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

Chapter 30

Matt had given up on clues. As far as he could tell, something had caused Elena to bypass the Dunstan house and barn completely, hopping on and on until she got to a squashed and torn bed of thin creeping vines. They hung limp from Matt's fingers, but they reminded him, disquietingly, of the feeling of the bug's tentacles around his neck.

And from there on there was no sign of human movement. It was as if a UFO had beamed her up.

Now, from making forays to all sides until he had lost the patch of creepers, he was lost in the deep Wood. If he wanted to, he could fantasize that all sorts of noises were all around him. If he wanted to, he could imagine that the light of the flashlight was no longer as bright as it had been, that it had a sickly yellowish tinge....

All this time, while searching, he had kept as quiet as possible, realizing that he might be trying to sneak up on something that didn't want to be snuck up on. But now, somewhere inside him, something was swelling up and his ability to stop it was weakening by the second.

When it burst out of him, it startled him as much as it might have any possible listeners.

"Ellleeeeeeeeeeeeeeenaaaa!"

From the time when he'd been a child, Matt had been taught to say his nighttime prayers. He didn't know much else about church, but he did have a deep and sincere feeling that there was Someone or Something out there that looked after people. That somewhere and somehow it all made sense, and that there were reasons for everything.

That belief had been severely tested during the past year.

But Elena's return from the dead had swept away all his doubts. It had seemed to prove everything that he'd always wanted to believe in.

You wouldn't give her back to us for just a few days, and then take her away again? he wondered, and the wondering was really a form of praying. You wouldn't - would You?

Because the thought of a world without Elena, without her sparkle ; her strong will; her way of getting into crazy adventures - and then getting out of them, even more crazily - well, it was too much to lose. The world would be painted in drab grays and dark browns again without her. There would be no fire-engine reds, no flashes of parakeet green, no cerulean, no daffodil, no mercury silver - and no gold. No sprinkles of gold in endless blue lapis lazuli eyes.

"Elllleeeeeeenaaaa! Damn you, you answer me! It's Matt, Elena! Elleeeeee - "

He broke off quite suddenly and listened. For a moment his heart leaped and his whole body started. But then he made out the words he could hear.

"Eleeeeeenaaa? Maaaatt? Where are you?"

"Bonnie? Bonnie! I'm here! " He turned his flashlight straight up, slowly twisting it in a circle. "Can you see me?"

"Can you see us?"

Matt pivoted slowly. And - yes - there were the beams of one flashlight, two flashlights, three!

His heart leaped to see three beams. "I'm coming toward you," he shouted, and suited the action to the word. Secrecy had been long ago left behind. He was running into things, yanking at tendrils that tried to grab his ankles, but bellowing all the while, "Stay where you are! I'm coming to you!"

And then the flashlight beams were right in front of him, blinding him, and somehow he had Bonnie in his arms, and Bonnie was crying. That at least lent the situation some normality. Bonnie was crying against his chest and he was looking at Meredith, who was smiling anxiously, and at...Mrs. Flowers? It had to be, she was wearing that gardening hat with the artificial flowers on it, as well as what looked like about seven or eight woolly sweaters.

"Mrs. Flowers?" he said, his mouth finally catching up with his brain. "But - where's Elena?"

There was a sudden droop in the three people watching him, as if they had been on tiptoes for news, and now they had slumped in disappointment.

"We haven't seen her," Meredith said quietly. "You were with her."

"I was with her, yeah. But then Damon came. He hurt her , Meredith" - Matt felt Bonnie's arms clench on him. "He had her rolling on the ground having seizures. I think he's going to kill her. And - he hurt me. I guess I blacked out. When I woke up she was gone."

"He took her away?" Bonnie asked fiercely.

"Yeah, but...I don't understand what happened next." Painfully, he explained about Elena seemingly jumping out of the car and the tracks that led nowhere.

Bonnie shivered in his arms.

"And then some other weird stuff happened," Matt said. Slowly, faltering sometimes, he did his best to explain about Kristin, and the similarities to Tami.

"That is...just plain weird," Bonnie said. "I thought I had an answer, but if Kristin hasn't had any contact with any of the other girls..."

"You were probably thinking something about the Salem witches, dear," said Mrs. Flowers. Matt still couldn't get used to Mrs. Flowers talking to them. She went on, "But you don't really know with whom Kristin has been in the last few days. Or with whom Jim has been, for that matter. Children have quite a lot of freedom in this day and age, and he might be - what do they call it? – a carrier ."

"Besides, even if this is possession, it may be an entirely different kind of possession," Meredith said. "Kristin lives out in the Old Wood. The Old Wood is full of these insects - these malach. Who knows whether it happened when she simply stepped outside her door? Who knows what was waiting for her?"

Now Bonnie was shaking in Matt's arms. They'd turned out all the flashlights but one, to conserve energy, but it sure made for spooky surroundings.

"But what about the telepathy?" Matt said to Mrs. Flowers. "I mean, I don't believe for a minute that real witches were attacking those Salem girls. I think they were repressed girls who had mass hysteria when they all got together, and somehow everything got out of hand. But how could Kristin know to call me - to call me - the same name that Tamra did?"

"Maybe we've all got it all wrong," Bonnie said, her voice buried somewhere in Matt's solar plexus. "Maybe it's not like Salem at all, where the - the hysteria spread out horizontally, if you see what I mean. Maybe there's somebody on top here, who's spreading it wherever they want to."

There was a brief silence, and then Mrs. Flowers murmured, "’Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...'"

"You mean you think that's right? But then who is it that's on top? Who's doing all of this?" Meredith demanded. "It can't be Damon because Damon saved Bonnie twice - and me once." Before anyone could muster words to ask about that , she was going on. "Elena was pretty sure that something was possessing Damon . So who else is it?"

"Somebody we haven't met yet," Bonnie muttered ominously. "Somebody we aren't going to like."

With perfect timing there was the crackle of a branch behind them. As one person, as one body, they turned to look.

"What I really want," Damon said to Elena, "is to get you warm. And that either means cooking you something hot so you'll warm up from the inside or putting you in the tub so you'll warm up from the outside. And considering what happened last time - "

"I...don't feel I can eat anything...."

"Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?"

She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. "It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start."

"Well? I promise not to mix the apples and the chicken together."

"I could try some soup," Elena said slowly. "And, oh, Damon I'm so thirsty just for plain water. Please."

"I know, but you'll drink too much, get pains. I'll make soup."

"It comes in little cans with red paper on them. You pull the tab on top to make it come off...." Elena stopped as he turned to the door.

Damon knew she had serious doubts about the entire project, but he also knew that if he brought her anything passably drinkable she would drink it. Thirst did that to you.

He was unliving proof of the example.

As he went through the door there was a sudden horrendous noise, like a pair of kitchen choppers coming together. It nearly took off his - his rear from top to bottom, by the sound of it.

"Damon!" A voice crying weakly through the door. "Damon, are you all right? Damon! Answer me!"

Instead, he turned around, studied the door, which looked perfectly normal, and opened it. Anyone watching him open it would have wondered because he put a key in the unlocked door, said "Elena's room" and then unlocked and opened the door.

When he got inside, he ran.

Elena was lying in a hopeless tangle of sheets and blankets on the floor. She was trying to get up, but her face was blue-white with pain.

"What pushed you off the bed?" he said. He was going to kill Shinichi slowly .

"Nothing. I heard a terrible sound just as the door shut. I tried to get to you, but - "

Damon stared at her. "I tried to get to you, but - " This broken, hurting, exhausted creature had tried to rescue him ? Tried so hard that she'd fallen off her bed?

"I'm sorry," she said, with tears in her eyes. "I can't get used to gravity. Are you hurt?"

"Not as much as you are," he said, purposely keeping his voice rough, his eyes averted. "I did something stupid, leaving the room, and the house...reminded me."

"What are you talking about?" said the woebegone Elena, dressed only in sheets.

"This key," Damon held it up for her to see. It was golden and could be worn as a ring, but two wings folded out and made a beautiful key.

"What's wrong with it?"

"The way I used it. This key has the power of the kitsune in it, and it will unlock anything and take you anywhere, but the way it works is that you put it into the lock, say where you want to go, and then turn the key. I forgot to do that in leaving your room."

Elena looked puzzled. "But what if a key doesn't have a lock in it? Most bedroom doors don't have locks."

"This key goes into any door. You might say it makes its own lock. It's a kitsune treasure - which I shook out of Shinichi when I was so angry about you being hurt. He'll be wanting it back soon." Damon's eyes narrowed and he smiled faintly. "I wonder which of us will end up keeping it. I noticed another one in the kitchen - a spare, of course."

"Damon, all this about magical keys is interesting, but if you could let me get off the floor..."

He was contrite at once. Then came the question of whether to put her on the bed or not.

"I'll take the bath," Elena said in a small voice. She unsnapped the top of her jeans and tried to scoot out of them.

"Wait a minute! You might faint and drown. Lie down and I promise to get you clean, if you're willing to try and eat." He had new reservations about the house.

"Now undress on the bed and pull the sheet over you. I do wicked massages," he added, turning away.

"Look, you don't have to not look. It's something I haven't understood since I...came back," Elena said. "Modesty taboos. I don't see why anyone should be ashamed of their body." (This came to him in a rather muffled voice.) "I mean for anyone who says God made us, God made us without clothes, even after Adam and Eve. If it's so important, why didn't he make us with diapers on?"

"Yes, actually, what you're saying reminds me of what I once said to the Dowager Queen of France," Damon said, determined to keep her undressing while he gazed at a crack in one of the wooden panels of the wall. "I said that if God were both omnipotent and omniscient, then He surely knew our destinies beforehand, and why were the righteous doomed to be born as sinfully naked as the damned?"

"And what did she say?"

"Not a word. But she giggled and tapped me three times on the back of my hand with her fan, which I was later told was an invitation for an assignation. Alas, I had other obligations. Are you on the bed still?"

"Yes, and I'm under a sheet," Elena said wearily. "If she were Dowager Queen, I expect you were glad," she added in a half-bewildered voice. "Aren't they the old mothers?"

"No, Anne of Austria, Queen of France, kept her remarkable beauty to the end. She was the only redhead that - "

Damon stopped, groping wildly for words as he faced the bed. Elena had done as he had asked. He just hadn't realized how much she would look like Aphrodite arising from the ocean. The ruffled white of the sheet came up to the warmer milk-white of her skin. She needed cleaning, certainly, but just knowing that under that thin sheet she was magnificently naked was enough to make him lose his breath.

She had rolled her clothes into a ball and thrown them into the farthest corner of the room. He didn't blame her.

He didn't think. He didn't give himself time. He simply held out his hands and said, "Lemon-thyme chicken consomm��¦, hot, in a Mikasa cup - and plum flower oil, very warm, in a vial."

Once the broth was duly consumed and Elena was lying on her back again, he began to gently massage her with the oil. Plum flower always made for a good start. It numbed the skin and the senses to pain, and it provided a basis for the other, more exotic, oils he planned to use on her.

In a way, it was much better than dumping her in a modern bath or Jacuzzi. He knew where her injuries were; he could heat the oils to the appropriate temperature for any of them. And instead of a barely mobile Jacuzzi head spouting water against a bruise, he could avoid anything too sensitive - in the painful sense.

He started with her hair, adding a very, very light coating of oil that would make the worst tangles easy to brush out. After the oiling, her hair shone like gold against her skin - honey on cream. Then he began with the muscles in her face: tiny strokes with his thumbs over her forehead to smooth it and relax it, forcing her to relax along with his movements. Slow, circular swirls at her temples, with only the lightest of pressure. He could see the thin blue veins traced here, and he knew that deep pressure could put her to sleep.

He then proceeded to upper arms, her forearms, her hands, taking her apart with ancient strokes and the correct ancient essences to go with them, until she was nothing but a loose, boneless thing under the sheet: sleek and soft and yielding. He flashed his incandescent smile for a moment while pulling a toe until it popped - and then the smile turned ironic. He could have what he wanted of her, now. Yes, she was in no mood to refuse anything. But he hadn't counted on what the damned sheet would do to him . Everyone knew that a scrap of covering, no matter how simple, always drew attention to the taboo area as pure nakedness did not. And massaging Elena by inches this way only focused him on what lay beneath the snowy fabric.

After a while Elena said drowsily, "Aren't you going to tell the end of the story? About Anne of Austria, who was the only redhead to..."

"...to, ah, remain a natural redhead to the end of her life," Damon murmured. "Yes. It was said that Cardinal Richelieu was her lover."

"Isn't that the wicked Cardinal from the The Three Musketeers ?"

"Yes, but perhaps not so wicked as he was portrayed there, and certainly an able politician. And, some say, the real father of Louis...now turn over."

"It's a strange name for a king."

"Hm?"

"Louis Now Turn Over," Elena said, turning over and showing a flash of creamy thigh while Damon tried to eye various other parts of the room.

"Depends on the naming traditions of the individual's native country," Damon said wildly. All he could see were replays of that glimpse of thigh.

"What?"

"What?"

"I was asking you - "

"Are you warm now? All done," Damon said and, unwisely, patted the highest curve of terrain under the towel.

"Hey!" Elena reared up, and Damon - faced by an entire body of pale rose-gold and perfumed and sleek - and with muscles like steel under the silken skin - precipitately fled.

He came back after an appropriate interval with a calming offering of more soup. Elena, dignified under her sheet, which she had made into a toga, accepted. She didn't even try to swat him on the bottom when his back was turned.

"What is this place?" she wondered instead. "It can't be the Dunstans' - they're an old family, with an old house. They used to be farmers."

