw one of those bugs up close and it was exactly the way Matt described...."

"And what's left of it now? Nothing. Besides, they'll say that you would say anything for him."

Bonnie couldn't stand just walking aimlessly around anymore. She had to get to Matt, had to warn him - if they could even find him or Elena. "I thought you were the one who couldn't wait a minute to find them," she said accusingly to Meredith.

"I know; I was. But I had to look something up - and besides I wanted one more try at that page only vampires are supposed to read. The Shi no Shi one. But I've tweaked the screen in all the ways I can think of, and if there's something written here, I certainly can't find it."

"Best not to waste more time on it, then," Mrs. Flowers said. "Come get into your jacket, my dear. Shall we take the Yellow Wheeler or not?"

For just a moment Bonnie had a wild vision of a horse-drawn vehicle, a sort of Cinderella carriage but not pumpkin-shaped. Then she remembered seeing Mrs. Flowers' ancient Model T - painted yellow - parked inside what must be the old stables that belonged to the boardinghouse.

"We did better when we were on foot than we or Matt did in a car," said Meredith, giving the computer monitor controls a final vicious click. "We're more mobile than - oh, my God! I did it! "

"Did what?"

"The website. Come look at this."

Both Bonnie and Mrs. Flowers came over to the computer. The screen was bright green with thin, faint, dark green writing.

"How did you do it?" Bonnie demanded as Meredith bent to get a notebook and pen to copy down what they saw.

"I don't know. I just tweaked the color settings one last time - I'd already tried it for Power Saver, Low Battery, High Resolution, High Contrast, and every combination I could think of."

They stared at the words.

Tired of that lapis lazuli?

Want to take a vacation in Hawaii?

Sick of that same old liquid cuisine?

Come and visit Shi no Shi.

After that came an ad for the "Death of Death," a place where vampires could be cured of their cursed state and become human again. And then there was an address. Just a city road, no mention of what state, or, for that matter, what city. But it was a Clue.

"Stefan didn't mention a road address," Bonnie said.

"Maybe he didn't want to scare Elena," Meredith said grimly. "Or maybe, when he looked at the page, the address wasn't there."

Bonnie shivered. "Shi no Shi - I don't like the sound of it. And don't laugh at me," she added to Meredith defensively. "Remember what Stefan said about trusting my intuition?"

"Nobody's laughing, Bonnie. We need to get to Elena and Matt. What does your intuition tell you about that?"

"It says that we're going to get into trouble, and that Matt and Elena are in trouble already."

"Funny, because that's just what my judgment tells me."

"Are we ready, now?" Mrs. Flowers handed out flashlights.

Meredith tried hers and found it had a strong, steady beam.

"Let's do it," she said, automatically flipping off Stefan's lamp again.

Bonnie and Mrs. Flowers followed her down the stairs, out of the house, and onto the street they had run from not so long ago. Bonnie's pulse was racing, her ears ready for the slightest whip whip sound. But except for the beams of their flashlights, the Old Wood was completely dark and eerily silent. Not even the sound of birdsong broke the moonless night.

They plunged in, and in minutes they were lost.

Matt woke up on his side and for a moment didn't know where he was. Outdoors. Ground. Picnic? Hiking? Fell asleep?

And then he tried to move and agony flared like a geyser of flame, and he remembered everything. That bastard , torturing Elena, he thought.

Torturing Elena.

It didn't go together, not with Damon . What was it Elena had been saying to him at the end that had made him so angry?

The thought nagged at him, but it was just another unanswered question, like Stefan's note in Elena's diary.

Matt realized that he could move, if very slowly. He looked around, moving his head by careful increments until he saw Elena, lying near him like a broken doll. He hurt and he was desperately thirsty. She would feel the same way. The first thing was to get her to a hospital; the kind of muscular contractions brought on by that degree of pain could break an arm or even a leg. They were certainly strong enough to cause a sprain or dislocation. Not to mention Damon spraining her wrist.

That was what the practical, sensible part of him was thinking. But the question that kept going around in his mind still made him reel in complete astonishment.

He hurt Elena? The way he hurt me? I don't believe it. I knew he was sick, twisted, but I never heard of him hurting the girls. And never, never Elena. Never . But me - if he treats me the way he treats Stefan, he'll kill me. I don't have a vampire's resilience.

I have to get Elena out of this before he kills me. I can't leave her alone with him.

Instinctively, somehow, he knew that Damon was still around. This was confirmed when he heard some little noise, turned his head too fast, and found himself staring at a blurred and wobbling black boot. The blur and wobble were the result of turning too quickly, but as quickly as he'd turned, he'd suddenly felt his face pressed into the dirt and pine needles on the ground of the clearing.

By The Boot. It was on his neck, grinding his face into the dirt now. Matt made a wordless sound of pure fury and grabbed at the leg above the boot with both hands, trying to get a purchase and throw Damon off. But while he could grasp the smooth leather of the boot, moving it in any direction was impossible. It was as if the vampire in the boot could turn himself to iron. Matt could feel the tendons in his throat stand out, his face turn red, and his muscles bunch under his shirt as he made a violent effort to heave Damon off. At last, exhausted, chest heaving, he lay still.

In that very same instant, The Boot was lifted. Exactly, he realized, at the moment when he was too tired to lift his head himself. He made a supreme effort and lifted it a few inches.

And The Boot caught him under the chin and lifted his face a little higher.

"What a pity," Damon said with infuriating contempt. "You humans are so weak. It's no fun to play with you at all."

"Stefan...will come back," Matt got out, looking up at Damon from where he was unintentionally groveling on the ground. "Stefan will kill you."

"Guess what?" Damon said conversationally. "Your face is all messed up on one side - scratches, you know. You've got sort of a Phantom of the Opera thing going on."

"If he doesn't, I will. I don't know how, but I will. I swear it."

"Careful what you promise."

Just as Matt got his arm working enough to prop him up - exactly then, to the millisecond - Damon reached out and grabbed him painfully by a handful of hair, yanking his head up.

"Stefan," Damon said, looking straight down into Matt's face and forcing Matt to look up at him, no matter how Matt tried to turn his face away, "was only powerful for a few days because he was drinking the blood of a very powerful spirit who hadn't yet adapted to Earth yet. But look at her now." He twisted his grip on Matt's hair again, more painfully. "Some spirit. Lying there in the dirt. Now the Power is back where it should be. Do you understand? Do you - boy?"

Matt just stared at Elena. "How could you do that?" he whispered finally.

"An object lesson in what it means to defy me. And surely you wouldn't want me to be sexist and leave her out?" Damon tched . "You have to keep up with the times."

Matt said nothing. He had to get Elena out of this.

"Worrying about the girl? She's just playing possum now. Hoping I'll ignore her and concentrate on you."

"You're a liar."

"So I'll concentrate on you. Speaking of keeping up with the times, you know - except for the scratches and things, you're a fine-looking young man."

At first the words meant nothing to Matt. When he understood them, Matt could feel his blood freeze in his body.

"As a vampire, I can give you an informed and honest opinion. And as a vampire, I'm getting very thirsty. There's you. And then there's the girl who's still pretending to be asleep. I'm sure you can see what I'm getting at."

I believe in you, Elena, Matt thought. He's a liar, and he'll always be a liar. "Take my blood," he said wearily.

"Are you sure?" Now Damon sounded solicitous. "If you resist, the pain is horrible."

"Just get it over with."

"Whatever you like." Damon knelt fluidly on one knee, at the same time twisting his grip on Matt's hair, making Matt wince. The new grip dragged Matt's upper body across Damon's knee, so that his head was thrown back, his neck arched and exposed. In fact Matt had never felt so exposed, so helpless, so vulnerable in his life.

"You can always change your mind," Damon taunted him.

Matt shut his eyes, stubbornly saying nothing.

At the last moment, though, as Damon bent with fangs exposed, Matt's fingers almost involuntarily, almost as if it were something his body was doing apart from his mind, clenched themselves into a fist and he suddenly, unpredictably, brought the fist swinging up to deal a violent blow to Damon's temple. But - serpent-quick - Damon reached up and caught the blow almost nonchalantly in an open hand, and held Matt's fingers in a crushing grip - just as razor-sharp fangs opened a vein in Matt's throat and an open mouth fastened on his exposed throat, sucking and drinking the blood that sprayed upward.

Elena - awake but unable to move from where she had fallen, unable to make a sound or turn her head - was forced to listen to the entire exchange, forced to hear Matt's groan as his blood was taken against his will, as he resisted to the last.

And then she thought of something that, as dizzy and frightened as she was, almost made her pass out in fear.

Chapter 26

Ley lines. Stefan had spoken of them, and with the influence of the spirit world still on her, she had seen them without trying. Now, still lying on her side, channeling what remained of that Power to her eyes, she looked at the earth.

And that was what made her mind go gray in terror.

As far as she could see there were lines converging here from all directions. Thick lines that glowed with a cold phosphorescence, medium-sized lines that had the dull shine of bad mushrooms in a cellar, and tiny lines that looked like perfectly straight cracks of the outer surface layer of the world. They were like veins and arteries and nerves just under the skin of the clearing-beast.

No wonder it seemed alive. She was lying on a massive convergence of ley lines. And if the cemetery was worse than this - she couldn't imagine what it might look like.

If Damon had somehow found a way to tap into that Power...no wonder he seemed different, arrogant, undefeatable. Ever since he had released her to drink Matt's blood, she had kept shaking her head, trying to shake off the humiliation with it. But now finally she stopped as she tried to calculate a way to make use of this Power. There had to be a way to do it.

The grayness wouldn't clear from her vision. Finally Elena realized that it was not because she was faint, but because it was getting dark - twilight outside the clearing, true darkness coming into it.

She tried again to lift herself up, and this time she succeeded. Almost immediately a hand was extended to her and, automatically, she took it, letting it draw her to her feet.

She faced - whoever it was, Damon or whatever was using his features or his body. Despite the almost-darkness, he still wore those wraparound sunglasses. She could make nothing out of the rest of his face.

"Now," the thing in the sunglasses said. "You're going to come with me."

It was nearing full dark, and they were in the clearing that was a beast.

This place - it was unwholesome. She was afraid of the clearing as she had never been afraid of a person or creature. It resounded with malevolence, and she couldn't shut her ears to it.

She had to keep thinking, and keep thinking straight, she thought.

She was terribly frightened for Matt; frightened that Damon had taken too much blood or had played too hard with his toy; breaking it.

And she was afraid of this Damon thing. She was also worried about the influence this place might have had on the real Damon. The woods around them shouldn't have any effect on vampires, except to hurt them. Was the possible-Damon inside the possessor hurt? If he could understand anything of what was happening, could he distinguish that hurt from his hurt and anger at Stefan?

She didn't know. She did know that there had been a terrible look in his eyes when Stefan had told him to get out of the boardinghouse. And she did know that there were creatures in the forest, malach, that could influence a person's mind. She was afraid, deeply afraid, that the malach were using Damon now, blackening his darkest desires and twisting him into something horrible, something he had never been even at his worst.

But how could she be sure? How could she know whether or not there was something else behind the malach, something that controlled them ? Her soul was telling her that this might be the case, that Damon might be completely unconscious of what his body was doing, but that might just be wishful thinking.

Certainly all she could sense around her were small, evil creatures. She could feel them encircling the clearing, strange insect-like beings like the one that had attacked Matt. They were in a furor of excitement, whipping their tentacles around to make a noise almost like a buzzing helicopter.

Were they influencing Damon now? Certainly, he had never before hurt any of the other humans she knew the way he had today. She had to get all three of them out of this place. It was diseased, contaminated. Once again she felt a wave of longing for Stefan, who might know what to do in this situation.

She turned, slowly, to look at Damon.

"May I call someone to come and help Matt? I'm afraid to leave him here; I'm afraid they'll get him." Just as well to let him know that she knew they were hiding in the liverwort and the rhododendron and mountain holly bushes all around.

Damon hesitated; he seemed to consider it. Then he shook his head.

"We wouldn't want to give them too many clues to where you are," he said cheerily. "It'll be an interesting experiment to see if the malach do get him - and how they do it."

"It wouldn't be an interesting experiment for me ." Elena's voice was flat. "Matt is my friend."

"Nevertheless, we'll leave him here for now. I don't trust you - even to give me a message to Meredith or Bonnie - to send on my phone."

Elena didn't say anything. As a matter of fact, he was right not to trust her, as she and Meredith and Bonnie had worked out an elaborate code of harmless-sounding phrases as soon as they knew that Damon was after Elena. A lifetime ago for her - literally - but she could still remember them.

Silently, she simply followed Damon to the Ferrari.

She was responsible for Matt.

"You're not putting up much of an argument this time, and I wonder what you're plotting."

"I'm plotting that we might as well get on with it. If you'll tell me what ‘it' is," she said, more bravely than she felt.

"Well, now what ‘it' is, is up to you." Damon gave Matt a kick in the ribs in passing. He was now pacing in a circle around the clearing, which seemed smaller than ever, a circle which didn't include her. She took a few paces toward him - and slipped. She didn't know how it happened. Maybe the giant animal breathed. Maybe it was just the slick pine needles under her boots.

But one moment she was heading for Matt and the next her feet had gone out from under her and she was heading for the ground with nothing to grab onto.

And then, smoothly and unhurriedly, she was in Damon's arms. With centuries of Virginian etiquette behind her she automatically said, "Thank you."

"My pleasure."

Yes, she thought. That's all it means. It is his pleasure, and that's all that matters.

That was when she noticed that they were headed for her Jaguar.

"Oh, no, we don't," she said.

"Oh, yes, we will - if I please," he said. "Unless you want to see your friend Matt suffer like that again. At some point his heart will give out."

"Damon." She pushed her way out of his arms, standing on her own feet. "I don't understand. This isn't like you. Take what you want and go."

He just kept looking at her. "I was doing just that."

"You don't have to" - for the life of her, she couldn't keep a tremor out of her voice - "take me anywhere special to take my blood. And Matt won't know. He's out."

For a long moment there was silence in the clearing. Utter silence. The night birds and the crickets stopped making their music. Suddenly Elena felt as if she were on some kind of thrill ride that plummeted down, leaving her stomach and organs still at the top. Then Damon put it in words.

"I want you . Exclusively."

Elena braced herself, trying to keep a clear head despite the fog that seemed to be invading it.

"You know that that's not possible."

"I know that it was possible for Stefan. When you were with him, you didn't think about anything but him. You couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't feel anything but him."

Elena's gooseflesh now covered her whole body. Speaking carefully around the obstruction in her throat, she said, "Damon, did you do something to Stefan?"

"Now, why would I want to do something like that?"

Very low, Elena said, "You and I both know why."

"Do you mean," Damon started out speaking casually, but his voice grew more intense as he gripped her shoulders, "so that you would see nothing but me , hear nothing but me , think of nothing but me ?"

Still quietly, still controlling her terror, Elena said, "Take off the sunglasses, Damon."

Damon glanced upwards and around as if to reassure himself that no last ray of sunset could pierce the green-gray world that surrounded them. Then with one hand, he stripped off the sunglasses.

Elena found herself looking into eyes that were so black there seemed to be no difference between iris and pupil. She...turned a switch in her brain, did something so that all her senses were tuned onto Damon's face, his expression, the Power circulating through him.

His eyes were still as black as the depths of an unexplored cave. No red. But then, he'd had time, this time to get ready for her.

I believe what I saw before, Elena thought. With my own eyes.

"Damon, I'll do anything, anything you want. But you have to tell me. Did you do something to Stefan?"

"Stefan was still high on your blood when he left you," he reminded her, and before she could speak to deny this - "and, to answer your question precisely, I don't know where he is. On that, you have my word. But in any case, it's true, what you were thinking earlier," he added, as Elena tried to step away, to get out of the grip he had on her upper arms. "I'm the only one, Elena. The only one you haven't conquered. The only one you can't manipulate. Intriguing, isn't it?"

Suddenly, in spite of her fear, she was furious. "Then why hurt Matt? He's just a friend. What's he got to do with it?"

"Just a friend." And Damon began to laugh the way he had before, eerily.

"Well, I know he didn't have anything to do with Stefan leaving," Elena snapped.

Damon turned on her, but by then the clearing was so dim that she couldn't read his expression at all. "And who said I did? But that doesn't mean I'm not going to make use of the opportunity." He picked Matt up easily and held up something that shone silver from his other hand.

Her keys. From her jeans pocket. Taken, no doubt, when she was lying unconscious on the ground.

She could tell nothing from his voice, either, except that it was bitter and grim - all usual if he were talking about Stefan. "With your blood in him, I couldn't have killed my brother if I had tried, the last time I saw him," he added.

"Did you try?"

"As a matter of fact, no. You have my word on that as well."

"And you don't know where he is?"

"No." He hefted Matt.

"What do you think you're doing?

"Taking him with us. He's hostage for your good behavior."

"Oh, no," Elena said flatly, pacing. "This is between you and me. You've hurt Matt enough." She blinked and once again almost screamed to find Damon much too close, much too fast. "I'll do whatever you want. Whatever you want. But not here out in the open and not with Matt around."

Come on, Elena, she was thinking. Where's that vampy behavior when you want it? You used to be able to vamp any guy; now, just because he's a vampire, you can't do it?

"Take me somewhere," she said softly, intertwining her arm with his free one, "but in the Ferrari. I don't want to go in my car. Take me in the Ferrari."

Damon paced back to the trunk of the Ferrari, unlocked it, and looked inside. Then he looked at Matt. It was clear that the tall, well-built boy wasn't going to fit in to the trunk...at least, not with all his limbs attached.

"Don't you even think about it," Elena said. "Just put him in the Jaguar with the keys and he'll be safe enough - lock him in." Elena fervently prayed that what she was saying was true.

For a moment Damon said nothing, then he looked up with a smile so brilliant she could see it in the dusk. "All right," he said. He dumped Matt on the ground again. "But if you try to run while I move the cars, I run him over."

Damon, Damon, will you never understand? Humans don't do that to their friends, Elena thought as he brought the Ferrari out so he could bring the Jaguar in, so he could dump Matt in it.

"All right," she said in a small voice. She was afraid to look at Damon. "Now - what do you want?"

Damon inclined from the waist in a very graceful bow, indicating the Ferrari. She wondered what would happen once she got in. If he were any normal attacker - if there wasn't Matt to think about - if she

didn't fear the forest even more than she feared him...

She hesitated and then got into Damon's car.

Inside, she pulled her camisole out of her jeans to conceal the fact that she wasn't wearing a seat belt. She doubted Damon ever wore a seat belt or locked his doors or anything like that. Precautions weren't his thing. And now she prayed that he had other matters on his mind.

"Seriously, Damon, where are we going?" she said as he got into the Ferrari.

"First, how about one for the road?" Damon suggested, his voice fake-jocular.