"Oh, let's just call it a little pied-����-terre of my own in the woods."

"Ha," Elena said. "I knew you weren't sleeping in trees."

Damon found himself trying not to smile. He'd never been with Elena when the situation hadn't been life-or-death. Now, if he said he'd found he loved her mind after having massaged her naked under a sheet - no...No one would ever believe him.

"Feeling better?" he asked.

"As warm as chicken-apple soup."

"I'm never going to hear the end of that, am I?"

He made her stay on the bed while he thought up nightgowns, all sizes and styles, and robes, too - and slippers, all in the instant of walking to what had been a bathroom, and was pleased to find that it was now a walk-in closet with everything anyone could want in terms of night attire. From silky lingerie to good old-fashioned sleeping gowns to night-caps, this wardrobe had it all. Damon emerged with a double armful and gave Elena her choice.

She picked a high-necked white nightgown made out of some modest fabric. Damon found himself stroking a regal sky-blue gown trimmed with what looked like genuine Valenciennes lace.

"Not my style," Elena said, quickly tucking it under some other robes.

Not your style around me , Damon thought, amused. And a wise little lass you are, too. You don't want to tempt me into doing anything you might be sorry for tomorrow.

"All right - and then you can get a good night's sleep - " He broke off, for she was suddenly looking at him with astonishment and distress.

"Matt! Damon, we were looking for Matt ! I just remembered. We were looking for him and I - I don't know. I got hurt. I remember falling and then I was here."

Because I carried you here, Damon thought. Because this house is just a thought in Shinichi's mind. Because the only permanent things inside it are we two.

Damon took in a deep breath of air.

Chapter 31

Let us at least have the dignity of walking out of your trap on our own feet - or should I say, using your own key? Damon thought to Shinichi. To Elena, he said, "Yes, we're looking for what's-his-face. But you took a bad fall. I wish - I would like to ask you - that you stay here and recuperate while I go look for him."

"You think you know where Matt is?" That was the entire sentence distilled for her. That was all she heard.

"Yes."

"Can we go now ?"

"Won't you let me go alone?"

"No," Elena said simply. "I have to find him. I wouldn't sleep at all if you went out alone. Please, can't we go now?"

Damon sighed. "All right. There were some" - (there will be now) - "clothes that will fit you in the closet. Jeans and things. I'll get them," he said. "As long as I really, really can't convince you to lie down and rest while I look for him."

"I can make it," Elena promised. "And if you go without me, I'll just jump out a window and follow you."

She was serious. He went and got the promised pile of clothes and then turned his back while Elena put on an identical version of the jeans and Pendleton shirt she had been wearing, whole and un-bloodstained. Then they left the house, Elena brushing her hair vigorously, but glancing back every step or so.

"What are you doing?" Damon asked, just when he had decided to carry her.

"Waiting for the house to disappear." And when he gave her his best what're you talking about? look, she said, "Armani jeans, just my size? La Perla camisoles, same? Pendleton shirts, two sizes too big, just like the one I was wearing? That place is either a warehouse or it's magic. My bet's on magic."

Damon picked her up as a way to shut her up, and walked to the passenger's door of the Ferrari. He wondered if they were in the real world now or in another of Shinichi's globes.

"Did it disappear?" he asked.

"Yup."

What a pity, he thought. He'd have liked to keep it.

He could try to renegotiate the bargain with Shinichi, but there were other, more important things to think of. He gave Elena a slight squeeze, thinking, other, much, much more important things.

In the car he made sure of three small facts. First, that click which his brain automatically registered as passenger buckled up really did mean that Elena had her seat buckle properly fastened. Second, that the doors were locked – from his master control. And third, that he drove quite slowly. He didn't think that anyone in Elena's shape would be throwing themselves out of cars again in the near future, but he wasn't taking any chances.

He had no idea how long this spell was going to work. Elena must eventually come out of her amnesia. It was only logical, since he seemed to be, and he'd been awake much longer than she had. Pretty soon she would remember...what? That he'd taken her in the Ferrari against her will (bad but forgivable - he couldn't know she'd launch herself out)? That he'd been teasing Mike or Mitch or whoever and her in the clearing? He himself had a vague picture of this - or was it another dream.

He wished he knew what the truth was. When would he remember everything? He'd be in a much stronger bargaining position once he did.

And it was hardly possible that Mac was getting hypothermia in a midsummer snowstorm even if he were still in that clearing right now. It was a chilly night, but the worst the boy could expect was a twinge of rheumatism when he was around eighty.

The vital thing was that they didn't find him. He might have some unpleasant truths to tell.

Damon noticed Elena making the same gesture again. A touch to her throat, a grimace, a deep breath.

"Are you carsick?"

"No, I'm..." In the moonlight he could see her blush come and go; could sense her heat with detectors in his face. She flushed deeply. "I explained," she said, "about feeling...too full. That's what it is now."

What was a vampire to do?

Say, I'm sorry - I've given it up for Moon spire ?

Say, I'm sorry - you'll hate me in the morning?

Say, To hell with the morning; this seat reclines two inches ?

But what if they got to the clearing and found that something really had happened to Mutt - Gnat - the boy? Damon would regret it for the rest of the remaining twenty seconds of his life. Elena would call battalions of sky spirits down on his head. Even if no one else believed in her, Damon did.

He found himself saying, as smoothly as ever he'd spoken to a Page or a Damaris, "Will you trust me?"

"What?"

"Will you trust me for another fifteen or twenty minutes, to go to a certain place I think what's his name might be?" If he is - my bet is that you remember everything and you never want to see me again in your life - then you'll be spared a long search. If he isn't - and the car isn't either; it's my lucky day and Mutt wins the prize of a lifetime - and then we go on looking.

Elena was watching him intently. "Damon, do you know where Matt is?"

"No." Well, that was true enough. But she was a bright little trinket, a pretty little pink, and more than all that, she was clever.... Damon broke off his polyrhythmic contemplations on Elena's intelligence. Why was he thinking in poetry? Was he really going crazy? He'd wondered that before - hadn't he? Didn't it prove you weren't crazy if you wondered if you were? The truly insane never doubted their sanity, right? Right. Or did they? And surely all this talking to himself couldn't be good for anyone .

Merda.

"All right, then. I'll trust you."

Damon let out a breath he didn't need and headed the car toward the clearing.

It was one of the more exciting gambles of his life. On one hand, there was his life - Elena would find some way or other of killing him if he'd killed Mark, he was certain. And on the other hand...a taste of paradise. With a willing Elena, an eager Elena, an open Elena...he swallowed. He found himself doing the thing closest to praying that he'd done in half a millennium.

As they rounded the corner on the road to the little lane, he kept himself in hyper-alertness, the engine a bare hum, the night air bringing all kinds of information to vampire senses. He was thoroughly aware that an ambush could have been set up for him. But the lane was deserted. And as he suddenly hit the accelerator to reveal the little clearing, he found it blessedly, bleakly, blankly empty of either cars or of college-aged young men whose names started with "M."

He relaxed against the seatback.

Elena had been watching him.

"You thought he might be here."

"Yes." And now was the time for the real question. Without asking her this, the whole thing was a sham, a fraud. "Do you remember this place?"

She glanced around. "No. Should I?"

Damon smiled.

But he took the precaution of driving on up another three hundred yards, into a different clearing, just in case she should have a sudden attack of memory.

"There were malach in the other clearing," he explained easily. "This one is guaranteed monster-free." Oh, what a liar, I am, I am, he rejoiced. Have I still got it or what?

He'd been...disturbed ever since Elena had come back from the Other Side. But if that first night it had discomfited him into literally giving her the shirt off his back - well, there were still no words for how he'd felt when she'd stood before him newly returned from the afterlife, her skin glowing in the dark clearing, naked without shame or the concept of shame. And during her massage, where veins traced out lines of blue comet fire against an inverse sky. Damon was feeling something he hadn't felt for five hundred years.

He was feeling desire.

Human desire. Vampires didn't feel that. It was all sublimated into the need for the blood, always the blood....

But he was feeling it.

He knew why, too. Elena's aura. Elena's blood. She'd brought back with her something more substantial than wings. And while the wings had faded, this new talent seemed to be permanent.

He realized that it was a very long time since he'd felt this, and that therefore he might be quite wrong. But he didn't think so. He thought that Elena's aura would make the most fossilized of vampires stand up and blossom into virile young men once again.

He leaned away as far as the crowded confines of the Ferrari would allow. "Elena, there's something I should tell you."

"About Matt?" She gave him a straightforward, intelligent glance.

"Nat? No, no. It's about you. I know you were surprised that Stefan would leave you in the care of somebody like me ."

There was no room for privacy in the Ferrari and he was sharing her body warmth already.

"Yes, I was," she said simply.

"Well, it may have something to do with - "

"It may have had something to do with how we decided that my aura would give even old vampires the jigsies. From now on, I'll need strong protection because of that, Stefan said."

Damon didn't know what the jigsies were, but he was prepared to bless them for getting a delicate point across to a lady. "I think," he said carefully, "that of all things, Stefan would want you to have protection from the evil folk drawn here from all over the globe, and above all other things that you not be forced to - to, um, jigsy - if it was not your wish."

"And now he'sleft me - like a selfish, stupid, idealistic idiot, considering all the people in the world who might want to jigsy me."

"I agree," Damon said, careful of keeping the lie of Stefan's willing departure intact. "And I've already promised what protection I can offer. I really will do my best, Elena, to see that no one gets near you."

"Yes," said Elena, "but then something like this" - she made a little gesture probably to indicate Shinichi and all the problems brought about by his arrival - "comes up and nobody knows how to deal with it."

"True," said Damon. He had to keep shaking himself and reminding himself of his real purpose here. He was here to...well, he wasn't on St. Stefan's side. And the thing was, it was easy enough....

There she was, brushing her hair out...a fair pretty maiden sat brushing her hair out...the sun in the sky was nonesuch so gold.... Damon shook himself hard . Since when had he gotten into ye Olde English folksongs? What was wrong with him?

To have something to say, he asked, "How are you feeling?" - just, as it happened, as she lifted her hand to her throat.

She grimaced. "Not bad."

And that made them look at each other. And then Elena smiled and he had to smile back, at first just a quirk of the lip, and then a full smile.

She was...damn it, she was everything . Witty, enchanting, brave, smart...and beautiful. And he knew that his eyes were saying all that and that she wasn't turning away.

"We might - take a little walk," he said, and bells rang and trumpets played fanfares, and confetti came raining down and there was a release of doves....

In other words, she said, "All right."

They picked a little path off the clearing that looked easy to Damon's night-acquainted vampire eyes. Damon didn't want her on her feet too much. He knew that she still hurt and that she didn't want him to know it or to pamper her. Something inside him said, "Well, then, wait until she says she's tired and help her to sit down."

And something else beyond his control, sprang out at the first little hesitation of her foot, and he picked her up, apologizing in a dozen different languages, and generally acting the fool until he had her seated on a comfortably carved wooden bench with a back to it and a very light traveling blanket over her knees. He kept adding, "You'll tell me if there's something - anything - else you want?" He accidentally sent to her a snippet of his thoughts of possible contenders, which were, a glass of water, him sitting beside her, and a baby elephant, which he had earlier seen in her mind that she admired very much.

"I'm very sorry, but I don't think I do elephants," he said, on his knees, making the footstool more comfortable for her, when he caught a random thought of hers: that he was not so different from Stefan as he seemed.

No other name could have caused him to do what he did then. No other word, or concept, could have such effect on him. In an instant the blanket was off, the footstool had disappeared, and he was holding Elena bent backward with the slender column of her neck fully exposed to him.

The difference, he told her, between me and my brother is that he is still hoping somehow to slip in through some side door into heaven. I'm not such a moaning ninny about my fate. I know where I'm going. And I don't - he gave her a smile with all canines fully extended - give a damn about it.

Her eyes were wide - he'd startled her. And startled her into an unintentional, thoroughly honest response. Her thoughts were projected toward him, easy to read. I know - and, I'm like that, too. I want what I want. I'm not as good as Stefan. And I don't know -

He was enthralled. What don't you know, sweetheart?

She just shook her head, eyes shut.

To break the deadlock, he whispered into her ear, "What about this, then:

Say I'm bold

And say I'm bad

Say - you vanities

- I'm vainer.

But you Erinyes, just add

I kissed Elena."

Her eyes flew open. "Oh, no! Please, Damon." She was whispering. "Please! Please not now!" And she swallowed miserably. "Besides, you asked me if I'd like a drink, and then suddenly it's no drink. I wouldn't mind being a drink if you'd like, but first, I'm so thirsty - as thirsty as you are, maybe?"

She did the little tap-tap-tap under her chin again.

Damon's insides melted.

He held out his hand and it closed around the stem of a delicate crystal glass. He swirled the splash of liquid in it expertly, tested it for bouquet - ah, exquisite - then gently rolled it on his tongue. It was the real thing. Black Magic wine, grown from Clarion Loess Black Magic grapes. It was the only wine most vampires would drink - and there were apocryphal stories of how it had kept them on their feet when their other thirst could not be assuaged.

Elena was drinking hers, her blue eyes wide above the deep violet of the wine as he told her some of its story. He loved to watch her when she was like this - investigating with all her senses fully aroused. He shut his eyes and remembered some choice moments from the past. Then he opened them again to find Elena, looking very much the thirsty child, eagerly gulping down -

"Your second glass...?" He'd discovered the first goblet at her feet. "Elena, where did you get another one?"

"I just did what you did. Held out my hand. It's not as if it were hard liquor, is it? It tastes like grape juice, and I was dying for a drink."