Elena had expected something like this. She sat passively as Damon took her chin in fingers that trembled slightly, and tilted it up. She shut her eyes as she felt the double-snakebite pinch of razor-sharp fangs piercing her skin. She kept her eyes shut as her attacker fastened his mouth on the bleeding flesh and began to drink deeply. Damon's idea of "one for the road" was just what she would have expected: enough to put both of them in danger. But it wasn't until she actually began to feel as if she would pass out any minute that she shoved at his shoulder.

He held on for a few more very painful seconds just to show who was Boss here. Then he let go of her, licking his lips avidly, his eyes actually gleaming at her through the Ray-Bans.

"Exquisite," he said. "Unbelievable. Why you're - "

Yeah, tell me I'm a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That's the way to my heart.

"Can we go now?" she asked pointedly. And then, as she suddenly remembered Damon's driving habits, she added deliberately, "Be careful; this road twists and turns a lot."

It had the effect she had hoped for. Damon hit the accelerator and they shot out of the clearing at high speed. Then they were taking the sharp turns of the Old Wood faster than Elena had ever driven through here; faster than anyone had dared go with her as a passenger before.

But still, they were her roads. From childhood on she had played here. There was only one family who lived right on the perimeter of the Old Wood, but their driveway was on the right side of the road - her side - and she got herself ready for it. He would take the sudden curve to the left just before the second curve that was the Dunstans' driveway - and on the second curve she would jump.

There was no sidewalk edging Old Wood Road, of course, but at that point there was a heavy growth of rhododendron and other bushes. All she could do was pray. Pray that she didn't snap her neck on impact. Pray that she didn't break an arm or leg before she limped through the few yards of woods to the driveway. Pray that the Dunstans were home when she pounded on their door and pray that they listened when she told them not to let the vampire in behind her.

She saw the curve. She didn't know why the Damon-thing couldn't read her mind, but apparently he couldn't. He wasn't speaking and his only precaution against her trying to get out seemed to be speed.

She was going to get hurt, she knew that. But the worst part of any hurt was fear, and she wasn't afraid.

As he rounded the curve, she pulled the handle and pushed open the door as hard as she could with her hands while she kicked it as hard as she could with her feet. The door swung open, quickly being caught by centrifugal force, as were Elena's legs. As was Elena.

Her kick alone took her halfway out of the car. Damon grabbed for her and got only a handful of hair. For a moment she thought he would keep her in, even without keeping hold of her. She tumbled over and over in the air, floating, remaining about two feet off the ground, reaching out to grab fronds, branches of bushes, anything she could use to slow her velocity. And in this place where magic and physics met; she was able to do it, to slow while still floating on Damon's power, although it took her much farther from the Dunstans' house than she wanted.

Then she did hit the ground, bounced, and did her best to twist in the air, to take the impact on her buttock or the back of a shoulder, but something went wrong and her left heel hit first - God! - and tangled, swinging her around completely, slamming her knee into concrete - God, God! - flipping her in the air and bringing her down on her right arm so hard it seemed to be trying to drive it into her shoulder.

She had the wind knocked out of her by the first blow and was forced to hiss air in by the second and third.

Despite the flipping, flying universe, there was one sign she couldn't miss - an unusual spruce growing into the road that she had noticed ten feet behind her when she'd exploded out of the car. Tears were pouring uncontrollably down her cheeks as she pulled at tendrils of bush that had entangled her ankle - and a good thing, too. A few tears might have blurred her vision, made her afraid - as she had been with the last two explosions of pain - that she might pass out. But she was out on the road, her eyes were washed clear, she could see the spruce and the sunset both directly ahead, and she was thoroughly conscious. And that meant that if she headed for the sunset but at a forty-five-degree angle to her right, she couldn't miss the Dunstans'; driveway, house, barn, cornfield were all there to guide her after perhaps twenty-five steps in the woods.

She had barely stopped rolling when she was pulling at the bush that had thwarted her and getting to her feet just as she pulled the last entangling stems from her hair. The calculation about the Dunstans' house happened instantaneously in her head, even as she turned and saw the crushed swath she'd cut through the greenery and the blood on the road.

At first she looked at her skinned hands in bewilderment; they couldn't have left such a gory trail. And they hadn't. One knee had been skinned - flayed, really - right through her jeans - and one seriously messed up leg, less bloody but causing her sheets of pain like white lighting even while she was not trying to move it. Two arms with quite a lot of skin removed.

No time to find out how much or to figure out what she'd done to her shoulder. Ascreeeeeeech of brakes ahead. Lord, he's slow. No, I'm fast, hyped up by pain and terror. Use it!

She ordered her legs to sprint into the forest. Her right leg obeyed, but when she swiveled her left and it hit the ground fireworks went off behind her eyes. She was in a state of hyper-alertness; she saw the stick even as she was falling. She rolled over once or twice, which caused dull red flares of pain to go off in her head, and then she was able to grab it. It might have been specially designed for a crutch, around underarm height and blunt on one end but sharp on the other. She tucked it under her left arm and somehow willed herself up from her place in the mud: boosting off with her right leg and catching herself on the crutch so that she scarcely had to touch her left foot to the ground.

She'd got turned around in the fall and had to twist to right herself again - but there she saw it, the last remains of sunset and the road behind her. Head forty-five-degrees right from that glow, she thought. Thank God, it was her right arm that was messed up; this way she could support herself with her left

shoulder on the crutch. Still without a moment's hesitation, without giving Damon an extra millisecond to follow her, she plunged in her chosen direction into the forest.

Into the Old Wood.

Chapter 27

When Damon woke up, he was wrestling with the wheel of the Ferrari. He was on a narrow road, heading almost straight into a glorious sunset - and the passenger door was waving open.

Once again, only the combination of almost instantaneous reflex and perfectly designed automobile allowed him to keep out of the wide, muddy ditches on either side of the one-lane road. But he managed it and ended up with the sunset at his back, gazing at the long shadows down the road and wondering what the hell had just happened to him.

Was he sleep-driving now? The passenger door - why was it open?

And then something happened. A long, thin thread, slightly waving, almost like a single strand of gossamer, lit up as the reddish sunlight hit it. It was dangling from the top of the passenger window, which was shut, with the roof down.

He didn't bother to pull the car to one side, but stopped in the middle of the road and went around to look at that hair.

In his fingers, held toward the light, it turned white. But turned toward the dark of the forest, it showed its true color: gold.

A long, slightly waving, golden hair.

Elena.

As soon as he had identified it, he got back into the car and began to backtrack. Something had ripped Elena right out of his car without putting so much as a scratch on the paint. What could have done that?

How had he managed to get Elena to go for a spin anyway? And why couldn't he remember? Had they both been attacked...?

When he backtracked, however, the marks by the passenger's side of the road told the entire grisly story. For some reason, Elena had been frightened into jumping out of the car - or some power had pulled her. And Damon, who now felt as if there were steam rising from his skin, knew that in all the woods there were only two creatures that could have been responsible.

He sent out a scouting probe, a simple circle that was meant to be undetectable, and almost lost control of the car again.

Merda! That blast had come out as a sphere-shaped killing strafe - birds were dropping out of the sky. It tore through the Old Wood, through Fell's Church, which surrounded it, and into the areas beyond, before finally dying out hundreds of miles away.

Power? He wasn't a vampire, he was Death Incarnate. Damon had a vague thought of pulling over and waiting until the turmoil inside himself had stopped. Where had such Power come from?

Stefan would have stopped, would have dithered around, wondering. Damon just grinned savagely, gunned the engine, and sent thousands of probes raining from the sky, all attuned to catch a fox-shaped creature running or hiding in the Old Wood.

He got a hit in a tenth of a second.

There. Under a black cohosh bush, if he wasn't mistaken - under some unspeakable bush, anyway. And Shinichi knew he was coming.

Good. Damon sent a wave of Power directly at the fox, catching it in akekkai , a sort of invisible rope-barrier that he tightened deliberately, slowly, around the struggling animal. Shinichi fought back, with killing force. Damon used the kekkai to pick him up bodily and slam the little fox body into the ground. After a few of these slams Shinichi decided to stop fighting and played dead instead. That was fine with Damon. It was the way he thought Shinichi looked best, except for the bit about playing.

At last he had to stash the Ferrari between two trees and ran swiftly to the bush where Shinichi was now fighting the barrier around him to get into human form.

Standing back, eyes narrowed, arms crossed on his chest, Damon watched the struggle for a while. Then he let up enough on the kekkai's field to allow the change.

And the instant Shinichi became human, Damon's hands were around his throat.

"Where is Elena, kono bakayarou?" In a lifetime as a vampire you learned a lot of curse words. Damon preferred to use those of a victim's native language. He called Shinichi everything he could think of, because Shinichi was fighting, and was Calling telepathically for his sister. Damon had some choice things to say about that in Italian, where hiding behind your younger twin sister was...well, good for a lot of creative cursing.

He felt another fox-shape racing at him - and he realized that Misao intended to kill. She was in her true shape as a kitsune: just like the russet thing he'd tried to run over while driving with Damaris. A fox, yes, but a fox with two, three...six tails altogether. The extra ones usually were invisible, he gathered, as he neatly caught her in a kekkai as well. But she was ready to show them, ready to use all her powers to rescue her brother.

Damon contented himself with holding her as she struggled vainly within the barrier, and saying to Shinichi, "Your baby sister fights better than you do, bakayarou . Now, give me Elena. "

Shinichi changed forms abruptly and leaped for Damon's throat, sharp white teeth in evidence, top and bottom. They were both too keyed up, too high on testosterone - and Damon, on his new Power - to let it go.