Could she really be that naive? True, Black Magic wine didn't have the sharp odor or taste of most alcohol. It was subtle, created for the fastidious vampire palate. Damon knew that the grapes were grown in the soil, loess, that a grinding glacier leaves behind. Of course, that process was only for the long-lived vampires, as it took ages to build up enough loess. And when the soil was ready, the grapes were grown and processed, from graft to foot-stomped pulp in ironwood vats, without ever seeing the sun. That was what gave it its black velvet, dark, delicate taste. And now...

Elena had a "grape juice" mustache. Damon wanted very much to kiss it away.

"Well, someday you can tell people you drank two glasses of Black Magic in under a minute, and impress them," he said.

But she was doing the tap-tap-tapping again under her chin.

"Elena, do you want to have some of your blood drawn?"

"Yes!" She said it in the ringing-bell tones of someone who has finally been asked the right question.

She was drunk.

She flung both arms backward, draping them against the bench, which conformed to accept her body's every new motion. It had become a black suede couch with a high back: a divan, and just now, Elena's slender neck was resting on the highest point of that back, her throat exposed to the air. Damon turned away with a little moan. He wanted to get Elena to civilization. He was worried about her health, mildly concerned about...Mutt's; and now...he couldn't have anything he wanted. He could hardly bleed her when she was drunk.

Elena made a different sort of sound that might have been his name. "D'm'n?" she mumbled. Her eyes had filled with tears.

Just about anything that a nurse might have to do for a patient, Damon had done for Elena. But it seemed she didn't want to unswallow two glasses of Black Magic in front of him.

"'M'shick," Elena got out, with a dangerous hiccup at the end. She gripped Damon's wrist.

"Yes, this is not the kind of wine to guzzle. Wait, just sit up straight and let me try..." And maybe because he said the words without thinking, without thinking of being rude, without thinking of manipulating her one way or another, it was all right. Elena obeyed him and he put two fingers on either side of her temples and pressed slightly. For a split second there was a near disaster, and then Elena was breathing slowly and calmly. She was still affected by the wine, but she wasn't drunk any longer.

And the time was now. He had to tell her the truth at last.

But first, he needed to wake up.

"A triple espresso, please," he said, holding out his hand. It appeared instantly, aromatic and black as his soul. "Shinichi says espresso alone is an excuse for the human race."

"Whoever Shinichi is, I agree with him or her. A triple espresso, please," Elena said to the magic that was this forest, this snowflake globe, this universe. Nothing happened.

"Maybe it's only attuned to my voice right now," Damon said, flashing her a reassuring smile, and then he fetched her espresso with a wave.

To his surprise, Elena was frowning.

"You said ‘Shinichi.' Who's that?

Damon wanted nothing less than for Elena to get involved with the kitsune, but if he was really going to tell all she was going to have to. "He's a kitsune , a fox spirit," he said. "And the person who gave me that Web address that sent Stefan running."

Elena's expression froze over.

"Actually," Damon said, "I find that I would rather get you home before taking the next step."

Elena lifted exasperated eyes to the sky, but let him pick her up and carry her back to the car.

He had just realized where the best place to tell her was.

It was just as well that they didn't urgently need to get to any place that was out of the Old Wood right now. They didn't find any road that did not lead to dead ends, little clearings, or trees. Elena seemed so unsurprised at finding the little lane that led to their small but perfectly appointed house that he said nothing as they entered and he took new inventory of what they had.

They had one bedroom with one large, luxurious bed. They had a kitchen. And a living area. But any of these rooms could become any kind of room you chose simply by thinking of it before opening the door. Moreover, there were the keys - left behind by what Damon was realizing was a seriously shaken Shinichi - that allowed the doors to do more. Insert a key in a door and announce what you wanted and there you were - even, it seemed, if it should be outside Shinichi's territory in space time. In other words, they seemed to link to the real outside world, but Damon wasn't entirely sure about that. Was it the real world or just another of Shinichi's play-traps?

What they had right now was a long spiraling stairway to an open-air observatory with a widow's walk around it, just like the roof of the boardinghouse. There was even a room just like Stefan's, Damon noted as he carried Elena up the stairs.

"We're going all the way up?" Elena sounded bewildered.

"All the way."

"And what are we doing up here?" Elena asked, when he had her settled in a chair with a footstool and a light blanket on the roof.

Damon sat down on a rocker, rocking a little, his arms wrapped around one knee, his face tilted to the clouded sky.

He rocked once more, stopped, and turned to face her. "I suppose we're here," he said, in the light self-mocking tone that meant he was very serious, "so that I can tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Chapter 32

"Who is it?" a voice was saying from the forest darkness. "Who's out there?"

Bonnie had seldom been as grateful to anyone as she was to Matt for holding on to her. She needed people contact. If she could only bury herself deep enough in other people, she would be safe somehow. She just barely managed not to scream as the dimming flashlight swung onto a surrealistic scene.

"Isobel!"

Yes, it really was Isobel, not at the Ridgemont hospital at all, but here in the Old Wood. She was standing at bay, almost naked except for blood and mud. Right here, against this background, she looked like both prey and a sort of forest goddess, a goddess of vengeance, and of hunted things, and of punishment for any being who stood in her way. She was winded, breathing hard, with bubbles of saliva coming out of her mouth, but she wasn't broken. You only had to see her eyes, shining red, to see that.

Behind her, stepping on branches and letting loose the occasional grunt or curse, were two other figures, one tall and thin but bulbous on top, and one shorter and stouter. They looked like gnomes trying to follow a wood nymph.

"Dr. Alpert!" Meredith seemed just barely able to sound like her ordinary controlled self.

At the same time, Bonnie saw that Isobel's piercings were much worse. She'd lost most of her studs and hoops and needles, but there was blood and, already, pus, coming out of the holes where they had been.

"Don't scare her," Jim's voice whispered out of the shadows. "We've been tracking her since we had to stop." Bonnie could feel Matt, who had drawn in air to shout, suddenly choke it off. She could also see why Jim looked so top-heavy. He was carrying Obaasan, Japanese-style, on his back, with her arms around his neck. Like a backpack, Bonnie thought.

"What happened to you?" Meredith whispered. "We thought you'd gone to the hospital."

"Somehow, a tree fell across the road while we were letting you off, and we couldn't get around it to get to the hospital, or anywhere else. Not only that, but it was a tree with a hornet's nest or something inside it. Isobel woke up like that " - the doctor snapped her fingers - "and when she heard the hornets she scrambled out and ran from them. We ran after her. I don't mind saying I would have done the same if I'd been alone."

"Did anybody see these hornets?" Matt asked, after a moment.

"No, it had just turned dark. But we heard them all right. Weirdest thing I ever heard. Sounded like hornet a foot long," Jim said.

Meredith was now squeezing Bonnie's arm from the other side. Whether to keep her silent or to encourage her to speak, Bonnie had no idea. And what could she say? "Fallen trees here only stay fallen until the police make the decision to look for them?" "Oh, and watch out for the hellish streams of bugs as long as your arm?" "And by the way, there's probably one inside Isobel right now?" That would really freak Jim out.

"If I knew the way back to the boardinghouse, I would drop these three off there," Mrs. Flowers was saying. "They're not part of this."

To Bonnie's surprise, Dr. Alpert did not take exception to the statement that she herself was "not part of it." Nor did she ask what Mrs. Flowers was doing with the two teenagers out in the Old Wood at this hour. What she said was even more astonishing: "We saw the lights as you started shouting. It's right back there."

Bonnie felt Matt's muscles tighten up against her. "Thank God," he said. And then, slowly, "But that's not possible. I left the Dunstans' about ten minutes before we met, and that's right on the other side of the Old Wood from the boardinghouse. It would take at least forty-five minutes to walk it."

"Well, possible or not, we saw the boardinghouse, Theophilia. All the lights were on, from top to bottom. It was impossible to mistake. Are you sure you're not underestimating time?" she added, to Matt.

Mrs. Flowers' name is Theophilia, Bonnie thought, and had to curb an urge not to giggle. The tension was getting to her.

But just as she was thinking it, Meredith gave her another nudge.

Sometimes she thought that she, and Elena, and Meredith had a sort of telepathy with each other. Maybe it wasn't true telepathy, but sometimes just a look, just a glance, could say more than pages and pages of argument. And sometimes - not always, but sometimes - Matt or Stefan would seem to be part of it. Not that it was like real telepathy, with voices as clear in your head as they would be in your ears, but sometimes the boys seemed to be...on the girls' channel.

Because Bonnie knew exactly what that nudge meant. It meant that Meredith had turned the lamp off in Stefan's room on the top of the house, and that Mrs. Flowers had turned the downstairs lights off as they left. So while Bonnie had a very vivid image of the boardinghouse with lights blazing, that image couldn't be reality, not now.

Someone is trying to mess with us was what Meredith's nudge meant. And Matt was on the same wavelength, even if it was for a different reason. He leaned very slightly back at Meredith, with Bonnie in between.

"But maybe we should head back toward the Dunstans'," Bonnie said in her most babyish, heartrending voice. "They're just normal people. They could protect us."

"The boardinghouse is just over that rise," Dr. Alpert said firmly. "And I really would appreciate your advice on how to slow down Isobel's infections," she added to Mrs. Flowers.

Mrs. Flowers fluttered. There was no other word for it. "Oh, goodness, what a compliment. One thing would be to wash the dirt out of the wounds immediately."

This was so obvious and so unlike Mrs. Flowers that Matt squeezed Bonnie hard just as Meredith leaned in on her. Yee haw! Bonnie thought. Do we have this telepathy thing going or not! So it's Dr. Alpert who's the dangerous one, the liar.

"That's it, then. We head for the boardinghouse," Meredith said calmly. "And Bonnie, don't worry. We'll take care of you."

"We sure will," Matt said, giving her one last hard squeeze. It meant I get it. I know who's not on our side. Aloud, he added, in a fake stern voice, "It's no good going to the Dunstans' anyway. I already told Mrs. Flowers and the girls about this, but they've got a daughter who's like Isobel."

"Piercing herself?" Dr. Alpert said, sounding startled and horrified at the thought.

"No. She's just acting pretty strangely. But it's not a good place." Squeeze.

I got it a long time ago, Bonnie thought in annoyance. I'm supposed to shut up now.

"Lead the way, please," murmured Mrs. Flowers, seeming more fluttery than ever. "Back to the boardinghouse."

And they let the doctor and Jim lead the way. Bonnie kept up a mumbling complaint in case anyone was listening. And she, and Matt, and Meredith all kept an eye on the doctor and Jim.

"Okay," Elena said to Damon, "I'm dolled up like somebody on the deck of an ocean liner, I'm keyed up like an overstrung guitar, and I'm fed up with all this delay. Soooo...what is the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth?" She shook her head. Time had skipped and stretched for her.

Damon said, "In a way, we're in a tiny snow globe I made for myself. It just means they won't see or hear us for a few minutes. Now is the time to get the real talking done."

"So we'd better talk fast." She smiled at him, encouragingly.

She was trying to help him. She knew he needed help. He wanted to tell her the truth, but it was so far against his nature that it was like asking one hell of a wild horse to let you ride it, master it.

"There are more problems," Damon got out huskily, and she knew he'd read her thoughts. "They - they tried to make it impossible for me to speak to you about this. They did it in grand old fairy tale style: by making up lots of conditions. I couldn't tell you inside a house, nor could I tell you outside. Well, a widow's walk isn't inside, but you can't say it's outside, either. I couldn't tell you by sunlight or by moonlight. Well, the sun's gone down, and it's another thirty minutes before the moon rises, and I say that that condition is met. And I couldn't tell you while you were clothed or naked." Elena automatically glanced down at herself in alarm, but nothing had changed as far as she could tell.

"And I figure that that condition is met, too, because even though he swore to me he was letting me out of one of his little snow globes, he didn't do it. We're in a house that's not a house - it's a thought in somebody's mind. You're wearing clothes that aren't real clothes - they're figments of imagination."

Elena opened her mouth again, but he put two fingers to her lips and said, "Wait. Just let me go on while I still can. I seriously thought that he might never stop with the conditions, which he had picked up out of fairy tale literature. He's obsessed with that, and with old English poetry. I don't know why, because he's from the other side of the world, from Japan. That's who Shinichi is. And he has a twin sister...Misao."

Damon stopped breathing hard after that, and Elena figured that there must have been some internal conditions against him telling her.

"He likes it if you translate his name as death-first , or number one in the matters of death . They're both like teenagers, really, with their codes and their games, and yet they're thousands of years old."

"Thousands?" Elena prodded gently as Damon coasted to a stop, looking exhausted but determined.

"I hate to think of how many thousands of years the two of them have been doing mischief. Misao's the one who's been doing all the things to the girls in town. She possesses them with her malach and then she makes the malach make them do things. You remember your American history? The Salem witches? That was Misao, or someone like her. And it's happened hundreds of times before that. You might look up the Ursuline nuns when you're out of this. They were a quiet convent who became exhibitionists and worse - some went mad, and some who tried to help them became possessed."

"Exhibitionists? Like Tamra? But she's only a child - "

"Misao's only a child, in her head."

"And where does Caroline come in?"

"In any case like this, there's got to be an instigator - someone who's willing to bargain with the devil - or a demon, really - for their own ends. That's where Caroline comes in. But for an entire town, they must be giving her something really big."

"An entire town? They're going to take over Fell's Church...?"

Damon looked away. The truth was that they were going to destroy Fell's Church, but there was no point in saying that. His hands were loosely fastened around his knees as he sat on a rickety old wooden chair on the widow's walk.

"Before we can do anything to help anyone, we have to get out of here. Out of Shinichi's world. This is important. I can - block him for short periods of time from watching us - but then I get tired and need blood. I need more than you can regenerate, Elena." He looked up at her. "He's put Beauty in with the Beast here and he'll leave us to see which one will triumph."

"If you mean kill the other, he's in for a long wait on my end."

"That's what you think now. But this is a specially made trap. There's nothing in here except the Old Wood as it was when we started driving around it. It's also minus any other human habitations. The only house is this house, the only real living creatures are the two of us. You'll want me dead soon enough."

"Damon, I don't understand. What do they want here? Even with what Stefan said about all the ley lines crossing under Fell's Church and making a beacon..."

"It was your beacon that drew them, Elena. They're curious, like kids, and I have a feeling that they may already have been in trouble wherever it is they really live. It's possible they were here watching the end of the battle, watching you be reborn."

"And so they want...to destroy us? To have fun? To take over the town and make us puppets?"

"All three, for a while. They could be having fun while someone else pleads their case in a high court in another dimension. And yes, fun, to them, means taking apart a town. Although I believe that Shinichi means to go back on his bargain with me for something he wants more than the town, so they may end up fighting each other."

"What bargain with you , Damon?"

"For you. Stefan had you. I wanted you. He wants you."

Despite herself, Elena felt cold pooling in her midriff, felt the distant shaking that began there and worked its way outward. "And the original bargain was?"

He looked away from her. "This is the bad part."

"Damon, what have you done?" she cried, almost screaming it. "What was the bargain?" Her whole body was shaking.

"I made a bargain with a demon and, yes, I knew what he was when I did it. It was the night after your friends were attacked by the trees - after Stefan banished me from his room. That and - well, I was angry, but he took my anger and boosted it. He was using me, controlling me; I see that now. That's when he started with the deals and conditions."

"Damon - " Elena began shakily, but he went on, speaking rapidly as if he had to get through this, to see it to its conclusion, before he lost his nerve. "The final deal was that he would help me get Stefan out of the way so I could have you, while he got Caroline and the rest of the town to share with his sister. Thus trumping Caroline's bargain for whatever she was getting from Misao."

Elena slapped him. She wasn't sure how she managed, wrapped up as she was, to get a hand free and to make the lightning-fast movement, but she did. And then she waited, watching a bead of blood hanging on his lip, for him to retaliate or for the strength to try to kill him.

Chapter 33
   
Damon just sat there. Then he licked his mouth and said nothing, did nothing.

"You bastard!"

"Yes."

"You're saying that Stefan didn't really walk out on me?"

"Yes. I mean - correct."

"Who wrote the letter in my diary, then?"

Damon said nothing, but looked away.

"Oh, Damon!" She didn't know whether to kiss him or shake him. "How could you - do you know," she said in a choked and threatening voice, "what I've gone through since he disappeared? Thinking every minute that he just suddenly decided to up and leave me ? Even if he intended to come back - "

"I - "

"Don't try to tell me you're sorry ! Don't try to tell me you know what it feels like feeling that, because you don't. How could you? You don't have feelings like that!"

"I think - I've had some similar experience. But I wasn't going to try to defend myself. Only to say that we have a limited time while I can block Shinichi from seeing us."

Elena heart was shattering into a thousand pieces; she could feel each one pierce her. Nothing mattered anymore. "You lied, you broke your promise about never harming each other - "

"I know - and that should have been impossible. But it started that night when the trees closed in on Bonnie and Meredith and...Mark...."

"Matt!"

"That night, when Stefan knocked me around and showed me his true Power - it was because of you. He did it so I would stay away from you. Before that he'd just hoped to keep you hidden. And that night I felt...betrayed somehow. Don't ask me why that should make sense, when for years before I've knocked him down and made him eat dirt any time I wanted."

Elena tried to make sense of what he was saying in her shattered condition. And she couldn't. But neither could she ignore a feeling that had just dropped down like an angel in chains grabbing hold of her.

Try to look with your other eyes. Look inside, not outside for the answer. You know Damon. You've already seen what is inside him. How long has it been there?

"Oh, Damon, I'm sorry! I know the answer. Damon - Damon. Oh, God! I can see what's wrong with you. You're more possessed than any of those girls."

"I - have one of those things in me?"

Elena kept her eyes shut while she nodded. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she felt sick even as she made herself do it: gather enough human power to see with her other eyes, see as she had somehow learned to see inside people.

The malach that she had seen before inside Damon, and the one Matt had described had been huge for insects - as long as an arm, maybe. But now in Damon she sensed something...huge. Monstrous. Something that inhabited him completely, its transparent head inside his beautiful features, its chitinous body as long as his torso; its backward-twisted legs inside his legs. For a moment she thought she would faint; but then she controlled herself. Staring at the ghostly image, she thought, What Would Meredith Do?

Meredith would stay calm. She wouldn't lie, but she would find some way to help.

"Damon, it's bad. But there has to be some way to get it out of you - soon. I'm going to find that way. Because as long as it's in you, Shinichi can make you do anything."

"Will you listen to why I think it's grown so large? That night, when Stefan dismissed me from his room, everyone else went home like good little girls and boys, but you and Stefan took a walk. A fly. A glide."

For a long time it meant nothing to her, even though it had been the last time she'd seen Stefan. In fact, that was its only significance to her: it was the last time she and Stefan had...

She felt herself freeze over inside.

"You went into the Old Wood. You were still the little spirit child who didn't really know what was right and what was wrong. But Stefan should have known better than to do that - on my own territory. Vampires take territory seriously. And in my own resting place - right in front of my eyes."

"Oh, Damon! No!"

"Oh, Damon, yes! There you were, sharing blood, too absorbed to have noticed me even if I had leaped out and tried to pry you apart. You were wearing a high-necked white nightgown and you looked like an angel. I wanted to kill Stefan right then."

"Damon - "

"And it wasright then that Shinichi appeared. He didn't need to be told what I was feeling. And he had a plan, an offer...a proposition."

Elena shut her eyes again and shook her head. "He'd prepared you beforehand. You were already possessed and ready to be full of anger."

"I don't know why," Damon went on as if he hadn't heard her, "but I scarcely thought about what it would mean to Bonnie and Meredith and the rest of the town. All I could think of was you. All I wanted was you, and revenge on Stefan."

"Damon, will you listen? By then, you had already been deliberately possessed. I could see the malach in you. You admit" - as she felt him swelling up to speak out - "that something was influencing you before that, forcing you to watch Bonnie and the others die at your feet that night. Damon, I think these things are even harder to get rid of than we imagine. For one thing, you wouldn't normally stay and watch people do - private things, would you? Doesn't the fact that you did in itself prove that something was wrong?"

"It's...a theory," Damon granted, not sounding happy.

"But don't you see? That was what made you tell Stefan you only saved Bonnie out of whim, and that was what made you refuse to tell everyone that the malach were making you watch the trees' attack, hypnotizing you. That and your stupid, stubborn pride."

"Watch it on the compliments. I may dry up and blow away."

"Don't worry," Elena said flatly, "whatever happens to the rest of us, I have a feeling your ego will survive. What happened next?"

"I made my deal with Shinichi. He would lure Stefan somewhere out of the way where I could see him alone, then smuggle him out of this place to somewhere Stefan couldn't find you - "

Something bubbled up explosively again inside Elena. It was a tight hard ball of compressed elation. "Not kill him?" she managed to get out.

"What?"

"Stefan's alive? He's alive? He...he's really alive?"

"Steady," Damon replied coldly. "Steady on, Elena. We can't have you fainting." He held her by the shoulders. "You thought I meant to kill him?"

Elena was trembling almost too hard to answer. "Why didn't you tell me before?"

"I apologize for the omission."

"He's alive - for sure, Damon? You're absolutely sure?"

"Positive."

Without a thought of herself, without a thought of any kind, Elena did what she did best - gave in to impulse. She threw her arms around Damon's neck and kissed him.

For a moment Damon just stood rigid with shock. He had contracted with killers to hijack her lover and decimate her town. But Elena's mind would never see it that way.

"If he were dead - " He stopped and had to try again. "Shinichi's whole bargain depends on keeping him alive - alive and away from you. I couldn't risk you killing yourself or really hating me" - again the note of distant coldness. "With Stefan dead, what hold would I have over you, princess?"

Elena ignored all this. "If he's alive, I can find him."

"If he remembers you. But what if every memory he had of you were taken away?"

"What?" Elena wanted to explode. "If every memory of Stefan were taken away from me ," she said icily, "I would still fall in love with him the very moment I saw him. And if every memory of me were taken away from Stefan, he would wander all over the world looking for something without knowing what he was looking for."

"Very poetic."

"But, oh, Damon, thank you for not letting Shinichi kill him!"

He shook his head at her, looking bewildered at himself. "I couldn't - seem to - do that. Something about giving my word. I figured that if he were free and happy and didn't remember, that would satisfy enough..."

"Of your promise to me? You figured wrong. But it doesn't matter now."

"It does matter. You've suffered for it."

"No, Damon. All that really matters is that he's not dead - and he didn't leave me. There's still hope."

"But Elena," Damon's voice had life now; it was both excited and inflexible: "Can't you see? Past history aside, you have to admit that we're the ones that belong together. You and I are simply better suited to each other by nature. Deep down you know that, because we understand each other. We're on the same intellectual level - "

"So is Stefan!"

"Well, all I can say is that he does a remarkable job of hiding it, then. But can't you feel it? Don't you feel" - his grip was becoming uncomfortable now - "that you could be my princess of darkness - that something deep inside you wants to? I can see it, if you can't."

"I can't be anything to you, Damon. Except a decent sister-in-law."

He shook his head, laughing harshly. "No, you're only suited for the main role. Well, all I can say is that if we live through the fight with the twins, you'll see things in yourself that you've never seen before. And you'll know that we're more suited together."

"And all I can say is that if we live through this fight with the Bobbsey twins from Hell, it sounds as if we're going to need all the spiritual power that we can get afterward. And that means getting Stefan back."

"We may not be able to get him back. Oh, I agree - even if we drive Shinichi and Misao away from Fell's Church, the likelihood that we're going to be able to do away with them completely is about zero. You're no fighter. We're probably not even going to be able to hurt them very much. But even I don't know exactly where Stefan is."

"Then the twins are the only ones who can help us."

"If they still can help us - oh, all right, I'll admit it. The Shi no Shi are probably complete frauds. They probably take a few memories from vampire chumps - memories are the coin of choice in the realm of the Other Side - and then send them away while the cash register is still jingling. They're frauds. The whole place is a giant slum and freak show - sort of like a rundown Vegas."

"But they're not afraid that the vampires they cheat will want revenge?"

Damon laughed, this time musically. "A vampire who doesn't want to be a vampire is about the lowest object on the totem pole on the Other Side. Oh, except for humans. Along with lovers who've fulfilled suicide pacts, kids who jump off the roof because they think their Superman cape can make them fly - "

Elena tried to pull away from him, to reprove him, but he was surprisingly strong. "It doesn't sound like a very nice place."

"It isn't."

"And that's where Stefan is?"

"If we're lucky."

"So basically," she said, seeing things, as she always did, in terms of Plans A, B, C, and D, "first we have to find out where Stefan is from these twins. Second, we have to get the twins to heal the little girls they've possessed. Third, we have to get them to leave Fell's Church alone - for good. But before any of that, we have to find Stefan. He'll be able to help us; I know he will. And then we just hope we're strong enough for the rest."

"We could use Stefan's help, all right. But you missed the real point - for now, what we have to do is keep the twins from killing us."

"They still think you're their friend, yes?" Elena's mind was flickering through options. "Make them sure you are. Wait until a strategic moment comes, and then take the chance. Do we have any weapons against them?"

"Iron. They do badly against iron - they're demons. And dear Shinichi is obsessed with you, although I can't say his sister will approve when she realizes it."

"Obsessed?"

"Yes. With you and with English folk songs, remember? Although I can't fathom why. The songs, I mean."

"Well, I don't know what we can make of that - "

"But I'll bet that his obsession with you will make Misao angry. It's just a hunch, but she's had him to herself for thousands of years."

"Then we set them against each other, pretend that he's going to get me. Damon - what?" Elena added in tones of alarm as he tightened his grip on her as if concerned.

"He's not going to get you," Damon said.

"I know that."

"I don't quite like the idea of anyone else getting you. You were meant to be mine, you know."

"Damon, don't. I've told you. Please - "

"Meaning ‘please don't make me hurt you'? The truth is that you can't hurt me unless I let you. You can only hurt yourself against me."

Elena could at least pull their upper bodies farther apart. "Damon, we just made an agreement, made plans. Now, what are we doing, throwing them all away?"

"No, but I thought of another way to get you a grade-A superhero, right now. You've been saying I should take more of your blood for ages."

"Oh...yes." It was true, even if that had been before he had admitted to her the terrible things he'd done. And...

"Damon, what happened with Matt in the clearing? We went looking all over for him, but we didn't find him. And you were glad ."

He didn't bother to deny it. "In the real world I was angry at him, Elena. He seemed to be just another rival. Part of the reason we're here is so I can remember exactly what happened."

"Did you hurt Matt, Damon? Because now you're hurting me."

"Yes." Damon's voice was light and indifferent suddenly, as if he found it amusing. "I suppose I did hurt him. I used psychic pain on him, and that's stopped a lot of hearts from beating. But your Mutt's tough. I like that. I made him suffer more and more, and yet he still went on living because he was afraid to leave you alone."