Damon actually felt the teeth scrape his throat before he got his hands again around the fox's neck. But this time Shinichi was showing his tails, a fan that Damon didn't bother to count.

Instead he stomped one neat boot on the fan and pulled with his other two hands. Misao, watching, shrieked in anger and anguish. Shinichi thrashed and arched, golden eyes fixed on Damon's. In another minute his spine would crack.

"I'll enjoy that," Damon told him sweetly. "Because I'll bet that Misao knows whatever you know. Too bad you won't be here to see her die."

Shinichi, rabid with fury, seemed willing to die and condemn Misao to Damon's mercies just to avoid losing the fight. But then his eyes darkened abruptly, his body went limp, and words appeared faintly in Damon's mind.

...hurts...can't...think...

Damon regarded him gravely. Now, Stefan, at this point, would release a good deal of the pressure on the kitsune so the poor little fox could think, Damon, on the other hand, increased the pressure briefly, then released it back to the previous level.

"Is that better?" he asked solicitously. "Can the cute little foxie think now?"

You...bastard...

Angry as he was, Damon suddenly remembered the point of all this.

"What happened to Elena? Her trail runs out up against a tree. Is she inside it? You have seconds left to live, now. Talk."

"Talk," seconded another voice, and Damon barely glanced up at Misao. He'd left her relatively unguarded and she'd found power and room to change into her human shape. He took it in instantaneously, dispassionately.

She was small-boned and petite, looking like any Japanese schoolgirl, except that her hair was just like her brother's - black tipped with red. The only difference was that the red in her hair was lighter and brighter - a truly brilliant scarlet. The bangs that fell into her eyes had blazing fiery tips, and so did the silky dark hair falling over her shoulders. It was striking but the only neurons that lit in Damon's mind in response were connected to fire and danger and deception.

She might have fallen into a trap, Shinichi managed.

A trap? Damon frowned. What kind of trap?

I'll take you to where you can look into them, Shinichi said evasively.

"And the fox can suddenly think again. But you know what? I don't think you're cute at all," Damon whispered, then dropped the kitsune on the ground. Shinichi-as-a-human fountained up, and Damon dropped the barrier just long enough to let the fox in human form try to take his head off with one punch. He leaned away from it easily, and returned it with a blow that knocked Shinichi back into the tree hard enough to bounce. Then, while the kitsune was still dazed and glassy-eyed, he picked him up, slung him over one shoulder, and started back to the car.

What about me? Misao was trying to curb furious and sound pathetic, but she really wasn't very good at it.

"You're not cute, either," Damon said, recklessly. He could get to like this super-Power thing. "But if you mean, when do you get out, it's when I get Elena back. Safe and healthy, with all her bits attached."

He left her cursing. He wanted to get Shinichi to wherever they had to go while the fox was still dazed and in pain.

Elena was counting. Go straight one, go straight two - untangle crutch from creeper, three, four, go straight five - it was definitely getting darker now, go straight six, caught by something in hair, yank , seven, eight, go straight - damn! A fallen tree. Too high to scramble over. She'd have to go around it. All right, to the right, one, two, three - a long tree - seven steps. Seven steps back - now, sharp right turn and keep walking. Much as you'd like to, you can't count any of those steps. So you're at nine. Straighten yourself because the tree was perpendicular - dear heaven, it's pitch dark now. Call that eleven and -

- she was flying. What had caused her crutch to slip, she didn't know, couldn't tell. It was too dark to go frisking around, maybe finding herself a case of poison oak. What she had to do was to think about things, to think so that this all-pervading hellish pain in her left leg would quiet down. It hadn't helped her right arm either - that instinctive wind milling, trying to catch something and save herself. God, that fall had hurt. The whole side of her body hurt so much -

But she had to get to civilization because she believed only civilization could help Matt.

You have to get up again, Elena.

I'm doing it!

Now - she couldn't see anything, but she had a pretty good idea which way she'd been pointed when she'd fallen. And if she was wrong, she would hit the road and be able to backtrack.

Twelve, thirteen - she kept counting, kept talking to herself. When she reached twenty she felt relief and joy. Any minute now, she'd hit the driveway.

Any minute now, she'd hit it.

It was pitch black out, but she was careful to scuff the ground so she would know, the minute she hit it.

Any...minute...now...

When Elena reached forty she knew she was in trouble.

But where could she have gone so far wrong? Every time some small obstacle had made her turn right, she'd turned carefully left the next time. And there was that whole line of landmarks in her way, the house, the barn, the small cornfield. How could she have gotten lost? How? It had only been half a minute in the forest...only a few steps in the Old Wood.

Even the trees were changing. Where she had been, near the road, most of the trees had been hickory or tulip. Now she was in a thicket of white oaks and red oaks...and conifers.

Old oaks...and on the ground, needles and leaves that muffled her foot-hops into soundlessness.

Soundlessness...but she needed help!

"Mrs. Dunstan! Mr. Dunstan! Kristin! Jake!" She threw the names out into a world that was doing its best to muffle her voice. In fact, in the darkness she could discern a certain swirling wispy grayness that seemed to be - yes - it was fog.

"Mrs. Dunstaa - a-aan! Mr. Dunstaa-aa-an! Kriiiissstiiiinnn! Jaaa-aaake!"

She needed shelter; she needed help. Everything hurt, most of all her left leg and right shoulder. She could just imagine what a sight she would make: covered in mud and leaves from falling every few feet, her hair in a wild mop from being caught on trees, blood everywhere....

One good thing: she certainly didn't look like Elena Gilbert. Elena Gilbert had long silky hair that was always perfectly coifed or charmingly dishabille . Elena Gilbert set the fashions in Fell's Church and would never be seen wearing a torn camisole and jeans covered with mud. Whoever they thought this forlorn stranger was, they wouldn't think she was Elena.

But the forlorn stranger was feeling a sudden qualm. She'd walked through woods all her life and never had her hair caught once. Oh, of course she had been able to see then, but she didn't remember having to step out of her way often to avoid it.

Now, it was as if the trees were deliberately reaching down to catch and snag her hair. She had to hold her body clumsily still and try to whip her head away in the worst cases - she couldn't manage to stay upright and get the tendril torn out as well.

But painful as the tearing at her hair was, nothing scared her like the grabbing at her legs.

Elena had grown up playing in this forest, and there had always been plenty of room to walk without hurting herself. But now...things were reaching out, fibrous tendrils were grabbing at her ankle just where it hurt most. And then it was agony to try to rip with her fingers at these thick, sap-coated, stinging roots.

I'm frightened, she thought, putting into words at last what all her feelings had been since she stepped into the darkness of the Old Wood. She was damp with dew and sweat, her hair was as wet as if she'd been standing in the rain. It was so dark! And now her imagination began to work, and unlike most people's imaginations it had genuine, solid information to work with . A vampire's hand seemed to tangle in her hair. After an endless time of agony in her ankle and her shoulder, she had twisted the "hand" out of her hair - to find another curling stalk.

All right. She would ignore the pain and get her bearings here, here where there was a remarkable tree, a massive white pine that had a huge hole in its center, big enough for Bonnie to get into. She would put that flat at her back and then walk straight west - she couldn't see stars because of the cloud cover, but she felt that west was to her left. If she were correct, it would bring her to the road. If she were wrong and it was north, it would take her to the Dunstans'. If it were south, it would eventually take her to another curve of the road. If it were east...well, it would be a long walk, but it would eventually take her to the creek.

But first she would gather all her Power, all the Power she'd been unconsciously using to dull the pain and give her strength - she would gather it and light up this place so she could see if the road was visible - or, better, a house - from where she stood. It was only a human's power but, again, the knowledge of how to use it made all the difference, she thought. She gathered the Power in one tight white ball and then loosed it, twisting to look around before it dissipated.

Trees. Trees. Trees.

Oaks and hickories, white pine and beech. No high ground to get to. In every direction, nothing but trees, as if she were lost in some grimly enchanted forest and could never get out.

But she would get out. Any of those directions would take her to people eventually - even east. Even east, she could just follow the stream until it led to people.

She wished she had a compass.

She wished she could see the stars.

She was trembling all over, and it wasn't just from the cold. She was injured; she was terrified. But she had to forget about that. Meredith wouldn't cry. Meredith wouldn't be terrified. Meredith would find a sensible way to get out.

She had to get help for Matt.

Gritting her teeth to ignore the pain, Elena started off. If any of her wounds had happened to her in isolation, she would have made a big fuss about it, sobbing and writhing over the injury. But with so many different pains, it had all melted into one terrible agony.

Be careful now. Make sure you're going straight and not tilting off at an angle. Pick your next target in your straight line of sight.

The problem was that by now it was too dark to see much of anything. She could just make out deeply grooved bark straight ahead. A red oak probably. All right, go to it. Hop - oh, it hurts - hop - the tears washing down her cheeks - hop - just a little farther - hop - you can make it - hop. She put her hand out on shaggy bark. All right. Now, look straight in front of you. Ah. Something gray and rough and massive ahead - maybe a white oak. Hop to it - agony - hop - somebody help me - hop - how long will it take? - hop - not that far now - hop. There. She put her hand on the wide rough bark.

And then she did it again.

And again.

And again. And again. And again.

"What is it?" Damon demanded. He'd been forced to let Shinichi lead once they were out of the car again, but he still kept the kekkai loosely around him and he still watched every move the fox made. He didn't trust him as far as - well, the fact was, he didn't trust him at all. "What's behind the barrier?" he said again, more roughly, tightening the noose around the kitsune's neck.

"Our little cabin - Misao's and mine."