"Damon!" Elena wrenched herself back, only to find that it did no good. He was far, far stronger than she was. "How could you do that to him?"

"I told you; he was a rival." Damon laughed suddenly. "You really don't remember, do you? I made him abase himself for you. I made him eat dirt, literally, for you."

"Damon - are you crazy?"

"No. I'm just now finding my sanity. I don't need to convince you that you belong to me. I can take you."

"No, Damon. I won't be your princess of darkness or - or anything else of yours without asking. At the most you'll have a dead body to play with."

"Maybe I'd like that. But you forget; I can enter your mind. And you still have friends - at home, getting ready for supper or bed, you hope. Don't you? Friends with all their limbs; who've never known real pain."

It took Elena a long time to speak. Then she said quietly, "I take back every decent thing I ever said about you. You're a monster, do you hear that? You're an abomin - " Her voice wound slowly down. "They're making you do this, aren't they?" she said finally, flatly. "Shinichi and Misao. A nice little show for them. Just like they made you hurt Matt and me before."

"No, I do only what I want to." Was that a flash of red Elena saw in his eyes? The briefest flaring of a flame..."Do you know how beautiful you are when you're crying? You're more beautiful than ever. The gold in your eyes seems to rise to the surface and spill down in tears of diamond. I would love to have a sculptor carve a bust of you weeping."

"Damon, I know you're not really saying this. I know that the thing they put inside you is the one saying it."

"Elena, I assure you, it's all me. I quite enjoyed it when I made him hurt you. I liked to hear the way you cried out. I made him tear your clothes - I had to hurt him a lot to get him to do it. But didn't you notice that your camisole had been torn, and that you were barefooted? That was all Mutt."

Elena forced her mind back to the moment she had come to herself leaping out of the Ferrari. Yes, then, and in the time afterward she had been barefooted and bare-armed, wearing only a camisole. Quite a bit of the fabric of her jeans had been left on the roadside after that, and in the surrounding vegetation. But it had never occurred to her to wonder what had happened to her boots and socks, or how her camisole had been torn in strips at the bottom. She'd simply been so grateful for help...to the one who had hurt her in her first place.

Oh, Damon must have thought that ironic. She suddenly realized she herself was thinking of Damon and not of the possessor. Not of Shinichi and Misao. But they weren't the same, she told herself. I've got to remember that!

"Yes, I enjoyed making him hurt you, and I enjoyed hurting you. I made him bring me a willow rod, just the right thickness, and then whipped you with it. You enjoyed that, too, I promise you. Don't bother to look for marks because they've all gone like the others. But all three of us enjoyed hearing your cries. You...and me...and Mutt, too. In fact, of all of us, he may have enjoyed it most."

"Damon, shut up! I won't listen to you talk about Matt that way!"

"I wouldn't let him see you without your clothes on, though," Damon confided, as if he hadn't heard a word. "That was when I had him - dismissed. Put into another snow globe. I wanted to hunt you as you tried to get away from me, in an empty globe that you could never get out of. I wanted to see that special look in your eyes that you get when you fight with everything you have - and I wanted to see it defeated. You're no fighter, Elena." Damon laughed suddenly, an ugly sound, and to Elena's shock his arm shot out and he punched through the wall of the widow's walk.

"Damon..." She was sobbing by now.

"And then I wanted to do this ." With no warning, Damon's fist forced her chin up, jerking her head back. His other hand tangled in her hair, bringing her neck back to the exact position he wanted her to be in. And then Elena felt him strike, quick as a cobra, and felt the two tearing wounds in the side of her neck, and her own blood spurting out of them.

Ages later, Elena woke up sluggishly. Damon was still enjoying himself, clearly lost in the experience of having Elena Gilbert. And there was no time to make different plans.

Her body simply took over by itself, startling her almost as much as it startled Damon. Even as he lifted his head, her hand plucked the magical house key off his finger. Then she gripped, twisted, lifted her knees as high as she could, and kicked outward, sending Damon smashing through the splintered, rotted wood that formed the outside railing of the widow's walk.

Chapter 34

Elena had once fallen off that balcony and Stefan had jumped and caught her before she could hit the ground. A human falling from that height would be dead on impact. A vampire in full possession of his or her reflexes would simply twist in the air like a cat and land lightly on their feet. But one in Damon's particular circumstances tonight...

From the sound of it, he had tried to twist, but had only ended up landing on his side and breaking bones. Elena deduced the latter from his cursing. She didn't wait to listen for more specifics. She was off like a rabbit, down to the level of Stefan's room - where instantaneously and almost unconsciously, she sent out a wordless plea - and then down the stairs. The cabin had turned completely into a perfect duplicate of the boardinghouse. Elena didn't know why, but instinctively she ran to the side of the house that Damon would know the least: the old servant's quarters. She got that far before she dared whispering things to the house, asking for them rather than demanding them, and praying that the house would obey her as it had obeyed Damon.

"Aunt Judith's house," she whispered, thrusting the key into a door - it went in like a hot knife into butter and turned almost of its own volition, and then suddenly she was there again, in what had been her home for sixteen years, up until her first death.

She was in the hallway, with her little sister Margaret's open door showing her lying on the floor of her bedroom, staring with wide-open eyes over a coloring book.

"It's tag, sweetie!" she announced as if ghosts appeared every day in the Gilbert household and Margaret was supposed to know how to deal with it. "You go running to your friend Barbara's and then she has to be It. Don't stop running until you get there, and then go see Barbara's mom. But first you give me three kisses." And she lifted Margaret and hugged her tightly and then almost threw her at the door.

"But Elena - you're back - "

"I know, darling, and I promise to see you again another day. But now - run, baby - "

"I told them you would come back. You did before."

"Margaret! Run!"

Choking on tears, but maybe recognizing in her childlike way the seriousness of the situation, Margaret ran. And Elena followed, but zagging toward a different staircase when Margaret zigged.

And then she found herself confronted by a smirking Damon.

"You take too long to talk to people," he said as Elena frantically counted her options. Go over the balcony into the entry way? No. Damon's bones might still hurt a little but if Elena jumped even one story, she would probably break her neck. What else? Think!

And then she was opening the door into the china closet, at the same time shouting out, "Great-aunt Tilda's house," unsure if the magic would still work. And then she was slamming the door in Damon's face.

And she was in her Aunt Tilda's house, but the Aunt Tilda's house of the past. No wonder they accused poor Auntie Tilda of seeing strange things, Elena thought, as she saw the woman turning while holding a large glass casserole dish full of something that smelled mushroomy, and screaming, and dropping the dish.

"Elena!" she cried. "What - it can't be you - you're all grown up!"

"What's the trouble?" demanded Aunt Maggie, who was Aunt Tilda's friend, coming in from the other room. She was taller and fiercer than Aunt Tilda.

"I'm being chased," cried Elena. "I need to find a door, and if you see a boy after me - "

And just then Damon stepped out of the coat closet, and at the same time Aunt Maggie tripped him neatly and said, "Bathroom door beside you," and picked up a vase and hit the rising Damon over the head with it. Hard.

And Elena dashed through the bathroom door, crying, "Robert E. Lee High School last fall - just as the bell's rung!"

And then she was swimming against the flow, with dozens of students trying to get to their classes on time - but then one of them recognized her, and then another, and while apparently she'd successfully traveled to a time when she wasn't dead - no one was screaming "ghost" - neither had anyone at Robert E. Lee ever seen Elena Gilbert wearing a boy's shirt over a camisole, with her hair falling wildly over her shoulders.

"It's a costume for a play!" she shouted, and created one of the immortal legends about herself before she had even died by adding, "Caroline's house!" and stepping into a janitor's closet. An instant later, the most gorgeous boy that anyone had ever seen appeared behind her, and rocketed through the same doors saying words in a foreign language. And when the janitor's closet opened, neither boy nor girl was there.

Elena landed running down a hallway and almost crashed into Mr. Forbes, who looked rather wobbly. He was drinking what seemed to be a large glass of tomato juice that smelled like alcohol.

"We don't know where she's gone, all right?" he shouted before Elena could say a word. "She's gone right out of her mind, as far as I can tell. She was talking about the ceremony at the widow's walk - and the way she was dressed! Parents don't have any control over children anymore!" He slumped against the wall.

"I'm so sorry," murmured Elena. The ceremony. Well, Black Magic ceremonies were usually held at moonrise or midnight. And it was just a few minutes before midnight. But in those minutes, Elena had just come up with scheme B.

"Excuse me," she said, taking the drink out of Mr. Forbes's hand and dashing it directly into the face of Damon, who had appeared out of a closet. Then she shouted, "Some place their kind can't see!" and stepped into...

Limbo?

Heaven?

Some place their kind couldn't see. At first Elena wondered about herself, because she couldn't see much of anything at all.

But then she realized where she was, deep in the earth, beneath Honoria Fell's empty tomb. Once, she had fought down here to save the lives of Stefan and Damon.

And now, where there should have been nothing but darkness and rats and mildew, was a tiny, shining, light. Like a miniature Tinkerbell - just a speck, it hovered in the air, not leading her, not communicating, but...protecting, Elena realized. She took the light, which felt bright and cool in her fingers, and around her she traced a circle, big enough for a full-grown person to lie down in.

When she turned back, Damon was sitting in the middle.

He looked strangely pale for someone who had just fed. But he said nothing, not a word, just gazed at her. Elena went to him and touched him on the neck.

And a moment later, Damon was again drinking deep, deep, of the most extraordinary blood in the world.

Usually, he would be analyzing by now: taste of berry, taste of tropical fruit, smooth, smoky, woody, rounded with a silken aftertaste...But not now. Not this blood, which far surpassed anything for which he had words. This blood that was filling him with power such as he had never known before....

Damon...

Why was he not listening? How had he come to be drinking this extraordinary blood that tasted somehow of the afterlife, and why was he not listening to the donor?

Please, Damon. Please fight it...

He ought to recognize that voice. He'd heard it enough times.

I know they're controlling you. But they can't controlall of you. You're stronger than they are. You're the strongest....

Well, that was certainly true. But he was getting more and more confused. The donor seemed to be unhappy and he was a past-master at making donors happy. And he didn't quite remember...he really should remember how this had started.

Damon, it's me. It's Elena. And you're hurting me.

So much pain and bewilderment. From the beginning, Elena had known better than to outright fight the tapping of her veins. That would only cause agony, and it wouldn't do her the slightest bit of good except to stop her brain from working.

So she was trying to make him fight off the horrible beast inside him. Well, yes, but the change had to come from inside. If she forced him, Shinichi would notice and just possess him again. Besides, the simple Damon, be strong gig wasn't working.

Was there nothing to do but die, then? She could at least fight that, although she knew that Damon's strength would make it pointless. With every swallow he took of her new blood, he got stronger; he changed more and more into...

Into what? It was her blood. Maybe he would answer its call, which was also her call. Maybe, somehow inside, he could beat the monster without Shinichi noticing.

But she needed some new power, some new trick...

And even as she thought it, Elena felt the new Power moving in her, and she knew that it had always been there, just waiting for the right occasion to use it. It was a very specific power, not to be used for fighting or even for saving herself. Still, it was hers to tap. Vampires who preyed on her got only a few mouthfuls, but she had an entire blood supply filled with its enormous vigor. And calling upon it was as easy as reaching toward it with an open mind and open hands.

As soon as she did, she found new words coming to her lips, and most strangely of all, new wings springing from her body, which Damon was holding bent sharply back from the hips. These ethereal wings were not for flying, but for something else, and when they fully unfurled they made a huge, rainbow-colored arch whose very tip circled back again, surrounding and enfolding Damon and Elena both.

And then she said it telepathically. Wings of Redemption.

And inside, soundlessly, Damon screamed.

Then the wings opened slightly. Only one who had learned a great deal about magic would have seen what was happening inside them. Damon's anguish was becoming Elena's anguish as she took from him every painful incident, every tragedy, every cruelty that had ever gone into making up the stony layers of indifference and unkindness that encased his heart.

Layers - as hard as the stone at the heart of a black dwarf star - were breaking up and flying away. There was no stopping it. Great chunks and boulders fractured, fine pieces shattered. Some dissolved into nothing more than a puff of acrid smelling smoke.

There was something at the center, though - some nucleus that was blacker than hell and harder than the horns of the devil. She couldn't quite see what happened to it. She thought - she hoped - that at the very end even it blasted open.

Now, and only now, could she call for the next set of wings. She hadn't been sure that she would live through the first attack; she certainly didn't feel as if she could live through this one. But Damon had to know.

Damon was kneeling on one knee on the floor, with his arms clasped tightly around him. That should be all right. He was still Damon, and he'd be a lot happier without the weight of all that hatred and prejudice and cruelty. He wouldn't keep remembering his youth and the other young blades who'd mocked his father for being an old fool, with his disastrous investments and his mistresses younger than his own sons. Neither would he endlessly dwell on his own childhood, when that same father had beaten him in drunken rages when he neglected his studies or took up with objectionable companions.

And, finally, he would not go on savoring and contemplating the many terrible things he'd done himself. He had been redeemed, in heaven's name and in heaven's time, by words put into Elena's mouth.

But now...there was something that he needed to remember. If Elena was right.

If only she were right.

"Where is this place? Are you hurt, girl?"

In his confusion, he couldn't recognize her. He had knelt; now she knelt beside him.

He gave her a keen glance. "Are we at prayer or were we making love? Was it the Watch or the Gonzalgos?"

"Damon," she said, "it's me, Elena. It's the twenty-first century, now, and you are a vampire." Then, gently embracing him, with her cheek against his, she whispered, "Wings of Remembrance."

And a pair of translucent butterfly wings, violet, cerulean, and midnight blue in color, sprouted from her backbone, just above her hips. The wings were decorated with tiny sapphires and translucent amethysts in intricate patterns. Using muscles she had never used before, she easily drew them up and forward until they curled inside out, and Damon was shielded within them. It was like being enclosed in a dim, jewel-studded cave.

She could see in Damon's fine-bred features that he didn't want to remember anything more than he did right now. But new memories, memories connected with her, were already welling up inside him. He looked at his lapis lazuli ring and Elena could see tears come to his eyes. Then, slowly, his gaze turned on her.

"Elena?"

"Yes."

"Someone possessed me, and took the memories of the times I was possessed," he whispered.

"Yes - at least, I think so."

"And someone hurt you."

"Yes."

"I swore to kill him or make him your slave a hundred times over. He struck you. He took your blood by force. He made up ludicrous stories about hurting you in other ways."

"Damon. Yes, that's true. But, please - "

"I was on his track. If I'd met him I might have run him through; might have ripped his beating heart out of his chest. Or I might have taught him the most painful lessons I've heard tales of - and I've heard a lot of tales - and at the end, through the blood in his mouth, he would have kissed your heel, your slave until he died."

This wasn't good for him. She could see it. His eyes were white all around, like a terrified colt's.

"Damon, I beg you..."

"And the one who hurt you...was me."

"Not you by yourself. You said it yourself. You were possessed ."

"You feared me so much you stripped yourself for me."

Elena remembered the original Pendleton shirt.

"I didn't want you and Matt fighting."

"You let me bleed you when it was against your true will."

This time she could find nothing to say but, "Yes."

"I - dear God! - I used my powers to afflict you with terrible grief!"

"If you mean an attack that causes hideous pain and seizures, then yes. And you were worse to Matt."

Matt wasn't on Damon's radarscope. "And then I kidnapped you."

"You tried ."

"And you jumped out of a speeding car rather than take your chances with me."

"You were playing rough, Damon. They had told you to go out and play rough, maybe even to break your toys."

"I've been looking for the one who made you jump from the car - I couldn't remember anything before that. And I swore to take out his eyes and his tongue before he died in agony. You couldn't walk. You had to use a crutch to get through the forest, and just when help should have come, Shinichi drew you into a trap. Oh, yes, I know him. You wandered into his snow globe...and would be wandering still if I hadn't broken it."

"No," Elena said quietly. "I would have been dead a long time ago. You found me at the point of suffocation, remember?"

"Yes." A moment of fierce joy on his face. But then the trapped, horrified look returned. "I was the tormenter, the persecutor, the one you were so terrified of. I made you do things with - with - "

"Matt."

"O God," he said, and it was clearly an invocation to the deity, not just an exclamation, because he looked up, holding his clenched hands to heaven. "I thought I was being a hero for you. Instead I'm the abomination. What now? By rights, I should be dead at your feet already." He looked at her with wide, feral, black eyes. There was no humor in them, no sarcasm, no holding back. He looked very young and very wild and desperate. If he'd been a black leopard he'd have been pacing his cage frantically, biting at the bars.

Then he bowed his head to kiss her bare foot.

Elena was shocked.

"I'm yours to do what you please with," he said in that same stunned voice. "You can order me to die right now. After all my clever talk, it turns out that I'm the monster."

And then he wept. Probably no other set of circumstances could have brought tears to Damon Salvatore's eyes. But he had boxed himself in. He never broke his word, and he'd given his word to break the monster, the one who had done all this to Elena. The fact that he had been possessed - at first a little, and then more and more, until his entire mind was simply another of Shinichi's toys, to be picked up and put down at leisure - didn't make up for his crimes.

"You know that I - I'm damned," he told her, as if perhaps that might go a small way toward restitution.

"No, I don't ," Elena said. "Because I don't believe that's true. And Damon, think of how many times you fought them. I'm sure they wanted you to kill Caroline that first night you said you felt something in her mirror. You said you almost did it. I'm sure they want you to kill me. Are you going to do it?"

He bent toward her foot again, and she hastily grabbed him by the shoulders. She couldn't stand to see him in such pain.

But now Damon was looking this way and that, as if he had a definite purpose. He was also twisting the lapis lazuli ring.

"Damon - what are you thinking? Tell me what you're thinking!"

"That he may pick me up as a puppet again - and that this time there may be areal birch rod. Shinichi - he's monstrous beyond your innocent belief. And he can take me over at a moment's notice. We've seen that."

"He can't if you'll let me kiss you."

"What?" He looked at her as if she hadn't been following the conversation properly.

"Let me kiss you - and strip out that dying malach inside you."

"Dying?"

"It dies a little more each time you gain enough strength to turn your back on it."

"Is - it very big?"

"As big as you are by now."

"Good," he whispered. "I only wish I could fight it myself."

"Pour le sport?" Elena answered, showing that her summer in France last year hadn't been entirely wasted.

"No. Because I hate the bastard's guts and I'd happily suffer a hundred times its pain as long as I knew I was hurting it. "

Elena decided this was no time for delay. He was ready. "Will you let me do this one last thing?"

"I told you before - the monster who hurt you is your slave now."

All right. They could argue about that point later. Elena leaned forward and tilted her head up, lips pursed slightly.

After a few moments, Damon, the Don Juan of darkness, got the point.

He kissed her very gently, as if afraid to make too much contact.

"Wings of Purification," Elena whispered against his lips. These wings were as white as untrammeled snow, and lacelike, barely existing in some places at all. They arched high above Elena, shimmering with an iridescence that reminded her of moonlight on frosted cobwebs. They encased mortal and vampire in a web made of diamond and pearl.

"This is going to hurt you," Elena said, not knowing how she knew. The knowledge seemed to come moment by moment as she needed it. It was almost like being in a dream where great truths are understood without needing to be learned, and accepted without astonishment.

And that was how she knew that Wings of Purification would seek out and destroy anything foreign inside Damon and that the feeling could be very unpleasant for him. When the malach didn't seem to be coming out of its own accord, she said, prompted by her inner voice, "Take off your shirt. The malach is attached to your spine and it's closest to the skin at the back of your neck where it entered. I'm going to have to strip it out by hand."

"Attached to my spine?"

"Yes. Did you ever feel it? I think it would have felt like a bee sting at first, as it entered you, just a sharp little drill and a blob of jelly that attached to your spine."

"Oh. The mosquito bite. Yes, I felt that. And then later, my neck began to ache, and at last my whole body. Was it...growing inside me?"

"Yes, and taking over more and more of your nervous system. Shinichi was controlling you like a marionette."

"Dear God, I'm sorry ."

"Let's make him be sorry instead. Will you take off your shirt?"

Silently, like a trusting child, Damon took off his black jacket and shirt. Then, as Elena motioned him into position, he lay across her lap, his back hard with muscle and pale against the dark ground on either side.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Getting rid of it this way - pulling it out through the hole where it entered - will really hurt."

"Good," grunted Damon. And then he buried his face in his lithe, flat-muscled arms.

Elena used the pads of her fingers, feeling at the top of his spine for what she was looking for. A squishy point. A blister. When she found it, she pinched it with her fingernails until blood suddenly spurted.

She almost lost it then as it tried to go flat, but she was pursuing it with sharp nails - and it was too slow. At last she had it held firmly between thumbnail and two fingernails.

The malach was still alive and aware enough to feebly resist her. But it was like a jellyfish trying to resist - only jellyfish broke apart when you pulled. This slick, slimy, man-shaped thing retained its shape as she slowly pulled it through the breach in Damon's skin.

And it was hurting him. She could tell. She started to take some of the pain into herself, but he gasped, "No!" with such vehemence that she decided to let him have his way.

The malach was much larger and more substantial than she had realized. It must have been growing a long time, she thought - the little blob of jelly that had expanded until it controlled him to the fingertips. She had to sit up, then scoot away from Damon and back again before it lay on the ground, a sickly, stringy, white caricature of a human body.

"Is it done?" Damon was breathless - it really had hurt, then.

"Yes."

Damon stood and looked down at the flabby white thing - barely twitching - that had made him persecute the person he cared most about in the world. Then, deliberately, he trampled on it, crushing it under the heels of his boots until it lay torn in pieces, and then trampling the pieces. Elena guessed that he didn't dare blast it with Power for fear of alerting Shinichi.

At last, all that was left was a stain and a smell.

Elena didn't know why she felt so dizzy then. But she reached for Damon and he reached for her and they went to their knees holding each other.

"I release you from every promise you made - while in the possession of that malach," Elena said. This was strategy. She didn't want to release him from the promise of caring for his brother.

"Thank you," Damon whispered, the weight of his head on her shoulder.

"And now," said Elena, like a kindergarten teacher who wants to move quickly on to another activity, "We need to make plans. But to make plans in utter secrecy..."

"We have to share blood. But Elena, how much have you donated today? You look white."

"You said you'd be my slave - now you won't take a little of my blood."

"You said you released me - instead you're going to hold that over me forever, aren't you? But there's a simpler solution. You take some of my blood."

And in the end that was what they did, although it made Elena feel slightly guilty, as if she were betraying Stefan. Damon cut himself with the minimum of fuss, and then it began to happen - they were sharing minds, melting seamlessly together. In much shorter a time than it would take to speak the sentences aloud, it was done: Elena had told Damon of what her friends had found about the epidemic among the girls of Fell's Church - and Damon had told Elena everything he knew about Shinichi and Misao. Elena concocted a plan for scaring out any other possessed youngsters like Tami, and Damon promised to try to find out where Stefan was from the kitsune twins.

And, finally, when there was nothing more to say, and Damon's blood had restored faint color to Elena's cheeks they made plans as to how to meet again.

At the ceremony.

And then there was only Elena in the room, and a large raven winging its way toward the Old Wood.

Sitting on the cold stone floor, Elena took a moment to put all she now knew together. No wonder Damon had seemed so schizophrenic. No wonder he had remembered, and then forgotten, and then remembered that he was the one she was running from.

He remembered, she reasoned, when Shinichi was not controlling him, or at least was keeping him on a very loose rein. But his memory was spotty because some of the things he'd done were so terrible that his own mind had rejected them. They had seamlessly become part of the possessed Damon's memory, for when possessed Shinichi was controlling every word, every deed. And in between episodes, Shinichi was telling him that he had to find Elena's tormentor and kill him.

All very amusing, she supposed, for this kitsune, Shinichi. But for both her and Damon it had been hell.

Her mind refused to admit that there had been moments of heaven mixed in with the hell. She was Stefan's, alone. That would never change.

Now Elena needed one more magical door, and she didn't know how to find one. But there was the twinkling fairy light again. She guessed it was the last of the magic that Honoria Fell had left to protect the town she had founded. Elena felt a little guilty, using it up - but if it wasn't meant for her, why had she been brought here?

To try for the most important destination she could imagine.

Reaching for the speck with one hand and clenching the key in the other she whispered with all the force at her command:

"Somewhere I can see and hear and touch Stefan."

Chapter 35

A prison, with filthy rushes on the floor and bars between her and the sleeping Stefan.

Between her and Stefan!

It was really him. Elena didn't know how she could know. Undoubtedly they could twist and change your perceptions here. But just now, perhaps because nobody had been expecting her to drop into a dungeon, no one was prepared with anything to make her doubt her senses.

It was Stefan. He was thinner than before, and his cheekbones stuck out. He was beautiful. And his mind felt just right, just the right mixture of honor and love and darkness and light and hope and grim understanding of the world he lived in.

"Stefan! Oh, hold me! "

He woke and half sat up. "At least leave me my sleep. And meanwhile go away and put on another face, bitch!"

"Stefan! Language!"

She saw muscles in Stefan's shoulders freeze.

"What...did you...say?"

"Stefan...it's really me. I don't blame you for cursing. I curse this whole place and the two who put you here...."

"Three," he said wearily, and bent his head. "You'd know that if you were real. Go and let them teach you about my traitor brother and his friends who sneak up on people with kekkai crowns..."

Elena couldn't wait to debate about Damon now. "Won't you look at me, at least?"

She saw him turn slowly, look slowly, then saw him leap up from a pallet made of sickly-looking hay, and saw him stare at her as if she were an angel dropped down from the sky.

Then he turned his back on her and put his hands over his ears.

"No bargains," he said flatly. "Don't even mention them to me. Go away. You've gotten better but you're still a dream."

"Stefan!"

"I said, go away!"

Time was wasting. And this was too cruel, after what she had been through just to speak to him.

"You first saw me just outside the principal's office the day you brought your papers into school and influenced the secretary. You didn't need to look at me to know what I looked like. Once I told you that I felt like a murderer because I said, ‘Daddy, look' and pointed to - something outside - just before the car accident that killed my parents. I've never been able to remember what the something was. The first word I learned when I came back from the afterlife was Stefan . Once, you looked at me in the rearview mirror of the car and said that I was your soul...."

"Can't you stop torturing me for one hour? Elena - the real Elena - would be too smart to risk her life by coming here."

"Where's ‘here'?" Elena said sharply, frightened. "I need to know if I'm supposed to get you out."

Slowly Stefan uncovered his ears. Even more slowly he turned around again.

"Elena?" he said, like a dying boy who has seen a gentle ghost in his bed. "You're not real. You can't be here."

"I don't think I am. Shinichi made a magic house and it takes you wherever you want if you name it and open the door with this key. I said, ‘Somewhere I can hear and see and touch Stefan.' But" - she looked down - "you say I can't be here. Maybe it's all an illusion anyway."

"Hush." Now Stefan was clenching the bars on his side of the cell.