"And it wouldn't possibly be a trap, would it?"

"If you think so, fine! I'll go in alone...." Shinichi had finally changed into a half-fox, half-human form: black hair to his waist, with ruby-colored flames licking up from the ends, one silky tail with the same coloration behind him waving behind him, and two silky, crimson-tipped twitching ears on top of his head.

Damon approved aesthetically, but more important, he now had a ready-made handle. He caught Shinichi by the tail and twisted.

"Stop that!"

"I'll stop it when I get Elena - unless you waylaid her deliberately. If she's hurt, I'm going to take whoever harmed her and cut him into slivers. His life is forfeit."

"No matter who it was?"

"No matter who."

Shinichi was quivering slightly.

"Are you cold?"

"...just...admiring your resolve." More inadvertent quivering. Almost shaking his entire body. Laughter?

"At Elena's discretion, I would keep them alive. But in agony." Damon twisted the tail harder. "Move!"

Shinichi took another step and a charming country cabin came into view, with a gravel path leading up between wild creepers that loaded the porch and hung down like pendants.

It was exquisite.

Even as the pain grew, Elena began to have hope. No matter how turned around she was, she had to come out of the forest at some point. She had to make it. The ground was solid - no sign of mushiness or slanting downward. She wasn't headed for the creek. She was headed for the road. She could tell.

She fixed her sights on a distant, smooth-barked tree. Then she hopped to it, the pain almost forgotten in her new feeling of certainty.

She fell against the massive, peeling, ash-gray tree. She was resting against it when something bothered her. Her dangling leg. Why wasn't it bumping painfully against the trunk? It had knocked continually against all the other trees when she turned to rest. She pulled back from the tree, and, as if she knew it were important, gathered all her Power and let it go in a burst of white light.

The tree with the huge hole in it, the tree she had started from, was in front of her.

For a moment Elena stood completely still, wasting Power, holding the light. Maybe it was some different...

No. She was on the other side of the tree, but it was the same one. That washer hair caught in the peeling gray bark. That dried blood washer handprint. Below it was where her bloody leg had left a mark - fresh.

She'd walked straight out and come straight back to this tree.

"Noooooooooooooo!"

It was the first vocalized sound she'd made since she'd fallen out of the Ferrari. She'd endured all that pain in silence, with little gasps or sharp breaths, but she'd never cursed and screamed. Now she wanted to do both.

Maybe it wasn't the same tree -

Nooooooo, nooooooo, noooooooooooo!

Maybe her Power would come back and she'd see that she'd only hallucinated -

No, no, no, no, no, no!

It just wasn't possible -

Nooooooo!

Her crutch slipped from under her arm. It had dug into her armpit so deeply that the pain there rivaled the other pains. Everything hurt. But worst was her mind. She had a picture in her mind of a sphere like the Christmas snow globes you shook to make snow or glitter fall through liquid. But this sphere had trees all over the inside. From top to bottom, side to side, all trees, all pointing toward the middle. And herself, wandering inside this lonely sphere...no matter where she went, she'd find more trees, because that was all there were in this world she'd stumbled into.

It was a nightmare, but something like it was real.

The trees were intelligent, too, she realized. The little creeping vines, the vegetation; even now it was pulling her crutch away from her. The crutch was moving as if being passed from hand to hand by very small people. She reached out and just barely grabbed the end of it.

She didn't remember having fallen to the ground, but here she was. And there was a smell, a sweet, earthy, resinous aroma. And here were creepers, testing her, tasting her. With delicate little touches, they wound into her hair so that she couldn't pick her head up. Then she could feel them tasting her body, her shoulder, her bloody knee. Nothing about it mattered.

She squeezed her eyes shut, her body heaving with sobs. The creepers were pulling at her wounded leg now, and instinctively she jerked away. For a moment the pain woke her up and she thought, I've got to get to Matt , but the next moment that thought was dulled, too. The sweet, resinous smell remained. The creepers felt their way across her moving chest, across her breasts. They encircled her stomach.

And then they began to tighten.

By the time Elena realized the danger, they were restricting her breathing. She couldn't expand her chest. As she let out her breath, they only tightened again, working together: all the little creepers like one giant anaconda.

She couldn't tear them away. They were tough and springy and her nails couldn't cut through them. Working her fingers under a handful, she pulled as hard as she could, scraping with her nails and twisting. Finally one fiber sprang loose with the sound of a harp's string breaking and a wild whipping in the air.

The rest of the creepers pulled tighter.

She was having to fight to get air now, fight not to contract her chest. Creepers were delicately touching her lips, swaying over her face like so many thin cobras, then suddenly striking and going taut around her cheek and head.

I'm going to die.

She felt a deep regret. She had been given the chance of a second lifetime - a third, if you counted her life as a vampire - and she hadn't done anything with it. Nothing but pursue her own pleasure. And now Fell's Church was in peril and Matt was in immediate danger, and not only was she not going to help them, she was going to give up and die right here.

What would be the right thing to do? The spiritual thing? Cooperate with evil now, and hope she'd have the chance to destroy it later? Maybe. Maybe all she needed to do was to ask for help.

The feeling of breathlessness was leaving her light-headed. She would never have believed it of Damon, that he would put her through all this, that he would allow her to be killed. Just days ago she had been defending him to Stefan.

Damon and the malach. Maybe she was his offering to them. They certainly demanded a lot.

Or maybe it was just that he wanted her to beg for help. He might be waiting in the darkness quite close, his mind centered on hers, waiting for a whispered please .

She tried to spark the last of her Power. It was almost depleted, but like a match, with repeated striking she managed to get a tiny white flame.

Now she visualized the flame going into her forehead. Into her head. Inside. There.

Now.

Through the fiery agony of not being able to draw a breath, she thought:Bonnie. Bonnie. Hear me.

No answer - but she wouldn't hear one.

Bonnie, Matt is in a clearing in a lane off the Old Wood. He may need blood or some other help. Look for him. In my car.

Don't worry about me. It's too late for me. Find Matt.

And that's all I can say, Elena thought wearily. She had a vague, sad intuition that she hadn't gotten Bonnie to hear her. Her lungs were exploding. This was a terrible way to die. She was going to be able to exhale one more time, and then there would be no more air....

Damn you, Damon, she thought, and then she concentrated all her thoughts, all her mind's reach on memories of Stefan. On the feeling of being held by Stefan, on Stefan's sudden leaping smile, on Stefan's touch.

Green eyes, leaf green, a color like a leaf held up to sunlight...

The decency he had somehow managed to retain, untainted...

Stefan...I love you....

I'll always love you....

I've loved you....

I love...

Chapter 28

Matt had no idea what time it was, but it was deep dusk under the trees. He was lying sideways in Elena's new car, as if he'd been tossed in and forgotten. His entire body was in pain.

This time he awoke and immediately thought, Elena. But he couldn't see the white of her camisole anywhere, and when he called, first softly, then shouting, he got no answer.

So now he was feeling his way around the clearing, on hands and knees. Damon seemed to have gone and that gave him a spark of hope and courage that lit up his mind like a beacon. He found the discarded Pendleton shirt - considerably trampled. But when he couldn't find another soft warm body in the clearing, his heart crashed down somewhere around his boots.

And then he remembered the Jaguar. He fumbled frantically in one pocket for the keys, came up empty, and finally discovered, inexplicably, that they were in the ignition.

He lived through the agonizing moment when the car wouldn't start, and then was shocked to see the brightness of its headlights. He puzzled briefly about how to turn the car while making sure he wasn't running a limp Elena over, then dug through the glove compartment box, flinging out manuals and pairs of sunglasses. Ah, and one lapis lazuli ring. Someone was keeping a spare here, just in case. He put it on; it fit well enough.

At last his fingers closed over a flashlight, and he was free to search the clearing as thoroughly as he wanted to.

No Elena.

No Ferrari either.

Damon had taken her somewhere.

All right, then, he would track them. To do that he had to leave Elena's car behind, but he had already seen what these monsters could do to cars, so that wasn't saying much.

He would have to be careful with the flashlight, too. Who knew how much charge the batteries had left?

For the hell of it, he tried calling Bonnie's mobile phone, and then her home phone, and then the boardinghouse. No signal, even though according to the phone itself, there should have been. No need to question why, either - this was the Old Wood, messing with things as usual. He didn't even ask himself why it was Bonnie's number he called first, when Meredith would probably be more sensible.

He found the tracks of the Ferrari easily. Damon had sped out of here like a bat...Matt smiled grimly as he finished the sentence in his mind.

And then he'd driven as if to get out of the Old Wood. This was easy, it was clear that either Damon had been going too fast for proper control or that Elena had been fighting, because in a number of places, mainly around corners, the tire tracks showed up clearly against the soft ground beside the road.

Matt was especially careful not to step on anything that might be a clue. He might have to backtrack at some point. He was careful, too, to ignore the quiet noises of the night around him. He knew the malach were out there, but he refused to let himself think about them.

And he never even asked himself why he was doing this, deliberately going into danger instead of retreating from it, instead of trying to drive the Jaguar out of the Old Wood. After all, Stefan hadn't left him as bodyguard.

But then you couldn't trust anything that Damon might say, he thought.

And besides - well, he'd always kept one eye out for Elena, even before their first date. He might be clumsy, slow, and weak in comparison to their enemies now, but he would always try.

It was pitch-dark now. The last remnants of twilight had left the sky, and if Matt looked up he could see clouds and stars - with trees leaning in ominously from either side.

He was getting toward the end of the road. The Dunstans' house should be coming up on the right pretty soon. He'd ask them if they'd seen -

Blood.