"Is this where you've been? Is this the Shi no Shi ?"

He gave a little laugh - not a real one. "Not exactly what either of us expected, is it? And yet, they didn't lie in anything they said, Elena. Elena! I said ‘Elena.' Elena, you're really here!"

Elena couldn't bear to waste any time. She took the few steps through damp, crackly straw and scampering creatures to the bars that separated her from Stefan.

Then she tilted up her face, clutching bars in either hand, and shut her eyes.

I will touch him. I will, I will. I'm real, he's real - I'll touch him!

Stefan leaned down - to humor her, she thought - and then warm lips touched hers.

She put her arms through the bars because they were both weak at the knees: Stefan in astonishment that she could touch him, and Elena in relief and sobbing joy.

But - there was no time.

"Stefan, take my blood now - take it!"

She looked desperately for something to cut herself with. Stefan might need her strength, and no matter what Damon had taken from her, she would always have enough for Stefan. If it killed her, she would have enough. She was glad, now, that in the tomb, Damon had persuaded her to take his.

"Easy. Easy, little love. If you mean it, I can bite your wrist, but..."

"Do it now !" Elena Gilbert, the princess of Fell's Church, ordered. She had even gotten the strength to pull herself off her knees. Stefan gave her half a guilty glance.

"NOW!" Elena insisted.

Stefan bit her wrist.

It was an odd sensation. It hurt a little more than when he pierced the side of her neck as usual. But there were good veins down there, she knew; she trusted Stefan to find the largest so that this would take the least amount of time. Her urgency had become his.

But when he tried to pull back, she clutched a handful of his wavy dark hair and said, "More, Stefan. You need it - oh, I can tell, and we don't have time to argue."

The voice of command. Meredith had told her once that she had it, that she could lead armies. Well, she might need to lead armies to get into this place to save him.

I'll get an army somewhere, she thought fuzzily.

The starving blood fever that Stefan had been in - they obviously hadn't fed him since she had last seen him - was dying into the more normal blood-taking that she knew. His mind melted into hers. When you say you'll get an army, I believe you. But it's impossible. No one's ever come back.

Well, you will. I'm bringing you back.

Elena, Elena...

Drink, she said, feeling like an Italian mother. As much as you can without being sick.

But how did - no, you told me how you got here. That was the truth?

The truth. I always tell you the truth. But Stefan, how do I get you out?

Shinichi and Misao - you know them?

Enough.

They each have half a ring. Together it makes a key. Each half is shaped like a running fox. But who knows where they may have hidden the pieces? And as I said, just to get into this place, it takes an army....

I'll find the pieces of the fox ring. I'll put them together. I'll get an army. I'll get you out.

Elena, I can't keep drinking. You'll collapse.

I'm good at not collapsing. Please go on.

I can hardly believe it's you -

"No kissing! Take my blood!"

Ma'am! But Elena, truly, I'm full now. Overfull.

And tomorrow?

"I'll still be overfull." Stefan pulled away, a thumb on the places where he had pierced veins. "Truly, I can't , love."

"And the next day?"

"I'll manage."

"You will - because I brought this . Hold me, Stefan," she said, several decibels softer. "Hold me through the bars."

He did, looking bewildered, and she hissed in his ear, "Act like you love me. Stroke my hair. Say nice things."

"Elena, lovely little love..." He was still close enough mentally to say telepathically: Act like I love you? But while his hands were stroking and squeezing and tangling in her hair, Elena's own hands were busy. She was transferring from under her clothes to under his a flask full of Black Magic wine.

"But where did you get it?" Stefan whispered, seeming thunderstruck.

"The magic house has everything. I've been waiting for my chance to give it to you if you needed it."

"Elena - "

"What?"

Stefan seemed to be struggling with something. At last, eyes on the ground, he whispered, "It's no good. I can't risk you getting killed for the sake of an impossibility. Forget me."

"Put your face to the bars."

He looked at her but didn't ask any questions, obeying.

She slapped him across the face.

It wasn't a very hard slap...although Elena's hand hurt from colliding with the iron on either side.

"Now, be ashamed !" she said. And before he could say anything else, "Listen!"

It was the baying of hounds - far away, but getting closer.

"It's you they're after," Stefan said, suddenly frantic. "You have to go!"

She just looked at him steadily. "I love you, Stefan."

"I love you, Elena. Forever."

"I - oh, I'm sorry ." She couldn't go; that was the thing. Like Caroline talking and talking and never leaving Stefan's apartment, she could stand here and speak about it, but she couldn't do it.

"Elena! You have to. I don't want you to see what they do - "

"I'll kill them!"

"You're no killer. You're not a fighter, Elena - and you shouldn't see this. Please? Remember once you asked me if I'd like to see how many times you could make me say ‘please?' Well, each counts for a thousand now. Please? For me? Will you go?"

"One more kiss..." Her heart was beating like a frantic bird inside her.

"Please!"

Blind with tears, Elena turned around and grasped hold of the cell door.

"Anywhere outside the ceremony where no one will see me!" she gasped and wrenched the door to the corridor open and stepped through.

At least she'd seen Stefan, but for how long that would last to keep her heart from shattering again -

- oh, my God, I'm falling -

- she didn't know.

Elena realized that she was outside the boardinghouse somewhere - at least some eighty feet high - and plummeting rapidly. Her first, panicked conclusion was that she was going to die, and then instinct kicked in and she reached out with arms and hands and kicked in with legs and feet and managed to arrest her fall after twenty agonizing feet.

I've lost my flying wings forever, haven't I? she thought, concentrating on a single spot between her shoulder blades. She knew just where they should be - and nothing happened.

Then, carefully, she inched her way closer to the trunk, pausing only to move to a higher twig a caterpillar that was sharing the branch with her. And she managed to find a sort of place where she could sit by sidling and then pushing backward. It was far too high a branch for her personal taste.

As it was, she found that she could look down and see the widow's walk quite clearly, and that the longer she looked at any particular thing the clearer her vision got. Vampire vision plus, she thought. It showed her that she was Changing. Or else - yes, somehow here the sky was getting lighter.

What it showed her was a dark and empty boardinghouse, which was disturbing because of what Caroline's father had said about "the meeting" and what she had learned telepathically from Damon about Shinichi's plans for this Moon spire night. Could this be not the real boardinghouse at all, but another trap?

"We made it!" Bonnie cried as they approached the house. She knew her voice was shrill, was over-shrill, but somehow the sight of that brightly lit boardinghouse, like a Christmas tree with a star on top, comforted her, even if she knew that it was all wrong. She felt she could cry in relief.

"Yes, we did," Dr. Alpert's deep voice said. "All of us. Isobel's the one who needs the most treatment, the fastest. Theophilia, get your nostrums ready, and somebody else take Isobel and run her a bath."

"I'll do it," Bonnie quavered, after a brief hesitation. "She's going to stay tranquilized like she is now, right? Right?"

"I'll go with Isobel," Matt said. "Bonnie, you go with Mrs. Flowers and help her. And before we go inside, I want to make one thing clear: nobody goes anywhere alone. We all travel in twos or threes." There was the ring of authority in his voice.

"Makes sense," Meredith said crisply and took up a place by the doctor. "You'd better be careful, Matt; Isobel is the most dangerous."

That was when the high, thin voices began outside the house. It sounded like two or three little girls singing.

"Isa-chan, Isa-chan,

Drank her tea and ate her gran."

"Tami? Tami Bryce?" Meredith demanded, opening the door as the tune began again. She darted forward, then she grabbed the doctor by the hand, and dragged her along beside her as she darted forward again.

And, yes, Bonnie saw, there were three little figures, one in pajamas and two in nightgowns, and they were Tami Bryce and Kristin Dunstan and Ava Zarinski. Ava was only about eleven, Bonnie thought, and she didn't live near either Tami or Kristin. The three of them all giggled shrilly. Then they started singing again and Matt went after Kristin.

"Help me!" Bonnie cried. She was suddenly hanging on to a bucking, kicking bronco that lashed out in every direction. Isobel seemed to have gone crazy, and she went crazier every time that tune was repeated.

"I've got her," Matt said, closing in on her with a bear hug, but even the two of them couldn't hold Isobel still.

"I'm getting her another sedative," Dr. Alpert said, and Bonnie saw the glances between Matt and Meredith - glances of suspicion.

"No - no, let Mrs. Flowers make her something," Bonnie said desperately, but the hypodermic needle was already almost at Isobel's arm.

"You're not giving her anything," Meredith said flatly, dropping the charade, and with one chorus-girl kick, she sent the hypodermic flying.

"Meredith! What's wrong with you?" the doctor cried, wringing her wrist.

"It's what's wrong with you that's the matter. Who are you? Where are we? This can't be the real boardinghouse."

"Obaasan! Mrs. Flowers! Can't you help us?" Bonnie gasped, still trying to hold on to Isobel.

"I'll try," Mrs. Flowers said determinedly, heading toward her.

"No, I meant with Dr. Alpert - and maybe Jim. Don't you - know any spells - to make people take on their true forms?"

"Oh!" Obaasan said. "I can help with that. Just let me down, Jim dear. We'll have everyone in their true forms in no time."

Jayneela was a sophomore with large, dreamy, dark eyes that were generally lost in a book. But now, as it neared midnight and Gramma still hadn't called, she shut her book and looked at Ty. Tyrone seemed big and fierce and mean on the playing field, but off it he was the nicest, kindest, gentlest big brother a girl could want.

"You think Gramma's okay?"

"Hm?" Tyrone had his nose in a book, too, but it was one of those help-you-get-into-the-college-of-your-dreams books. As a senior-to-be, he was having to make some serious decisions. "Of course she is."

"Well, I'm going to check on the little girl, at least."

"You know what, Jay?" He poked her teasingly with one toe. "You worry too much."

In moments he was lost again in Chapter Six, "How to Make the Most of Your Community Service." But then the screams started coming from above him. Long, loud, high screams - his sister's voice. He dropped the book and ran.

"Obaasan?" Bonnie said.

"Just a moment, dear," Grandma Saitou said. Jim had put her down and now she was facing him squarely: she looking up, and he looking down. And there was something...very wrong about it.

Bonnie felt a wave of pure terror. Could Jim have done something evil to Obaasan as he carried her? Of course he could. Why hadn't she thought of that? And there was the doctor with her syringe, ready to tranquilize anyone who got too "hysterical." Bonnie looked at Meredith, but Meredith was trying to deal with two squirming little girls, and could only glance helplessly back.

All right, then, Bonnie thought. I'll kick him where it hurts most and get the old lady away from him. She turned back to Obaasan and felt herself freeze.

"Just one thing I have to do...," Obaasan had said. And she was doing it. Jim was bent at the waist, folded in half toward Obaasan, who was on her tiptoes. They were locked in a deep, intimate kiss.

Oh, God!

They had met four people in a wood - and assumed that two were sane and two insane. How could they tell which were the insane ones? Well, if two of them see things that aren't there...

But the house was there; Bonnie could see it, too. Was she insane?

"Meredith, come on!" she screamed. Her nerve breaking completely, she began to run away from the house toward the forest.

Something from the skies plucked her up as easily as an owl picks up a mouse and held her in an unrelenting iron grip.

"Going somewhere?" Damon's voice asked from above her as he glided in the last few yards to a stop, with her neatly tucked under one steely arm.

"Damon!"

Damon's eyes were slightly narrowed, as though at a joke only he could see. "Yes, the evil one himself. Tell me something, my fiery little fury."

Bonnie had already exhausted herself trying to make him let go. She hadn't even succeeded in tearing his clothes.

"What?" she snapped. Possessed or not, Damon had last seen her when she had Called him to save her from Caroline's insanity. But according to Matt's reports, he had done something awful to Elena.

"Why do girls love to convert a sinner? Why can you feed them almost any line if they feel that they've reformed you?"

Bonnie didn't know what he was talking about, but she could guess. "What did you do with Elena?" she said ferociously.

"Gave her what she wanted, that's all," Damon said, his black eyes twinkling. "Is there anything so awful about that?"

Bonnie, frightened by that twinkle, didn't even try to run again. She knew it was no use. He was faster and stronger, and he could fly. Anyway, she had seen it in his face: a sort of distant remorselessness. They were not just Damon and Bonnie here together. They were natural predator and natural prey.

And now here she was back with Jim and Obaasan - no, with a boy and girl she'd never seen before. Bonnie was in time to watch the transformation. She saw Jim's body shrink and his hair turn black, but that wasn't the striking thing about it. The striking thing was that all around the edges, his hair was not black but crimson. It was as if flames were licking up from the tips into darkness. His eyes were golden and smiling.

She saw Obaasan's doll-like old body grow younger and stronger and taller. This girl was a beauty; Bonnie had to admit it. She had gorgeous sloe-black eyes and silky hair that fell almost to her waist. And her hair was just like her brother's - only the red was even brighter, scarlet instead of crimson. She was wearing a barely-there laced black halter that showed how delicately built she was on top. And, of course, low-rise black leather pants to show the same thing on the bottom. She was wearing expensive-looking black high-heeled sandals, and her toenails were enameled the same brilliant red as the tips of her hair. At her belt, in a sinuous circle, was a curled-up whip with a scaly black handle.

Dr. Alpert said slowly, "My grandchildren...?"

"They don't have anything to do with this," the boy with the strange hair said charmingly, smiling. "As long as they mind their own business, you don't have to worry about them a bit."