At first his mind flew to ridiculous alternatives, like dark red paint. But his flashlight had caught reddish brown stains on the roadside just as the road made a sharp curve. That was blood on the road there. And not just a little blood.

Being careful to walk well around the red-brown marks, running his flashlight over and over the far side of the road, Matt began to put together what must have happened.

Elena had jumped.

Either that or Damon had pushed her out of a speeding car - and after all the trouble he'd taken to get her, that didn't make much sense. Of course, he might have already bled her until he was satisfied - Matt's fingers went up to his sore neck instinctively - but then, why take her in the car at all?

To kill her by pushing her out?

A stupid way to do it, but maybe Damon had been counting on his little pets to take care of the body.

Possible, but not very likely.

What was likely?

Well, the Dunstans' house was coming up on this side of the road, but you couldn't see it from here. And it would be just like Elena to jump out of a speeding car as it rounded a sharp corner. It would take brains, and guts, and a breathtaking trust in sheer luck that it wouldn't kill her.

Matt's flashlight slowly traced the devastation of a long hedge of rhododendron bushes just off the road.

My God, that's what she did. Yeah. She jumped out and tried to roll. Jeez, she was lucky not to break her neck. But she kept rolling, grabbing at roots and creepers to stop herself. That's why they're all torn up.

A bubble of elation was rising in Matt. He was doing it. He was tracking Elena. He could see her fall as clearly as if he'd been there.

But then she got flipped by that tree root, he thought as he continued to follow her trail. That would have hurt. And she'd slammed down and rolled on the concrete for a bit - that must have been agony; she'd left a lot of blood here, and then back into the bushes.

And then what? The rhododendron showed no more signs of her fall. What had happened here? Had Damon reversed the Ferrari fast enough and gotten her back?

No, Matt decided, examining the earth carefully. There was only one set of footprints here, and it was Elena's. Elena had gotten up here - only to fall down again, probably from injury. And then she'd managed to get up again, but the marks were weird, a normal footprint on one side and a deep but small indentation on the other.

A crutch. She found herself a crutch. Yeah, and that dragging mark was the mark of her bad foot. She walked up to this tree, and then around it - or hopped, actually, that's what it looked like. And then she'd headed for the Dunstans'.

Smart girl. She was probably unrecognizable by now, and anyway, who cared if they noticed the resemblance between her and the late, great Elena Gilbert? She could be Elena's cousin from Philadelphia.

So she'd gone, one, two, three...eight steps - and there was the Dunstan house. Matt could see lights. Matt could smell horses. Excitedly, he ran the rest of the way - taking a few falls that didn't do his aching body any good, but still heading straight for the back porch light. The Dunstans weren't front porch people.

When he got to the door, he pounded on it almost frenziedly. He'd found her. He'd found Elena!

It seemed a long time before the door opened a crack. Matt automatically wedged his foot in the crack while thinking, Yes, good, you're cautious people. Not the type to let a vampire in after you'd just seen a girl covered in blood.

"Yes? What do you want?"

"It's me, Matt Honeycutt," he said to the eye that he could see peering out of the slit of open door. "I've come for El - for the girl."

"What girl are you talking about?" the voice said gruffly.

"Look, you don't have to worry. It's me - Jake knows me from school. And Kristin knows me, too. I've come to help."

Something in the sincerity of his voice seemed to strike a chord in the person behind the door. It was opened to reveal a large, dark-haired man who was wearing an under-shirt and needed a shave. Behind him, in the living room was a tall, thin, almost gaunt woman. She looked as if she had been crying. Behind both of them was Jake, who'd been a year senior to Matt at Robert E. Lee High.

"Jake," Matt said. But he got no answer back except a dull look of anguish.

"What's wrong?" Matt demanded, terrified. "A girl came by here a while ago - she was hurt - but - but - you let her in, right?"

"No girl's come by here," said Mr. Dunstan flatly.

"She had to have. I followed her trail - she left a trail in blood , do you understand, almost up to your door ." Matt wasn't letting himself think. Somehow, if he kept telling the facts loudly enough, they would produce Elena.

"More trouble," Jake said, but in a dull voice that went with his expression.

Mrs. Dunstan seemed the most sympathetic. "We heard a voice out in the night, but when we looked, there was no one there. And we have troubles of our own."

It was then, right on cue, that Kristin burst into the room. Matt stared at her with a feeling of déjàvu. She was dressed up something like Tami Bryce. She had cut off the bottoms of her jeans shorts until they were practically nonexistent. On top she was wearing a bikini top, but with - Matt hastily turned his eyes away - two big round holes cut just where Tami had had round pieces of cardboard. And she'd decorated herself with glitter glue.

God! She's only, what, twelve? Thirteen? How could she possibly be acting this way?

But the next moment, his whole body was vibrating in shock. Kristin had pasted herself against him and was cooing, "Matt Honey-butt! You came to see me!"

Matt breathed carefully to get over his shock. Matt Honey-butt . She couldn't know that. She didn't even go to the same school as Tami did. Why would Tami have called her and - told her something like that?

He shook his head, as if to clear it. Then he looked at Mrs. Dunstan, who had seemed kindest. "Can I use your phone?" he asked. "I need – I really need to make a couple of calls."

"The phone's been down since yesterday," Mr. Dunstan said harshly. He didn't try to move Kristin away from Matt, which was odd because he was clearly angry. "Probably a fallen tree. And you know mobile phones don't work out here."

"But - " Matt's mind spun into overdrive. "You really mean that no teenage girl came up to your house asking for help? A girl with blond hair and blue eyes? I swear, I'm not the one who hurt her. I swear I want to help her."

"Matt Honey-butt? I'm making a tattoo, just for you." Still pressed up behind him, Kristin extended her left arm. Matt stared at it, horrified. She had obviously used needles or a pin to prick holes in her left forearm, and then opened a fountain pen's cartridge of ink to supply the dark blue color. It was your basic prison-type tattoo, done by a child. The straggling letters M A T were already visible, along with a smudge of ink that was probably going to be another T.

No wonder they weren't thrilled about letting me in, Matt thought, dazed. Now Kristin had both arms around his waist, making it hard to breathe. She was on tiptoe, talking to him, whispering rapidly some of the obscene things Tami had said.

He stared at Mrs. Dunstan. "Honest, I haven't even seen Kristin for - it must be nearly a year. We had an end of the year carnival, and Kristin helped with the pony rides, but..."

Mrs. Dunstan was nodding slowly. "It's not your fault. She's been acting the same way with Jake. Her own brother. And with - with her father. But I'm telling you the truth; we haven't seen any other girl. No one but you has come to the door today."

"Okay." Matt's eyes were watering. His brain, attuned first of all to his own survival, was telling him to save his breath, not to argue. Telling him to say, "Kristin - I really can't breathe - "

"But I love you, Matt Honey-butt. I don't want you to ever leave me. Especially for that old whore. That old whore with worms in her eye-sockets..."

Again Matt felt the sense of the world rocking. But he couldn't gasp. He didn't have the air. Pop-eyed, he turned helplessly toward Mr. Dunstan, who was closest.

"Can't - breathe - "

How could a thirteen-year-old be so strong? It was taking both Mr. Dunstan and Jake to pry her off him. No, even that wasn't working. He was beginning to see a gray network pulsating before his eyes. He needed air.

There was a sharp crack that ended with a meaty sound. And then another. Suddenly he could breathe again.

"No, Jacob! No more!" Mrs. Dunstan cried. "She let him go - don't hit her anymore!"

When Matt's vision cleared, Mr. Dunstan was doing up his belt. Kristin was wailing, "Just you waaa -hate! Just youwaa-haate! You'll besor- ry!" Then she rushed from the room.

"I don't know if this helps or makes it worse," Matt said when he'd gotten his breath back, "but Kristin isn't the only girl acting this way. There's at least one other one in the town - "

"All I care about is my Kristin," Mrs. Dunstan said. "And that...thing isn't her."

Matt nodded. But there was something he needed to do now. He had to find Elena.

"If a blond girl does come to the door and asks for help, will you please let her in?" he asked Mrs. Dunstan. "Please? But don't let any guys in - not even me if you don't want," he blurted.

For a moment his eyes and Mrs. Dunstan's eyes met, and he felt a connection. Then she nodded and hastened to get him out of the house.

All right, Matt thought. Elena was headed for here, but she didn't quite get here. So look at the signs.

He looked. And what the signs showed him was that, within a few feet of the Dunstan property, she had inexplicably turned sharply right, deeply into the forest.

Why? Had something scared her? Or had she - Matt felt sick to his stomach - somehow been tricked into hobbling on and on, until at last she left all human help behind?

All he could do was to follow her into the woods.

Chapter 29
   
"Elena!"

Something was bothering her.

"Elena!"

Please, no more pain. She couldn't feel it right now, but she could remember...oh, no more fighting for air...

"Elena!"

No...just let it be. Mentally, Elena pushed away the thing that bothered her ears and her head.

"Elena, please..."

All she wanted was sleep. Forever.

"Damn you, Shinichi!"

Damon had picked up the snow globe with the miniature forest when Shinichi found Elena's smudged glow radiating from it. Inside it, dozens of spruce, hickory, pine, and other trees grew - all from a perfectly transparent inner membrane. A miniature person - given that someone could be miniaturized and placed into such a globe, would see trees ahead, trees behind, trees in every direction - and could walk a straight line and come back to their starting point no matter which way they went.

"It's an amusement," Shinichi had said sullenly, watching him intently from under his lashes. "A toy, for children, usually. A play-trap."

"And you find this amusing?" Damon had smashed the globe against the driftwood coffee table in the exquisite cabin which was Shinichi's secret hideout. That was when he had discovered why these were games for children - the globe was unbreakable.

After that Damon had taken a moment - just one moment - to get hold of himself. Elena had perhaps seconds to live. He needed to be precise with his words.

After that single moment, a long flow of words had spilled out from his lips, mostly in English, and mostly without unnecessary curses or even insults. He didn't care about insulting Shinichi. He had simply threatened - no, he had sworn - to carry out on Shinichi the kind of violence that he had seen sometimes

in a long life filled with humans and vampires with skewed imaginations. Eventually, it had gotten through to Shinichi that he was serious, and Damon had found himself inside the globe with a drenched Elena in front of him. She was lying at his feet, and she was worse off than his worst fears had allowed him to picture. She had a dislocated right arm with multiple fractures and a hideously shattered left tibia.

Horrified as he had been to imagine her staggering through the forest of the globe, blood streaming from her right arm from shoulder to elbow, left leg dragging behind her like a wounded animal's, this was worse. Her hair had been soaking with sweat and mud, straggling over her face. And she'd been out of her mind, literally, delirious, talking to people who weren't there.

And she was turning blue.

She had been able to snap exactly one creeper with all her effort. Damon clawed up huge armfuls of them, ripping them from the earth viciously if they tried to fight or wrap around his wrists. Elena gasped in one deep breath just as suffocation would have killed her, but she didn't regain consciousness.

And she wasn't the Elena he remembered. When he'd picked her up, he'd felt no resistance, no acceptance, nothing. She didn't know him. She was delirious with fever, exhaustion, and pain, but in one moment of half-consciousness had kissed his hand through her damp, disheveled hair, whispering "Matt...Find...Matt." She didn't know who he was - she scarcely knew who she was, but her concern was for her friend. The kiss had gone through his hand and up his arm like the touch of a branding iron, and since then he'd been monitoring her mind, trying to divert the agony she was feeling away - away anywhere - into the night - into himself.

He turned back to Shinichi and, in a voice like an icy wind, said, "You'd better have a way to cure all her wounds - now."

The charming cabin was surrounded by the same evergreens, hickory, and pines as grew in the snow globe. The fire burned violet and green as Shinichi poked it.

"This water is just about ready to boil. Make her drink tea made with this." He handed Damon a blackened flagon - once beautiful chased silver; now a battered remnant of what it had been - and a teapot with some broken leaves and other unsavory-looking things at the bottom. "Make sure she drinks a good three quarters of a cup, and she'll fall asleep and wake up almost as good as new."

He dug an elbow into Damon's ribs. "Or you can just let her have a few sips - heal her partway, and then let her know it's in your power to give her more...or not. You know...depending on how cooperative she is..."

Damon remained silent and turned away. If I have to look at him, he thought, I'll kill him. And I might need him again.

"And if you really want to accelerate the healing, add some of your blood. Some people like to do it that way," Shinichi added, his voice picking up speed with excitement again. "See how much pain a human can take, you know, and then when they're dying, you can just feed them tea and blood and start over...if they remember you from last time - which they hardly ever do; they'll usually go through more pain just to get a chance to fight you...," he giggled, and Damon thought he sounded not quite sane.

But when he had suddenly turned to Shinichi, he had to hold himself very still inside. Shinichi had become a blazing, glowing, outline of himself, with tongues of light lapping from his projection, rather like close-up solar flares. Damon was nearly blinded, and knew he was meant to be. He clutched the silver flagon as if he were holding on to his own sanity.

Maybe he was. He had a blank space in his mind - and then there were suddenly memories of trying to find Elena...or Shinichi. Because Elena had abruptly been absent from his company, and it could only be the fault of the kitsune.

"There's a modern bathroom here?" Damon asked Shinichi.

"There's whatever you want; just decide before you open a door and unlock it with this key. And now..." Shinichi stretched, his golden eyes half shut. He ran a languid hand through his shiny black hair tipped with flame. "Now, I think I'll go sleep under a bush."

"Is that all you ever do?" Damon made no attempt to keep the biting sarcasm out of his voice.

"And have fun with Misao. And fight. And go to the tournaments. They - well, you'll have to come and see one for yourself."

"I don't care to go anywhere." Damon didn't want to know what this fox and his sister considered fun.

Shinichi reached out and took the miniature cauldron full of boiling water off the fire. He poured the boiling water over the collection of tree bark, leaves, and other detritus in the battered metal teapot.

"Why don't you go find a bush now ?" Damon said - and it wasn't a suggestion. He'd had enough of the fox, who had served his purpose now anyway, and he didn't care a bit about whatever mischief Shinichi might make for other people. All he wanted was to be alone - with Elena.

"Remember; get her to drink it all if you want to keep her for a while. She's pretty much unsalvageable without it." Shinichi poured through a fine sieve the infusion of dark green tea. "Better try before she wakes up."

"Will you just get out of here ?"

When Shinichi stepped through the dimensional crack, taking care to turn just the right way so as to reach the real world, and not some other globe, he was steaming. He wanted to go back and thrash Damon within an inch of his life. He wanted to activate the malach inside Damon and cause him to...well, of course, not quite kill sweet Elena. She was a blossom with nectar untasted, and Shinichi was in no hurry to see her buried underground.

But as for the rest of the idea...yes, he decided. Now he knew what he would do. It would be simply delicious to watch Damon and Elena make up, and then, during the Moon spire Festival tonight, to bring back the monster. He could let Damon go on believing they were "allies," and then, in the middle of their little spree - let the possessed Damon loose. Show that he, Shinichi, had been in control all along.

He would punish Elena in ways she had never dreamed about and she would die in delicious agony...at Damon's hand. Shinichi's tails quivered a little ecstatically at the thought. But for now, let them laugh and joke together. Revenge only ripened with time, and Damon was really quite difficult to control when he was raging.

It hurt to admit that, just as his tail - the physical one in the center - hurt from Damon's abominable cruelty to animals. When Damon was in a passion it took every ounce of Shinichi's concentration to control him.

But at Moon spire Damon would be calm, would be placid. He'd be pleased with himself, as he and Elena would undoubtedly have laid some absurd plot to try to stop Shinichi.

That would be when the fun would begin.

Elena would make a beautiful slave while she lasted.

With the kitsune gone, Damon felt that he could behave more naturally. Keeping a firm grasp on Elena's mind, he picked up the cup. He tried a sip of the mixture himself before trying it on her and found it tasted just slightly less nauseating than it smelled. However, Elena really had no choice, she could not do anything of her own volition, and little by little, the mixture went down.

And then a dose of his blood went down. Again, Elena was unconscious and had no choice in the matter.

And then she'd gone to sleep by herself.

Damon paced restlessly. He had a memory that was more like a dream floating around in his head. It was of Elena trying to throw herself out of a Ferrari going about 100 kilometers an hour, to get away from - what?

Him?

Why?

Not, in any case, the best of beginnings.

But that was all he could remember! Damn it! Whatever came right before it was a total blank. Had he hurt Stefan? No, Stefan was gone. It had been the other boy with her, Mutt. What had happened?

Damn it to hell ! He had to figure out what had happened so he could explain it all to Elena when she woke up. He wanted her to believe him, to trust him. He didn't want Elena as a one-night bleeder. He wanted her to choose him. He wanted her to see how much better suited she was to him than to his mousy, milksop brother.

His princess of darkness. That was what she was meant to be. With him as king, consort, whatever she wished. When she saw things more clearly, she would understand that it didn't matter. That nothing mattered except them being together.

He viewed her body, veiled under the sheet, with dispassion - no, with positive guilt .Dio mio - what if he hadn't found her? He couldn't get the picture out of his mind of how she'd looked, stumbling forward like that...lying there breathless...kissing his hand...

Damon sat down and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why had she been in the Ferrari with him? She'd been angry - no, not angry. Furious was closer but so frightened...of him . He could picture that clearly now, the moment of her throwing herself out of the speeding car, but he couldn't remember anything before it.

Was he going out of his mind?

What had been done to her? No...Damon forced his thoughts away from the easy question and made himself ask the real question. What had he done to her? Elena's eyes, blue with golden flecks, like lapis lazuli, were easy to read even without telepathy. What had...he...done to her that was so frightening that she would jump out of a speeding car to get away from him?

He'd been taunting the fair-haired boy. Mutt...Gnat...whatever. The three of them had been together, and he and Elena had been...damn! From there to his awakening at the steering wheel of the Ferrari, all was a shimmering blank. He could remember saving Bonnie at Caroline's house; he could remember being late for his 4:44A.M . meeting with Stefan; but after that, things began to fragment. Shinichi , maledicalo! That fox! He knew more about this than he was telling Damon.

I have always...been stronger...than my enemies, he thought. I have always...remained...in...control.

He heard a slight sound and was by Elena in an instant. Her blue eyes were shut, but the lashes were fluttering. Was she waking up?

He made himself turn down the sheet by her shoulder. Shinichi had been right. There was a lot of dried blood, but he could sense that the blood flow itself was more normal. But there was something horribly wrong...no, he wouldn't believe it.

Damon barely kept himself from screaming in frustration. The damn fox had left her with a dislocated shoulder.

Things were definitely not going well for him today.

Now what? Call for Shinichi?

Never. He felt he couldn't look at the fox again tonight without wanting to murder him.

He was going to have to put her shoulder back in the socket alone. It was a procedure usually only attempted by two people, but what could he do?

Still keeping Elena in an iron mind-grip, making sure she couldn't awaken, he grasped her by the arm and began the painful business of dislocating the humerus even farther, pulling the bone away so that he could finally release pressure and hear the sweet pop that meant that the long arm bone had slipped back into the socket. Then he let go. Elena's head was tossing from side to side, her lips parched. He poured some more of Shinichi's magical bone-knitting tea into the battered cup, then lifted her head gently from the left side to put the cup to her lips. He let her mind have some freedom, then, and she started to lift her right hand and then dropped it.

He sighed and tilted her head, tipping the silver flagon so that the tea trickled into her mouth. She swallowed obediently. It all reminded him of Bonnie...but Bonnie hadn't been so terribly hurt. Damon knew he couldn't return Elena to her friends in this condition; not with her camisole and jeans shredded, and dried blood everywhere.

Maybe he could do something about that. He went to the second door off the bedroom, thought, bathroom - modern bathroom, and unlocked and opened the door. It was exactly what he'd imagined: a pristine, white, sanitary place with a large heap of towels piled, ready for guests, on the bathtub.

Damon ran warm water over one of the washcloths. He knew better by now than to strip Elena and dump her in warm water. It was what she needed, but if anyone ever found out, her friends would have his beating heart torn out of his chest and staked on a pike. He didn't even have to think about that - he simply knew it.

He went back to Elena and began to gently stroke dried blood off her shoulder. She murmured, shaking her head, but he kept it up until the shoulder at least looked normal, exposed as it was by torn cloth.

Then he got another washcloth and went to work on her ankle. This was still swollen - she wasn't going to be running away anytime soon. Her tibia, the first of the two bones in the lower leg, had grown properly together again. It was more evidence that Shinichi and the Shi no Shi had no need for money, or they could simply put this tea on the market and make a fortune.

"We look at things...differently," Shinichi had said, fixing Damon with those strange golden eyes. "Money doesn't mean much to us. What does? The deathbed agonies of an old rogue who fears he's going to hell. Watching him sweat, trying to remember encounters he's long forgotten. A baby's first conscious tear of loneliness. The emotions of an unfaithful wife when her husband catches her with her lover. A maiden's...well, her first kiss and her first night of discovery. A brother willing to die for his brother. Things like that."

And many other things that couldn't be mentioned in polite company, Damon thought. A lot were about pain. They were emotional leeches, sucking up the feelings of mortals to make up for the emptiness of their own souls.

He could feel the sickness inside him again as he tried to imagine - to calculate - the pain Elena must have felt, leaping out of his car. She must have expected an agonizing death - but it was still better than staying with him.

This time, before entering the door that had been a white-tiled bathroom, he thought, Kitchen, modern, with plenty of ice packs in the freezer.

Nor was he disappointed. He found himself in a strongly masculine kitchen, with chrome appliances and black-and-white tiling. In the freezer: six ice packs. He took three back to Elena and put one around her shoulder, one at her elbow, and one around her ankle. Then he went back into the kitchen's spotless beauty for a glass of ice-cold water.

Tired. So tired.

Elena felt as if her body were weighted with lead.

Every limb...every thought...lapped in lead.

For instance, there was something she was supposed to be doing - or not doing - right now. But she couldn't make the thought come to the surface of her mind. It was too heavy. Everything was too heavy. She couldn't even open her eyes.

A scraping sound. Someone was near, on a chair. Then there was liquid coolness on her lips, just a few drops, but it stimulated her to try to hold the cup herself and drink. Oh, delicious water. It tasted better than anything she'd ever had before. Her shoulder hurt terribly, but it was worth the pain to drink and drink - no! The glass was being pulled away. She tried, feebly, to hang onto it, but it was pulled out of her grasp.

Then she tried to touch her shoulder, but those gentle, invisible hands wouldn't let her, not until they had washed her own hands with warm water. After that they packed the ice packs around her and wrapped her like a mummy in a sheet. The cold numbed her immediate feelings of pain, although there were other pains, deep inside....

It was all too difficult to think about. As the hands removed the ice packs again - she was shivering with cold now - she let herself lapse back into sleep.

Damon treated Elena and dozed, treated and dozed. In the perfectly appointed bathroom, he found a tortoiseshell hairbrush and a comb. They looked serviceable. And one thing he knew for certain: Elena's hair had never looked like this in her life - or unlife. He tried to stroke the brush gently through her hair and found that the tangles were much harder to get out than he'd imagined. When he pulled harder on the brush, she moved and murmured in that strange sleep-language of hers.

And, finally, it was the hair brushing that did it. Elena, without opening her eyes, reached up and took the brush from his hand and then, when it hit a major tangle, frowned, reached up to grasp a fistful and try to get the brush through it. Damon sympathized. He'd had long hair at times during his centuries of existence - when it couldn't be helped, and though his hair was as naturally fine as Elena's, he knew the frustrated feeling that you were ripping your hair out by the roots. Damon was about to take the brush from her again, when she opened her eyes.

"What - ?" she said, and then she blinked.

Damon had tensed, ready to push her into mental blackout if it were necessary. But she didn't even try to hit him with the brush.

"What...happened?" What Elena was feeling was clear: she didn't like this. She was unhappy about another awakening with only a vague idea of what had been going on when she slept.

As Damon, poised for fight or flight, watched her face, she slowly began to put together what had happened to her.

"Damon?" She gave him that no-holds-barred lapis gaze.

It said, Am I being tortured, or treated, or are you just an interested bystander, enjoying somebody's pain while drinking a glass of cognac?

"They cook with cognac, princess. They drink Armagnac. And I don't drink...either," Damon said. He spoiled the entire effect by adding hastily, "That's not a threat. I swear to you, Stefan left me as your bodyguard."

This was technically true if you considered the facts: Stefan had yelled, "You'd better make sure nothing happens to Elena, you double-dealing bastard, or I'm going to find a way to come back and rip off your - " The rest had been muffled in the fight, but Damon had gotten the gist. And now he took the assignment seriously.

"Nothing else will hurt you, if you'll allow me to watch over you," he added, now getting into the area of the fictitious, since whoever had frightened or pulled her out of the car had obviously been around when he had. But nothing would get her in the future, he swore to himself. However he had blundered this last time, from now on there would be no further attacks on Elena Gilbert - or someone would die.

He wasn't trying to spy on her thoughts, but as she stared into his eyes for a long moment, they projected with total clarity - and utter mystery - the words: I knew I was right. It was someone else all along. And he knew that under her pain, Elena felt a huge sense of satisfaction.

"I hurt my shoulder." She reached up with her right hand to grip it, but Damon stopped her.

"You dislocated it," Damon said. "It's going to hurt for a while."

"And my ankle...but someone...I remember being in the woods and looking up and it was you . I couldn't breathe but you tore the creepers off me and you picked me up in your arms...." She looked at Damon in bewilderment. "You saved me?"

The statement had the sound of a question, but it wasn't. She was wondering over something that seemed impossible. Then she began to cry.

A baby's first conscious tear of loneliness. The emotions of an unfaithful wife when her husband catches her with her lover...

And maybe a young girl's weeping when she believes that her enemy has saved her from death.

Damon ground his teeth in frustration. The thought that Shinichi might be watching this, feeling Elena's emotions, savoring them...it was impossible to bear. Shinichi would give Elena her memory back again, he was certain of that. But at a time and place most amusing to him.

"It was my job," he said tightly. "I'd sworn to do it."

"Thank you," Elena gasped between her sobs. "No, please - don't turn away. I really mean it. Ohhh - is there a box of tissues - or anything dry ?" Her body was heaving with sobs again.

The perfect bathroom had a box of tissues. Damon brought it back to Elena.

He looked away as she used them, blowing her nose again and again as she sobbed. Here there was no enchanted and enchanting spirit, no grim and sophisticated fighter of evil, no dangerous coquette. There was only a girl broken by pain, gasping like a wounded doe, sobbing like a child.

And undoubtedly his brother would know what to say to her. He, Damon, had no idea of what to do - except that he knew he was going to kill for this. Shinichi would learn what it meant to tangle with Damon when Elena was involved.

"How do you feel?" he asked brusquely. No one would be able to say he'd taken advantage of this - no one would be able to say he'd hurt her only to...to make use of her.

"You gave me your blood," Elena said wonderingly, and as he looked quickly down at his rolled-up sleeve, she added, "No - it's just a feeling I know. When I first - came back to Earth, after the spirit life.

Stefan would give me his blood, and eventually I would feel...this way. Very warm. A little uncomfortable."

He swung around and looked at her. "Uncomfortable?"

"Too full - here." She touched her neck. "We think it's a symbiotic thing...for vampires and humans who live together."

"For a vampire Changing a human into a vampire, you mean," he said sharply.

"Except I didn't Change when I was part spirit still. But then - I turned back human." She hiccupped, tried a pathetic smile, and used the brush again. "I'd ask you to look at me and see that I haven't Changed, but..." She made a helpless little motion.

Damon sat and imagined what it would have been like, taking care of the spirit-child Elena. It was a tantalizing idea.

He said bluntly, "When you said you were a little uncomfortable before, did you mean that I should take some of your blood?"

She half glanced away, then looked back. "I told you I was grateful. I told you that I felt...too full. I don't know how else to thank you."

Damon had had centuries of training in discipline or he would have thrown something across the room. It was a situation to make you laugh...or weep. She was offering herself to him as thanks for rescue from suffering that he should have saved her from, and had failed.

But he was no hero. He wasn't like St. Stefan, to refuse this ultimate of prizes; whatever condition she was in.

He wanted her.