"It's suicide or an attempted suicide - or something," Tyrone told the police dispatcher, almost weeping. "I think it was a guy named Jim who went to my high school last year. No, this is nothing to do with any drugs - I came here to watch my little sister Jayneela. She was baby-sitting - look, just come over, will you? This guy's chewed off most of his fingers, and as I came in, he said, ‘I'll always love you, Elena,' and he took a pencil and - no, I can't tell if he's alive or dead. But there's an old lady upstairs and I'm sure she's dead. Because she's not breathing."

"Who the hell are you?" Matt was saying, eyeing the strange boy belligerently.

"I'm the - "

" - and what the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm the hell Shinichi," the boy said in a much louder voice, looking annoyed to be interrupted. When Matt just stared at him, he added in an annoyed voice, "I'm the kitsune - the were-fox, you could say - who's been messing with your town, idiot. I came halfway around the world to do it, and I'd think you'd at least have heard of me by now. And this is my lovely sister, Misao. We're twins."

"I don't care if you're triplets. Elena said somebody besides Damon was behind this. And so did Stefan before he - hey, what did you do to Stefan? What did you do to Elena? "

While the two strange males were bristling at each other - quite literally in Shinichi's case, since his hair was almost standing on end - Meredith was picking out Bonnie, Dr. Alpert, and Mrs. Flowers by eye. Then she glanced at Matt and touched herself lightly on the chest. She was the only one strong enough to woman handle him, although Dr. Alpert gave a quick nod that said she would be helping.

And then, while the boys were working up to shouting volume, Misao was giggling at the ground, and Damon was leaning against a door with his eyes shut, they moved. With no signal at all to unite them, they were running, instinctively, as one group. Meredith and Dr. Alpert grabbed Matt from either side and simply lifted him off his feet, just as Isobel quite unexpectedly jumped on Shinichi with a guttural scream.

They hadn't expected anything from her, but it was certainly convenient, Bonnie thought as she hurtled over obstacles without even seeing them. Matt was still shouting and trying to run the other way and take out some primitive frustration on Shinichi, but he couldn't quite manage to get free to do it.

Bonnie could scarcely believe it when they made it into the Wood again. Even Mrs. Flowers had kept up and most of them still had their flashlights.

It was a miracle. They had even escaped Damon. The thing now was to be very quiet and to try to get through the Old Wood without disturbing anything. Maybe they could find their way back to the real boardinghouse, they decided. Then they could figure out how to save Elena from Damon and his two friends. Even Matt finally had to admit that it was unlikely that they would be able to overcome the three supernatural creatures by force.

Bonnie just wished they'd been able to take Isobel with them.

"Well, we have to go to the real boardinghouse anyway," Damon said, as Misao finally got Isobel subdued and semi-conscious. "That's where Caroline will be."

Misao stopped glaring at Isobel and seemed to start slightly. "Caroline? Why do we want Caroline?"

"It's all part of the fun, isn't it?" Damon said in his most charming, flirtatious voice. Shinichi immediately stopped looking martyred and smiled.

"That girl - she's the one you've been using as a carrier, right?" He looked mischievously at his sister, whose smile seemed slightly strained.

"Yes, but - "

"The more the merrier," Damon said, more cheerful with every minute. He didn't seem to notice Shinichi smirking at Misao behind his back.

"Don't sulk, darling," he said to her, tickling her under the chin while his golden eyes gleamed. "I've never set eyes on the girl. But of course, if Damon says it'll be fun, it will be." The smirk became a full-fledged gloating smile.

"And there's no chance of any of them actually getting away at all?" Damon said, almost absently, staring into the darkness of the Old Wood.

"Give me a little credit, please," the kitsune snapped. "You're a damned - a vampire, aren't you? You're not supposed to hang out in the woods at all."

"It's my territory, along with the cemetery - " Damon was beginning mildly, but Shinichi was determined to finish first this time. "I live in the woods," he said. "I control the bushes, the trees - and I've brought a few of my own little experiments along with me. You'll all see them soon enough. So, to answer your question, no, not one of them is going to escape."

"That was all I asked," Damon said, still mildly, but locking gazes with the golden eyes for another long moment. Then he shrugged and turned away, eyeing the moon that could be seen between swirling clouds on the horizon.

"We've got hours before the ceremony yet," Shinichi said, behind him. "We're hardly going to be late."

"We'd better not," Damon murmured. "Caroline can do an awfully good impression of that pierced girl in hysterics when people are late."

As a matter of fact, the moon was riding high in the sky as Caroline drove her mother's car to the porch of the boardinghouse. She was wearing an evening dress that looked as if it had been painted on her, in her favorite colors of bronze and green. Shinichi looked at Misao, who giggled with one hand covering her mouth and looked down.

Damon walked Caroline up the porch steps to the front door and said, "This way to the good seats."

There was some bewilderment as people got themselves sorted out. Damon spoke cheerfully to Kristin and Tami and Ava: "The peanut gallery for you three, I'm afraid. That means you sit on the ground. But if you're good, I'll let you come sit up with us the next time."

The others followed him with more or less exclamation, but it was Caroline who looked annoyed, saying, "Why do we want to go inside ? I thought they were supposed to be outside ."

"Closest seats not in danger," Damon said briefly. "We can get the best view from up there. Royal box seats, come on, now."

The fox twins and the human girl followed him, switching on lights in the darkened house all the way up to the widow's walk on the roof.

"And now where are they?" Caroline said, peering down.

"They'll be here any minute," Shinichi said, with a glance that was both puzzled and reproving. It said: Who does this girl think she is? He didn't spout any poetry.

"And Elena? She'll be here, too?"

Shinichi didn't answer that at all, and Misao just giggled. But Damon put his lips close to Caroline's ear and whispered.

After that, Caroline's eyes shone green as a cat's. And the smile on her lips was the one of a cat who has just put its paw on the canary.

Chapter 36

Elena had been waiting in her tree.

It wasn't, as a matter of fact, all that different from her six months in the spirit world, where she had spent most of her time watching other people, and waiting, and watching them some more. Those months had taught her a patient alertness that would have astounded anyone who knew the old, wildfire Elena.

Of course, the old, wildfire Elena was still inside her, too, and occasionally it rebelled. As far as she could see, nothing was happening in the dark boardinghouse. Only the moon seemed to move, creeping slowly higher into the sky.

Damon said this Shinichi had a thing about 4:44 in the morning or evening, she thought. Maybe this Black Magic was working to a different schedule than any she'd heard of.

In any case, it was for Stefan. And as soon as she thought that she knew that she would wait here for days, if that's what it took. She could certainly wait until daybreak, when no self-respecting Black Magic-worker would ever thing of beginning a ceremony.

And, in the end, what she was waiting for came to rest right below her feet.

First came the figures, walking sedately out of the Old Wood and toward the gravel pathways of the boardinghouse. They weren't hard to identify, even at long range. One was Damon, who had aje ne sais quois about him that Elena couldn't miss at a quarter of a mile - and then again there was his aura, which was a very good facsimile of his old aura: that unreadable, un-breachable ball of black stone. Avery good imitation, in fact. Actually, it was almost exactly like the one...

It was then, Elena later realized, that she felt her very first qualm.

But right now she was so caught up in the moment that she brushed the uneasy thought away. The one with the deep gray aura with crimson flashes would be Shinichi, she guessed. And the one with the same aura as the possessed girls: a sort of muddy color slashed with orange must be the twin sister Misao.

Only those two, Shinichi and Misao, were holding hands, even occasionally nuzzling each other - as Elena could see as they came up close to the boardinghouse. They certainly weren't acting like any brother and sister that Elena had seen.

Moreover, Damon was carrying a mostly-naked girl over his shoulder, and Elena couldn't imagine who that might be.

Patience, she thought to herself. Patience. The major players are here at last, just as Damon promised they would be. And the minor players...

Well, first, following Damon and his group were three little girls. She recognized Tami Bryce instantly from her aura, but the other two were strangers. They hopped, skipped, and frisked out of the Wood and to the boardinghouse, where Damon said something to them and they came around to sit in Mrs. Flowers' kitchen garden, almost directly below Elena. One look at the auras of the strange girls was enough to identify them as more of Misao's pets.

Then, up the driveway came a very familiar car - it belonged to Caroline's mother. Caroline stepped out of it and was helped into the boardinghouse by Damon, who had done something - Elena had missed what - with his burden.

Elena rejoiced as she saw lights coming on as Damon and his three guests traveled up the boardinghouse, lighting their way as they went. They came out on the very top, standing in a row on the widow's walk, looking down.

Damon snapped his fingers, and the backyard lights went on as if it were a cue for a show.

But Elena didn't see the actors - the victims of the ceremony that was about to begin, until just then. They were being herded around the far corner of the boardinghouse. She could see them all: Matt and Meredith and Bonnie, and Mrs. Flowers and, strangely, old Dr. Alpert. What Elena didn't understand was why they weren't fighting harder - Bonnie was certainly making enough noise for all of them, but they acted as if they were being pushed forward against their will.

That was when she saw the looming darkness behind them. Huge dark shadows, with no features that she could identify.

It was at that point that Elena realized, even over Bonnie's yelling, if she held herself still inside and focused hard enough, she could hear what everyone on the widow's walk was saying. And Misao's shrill voice cut through the rest.

"Oh lucky! We got all of them back," she squealed, and kissed her brother's cheek, despite his brief look of annoyance.

"Of course we did. I said so," he was beginning, when Misao squealed once more.

"But which of them do we start with?" She kissed her brother and he stroked her hair, relenting.

"You pick the first one," he said.

"You darling," Misao cooed shamelessly.

These two, Elena thought, are real charmers. Twins, huh?

"The little noisy one," Shinichi said firmly, pointing to Bonnie. "Urusei, brat! Shut up!" he added as Bonnie was pushed or carried forward by the shadows. Now Elena could see her more clearly.

And she could hear Bonnie's heartrending pleas to Damon not to do this to...the others. "I'm not begging for myself," she cried, as she was dragged into the light. "But Dr. Alpert is a good woman; she has nothing to do with this. Neither does Mrs. Flowers. And Meredith and Matt have already suffered enough. Please! "

There was a ragged chorus of sound as the others apparently tried to fight and were subdued. But Matt's voice rose above it all. "You touch her, Salvatore, and you'd better make damn sure you kill me, too!"

Elena's heart jerked as she heard Matt's voice sounding so strong and well. She'd found him at last, but she couldn't think of a way to save him.

"And then we have to decide what to do with them to start with," Misao said, clapping like a happy child at her birthday party.

"Take your pick." Shinichi caressed his sister's hair and whispered into her ear. She turned and kissed him on the mouth. Not hastily, either.

"What the - what's going on?" Caroline said. She had never been shy, that one, Elena thought. Now she had moved forward to cling to Shinichi's unoccupied hand.

For just an instant, Elena thought he would throw her off the widow's walk and watch her plunge to the ground. Then he turned, and he and Misao stared at each other.

Then he laughed.

"Sorry, sorry, it's so hard when you're the life of the party," he said. "Well, what do you think, Carolyn - Caroline?"

Caroline was staring at him. "Why's she holding you that way?"

"In the Shi no Shi , sisters are precious," Shinichi said. "And...well, I haven't seen her in a long time. We're getting reacquainted." But the kiss he planted on Misao's palm was hardly brotherly. "Go on," he added quickly, to Caroline. "You choose the first act in the Moon spire Festival! What shall we do with her?"

Caroline began to imitate Misao, kissing Shinichi's cheek and ear. "I'm new here," she said flirtatiously. "I don't really know what you want me to pick."

"Silly Caroline. Naturally, how she di - " Shinichi was suddenly smothered by a great hug and kiss from his sister.

Caroline, who had obviously wanted the attention of choice put to her, even if she didn't understand the subject, said huffily, "Well, if you don't tell me, I can't choose. And anyway, where's Elena? I don't see her anywhere!" She seemed about to say more when Damon glided over and whispered in her ear. Then she smiled again, and they both looked at the pine trees surrounding the boardinghouse.

That was when Elena had her second qualm. But Misao was already speaking and that required Elena's full attention.

"Lucky! Then I'll pick." Misao leaned forward, peeking over the edge of the roof at the humans below, her dark eyes wide, summing up the possibilities in what looked like a barren clearing. She was so delicate, so graceful as she got up to pace and think; her skin was so fair, and her hair so glossy and dark that even Elena couldn't take her eyes off her.

Then Misao's face lit up and she spoke. "Spread her on the altar. You brought some of your half-breeds?"

The last was not so much a question as an excited exclamation.

"My experiments? Of course, darling. I told you so," Shinichi replied and added, staring into the forest, "Two of you - er, men - and Old Faithful!" And he snapped his fingers. There were several minutes of confusion during which the humans around Bonnie were struck, kicked, thrown to the ground, trampled on, and crushed as they fought with the shadows. And then the things that had shambled forward before, shambled farther forward with Bonnie held in between them, dangling limply from each by a slim arm.

The half-breeds were something like men and something like trees with all the leaves stripped off them. If they had been made , it looked as if they had been made specifically to be grotesque and asymmetrical. One had a crooked, knobby left arm that reached almost to its feet, and a right arm that was thick, lumpy, and only waist-high.

They were hideous. Their skin was similar to the chitin-like skin of the insects, but much bumpier, with knotholes and burls and all the outward aspects of bark on their branches. They had a shaggy, unfinished look in places.

They were terrifying. The way their limbs were twisted; the way they walked, shambling forward like apes, the way their bodies ended on top with treelike caricatures of human faces, surmounted by a tangle of thinner branches sticking out at odd angles - they were calculated to look like creatures of nightmare.

And they were naked. They had nothing in place of clothes to disguise the ghastly deformities of their bodies.

And then Elena really knew what terror meant, as the two shambling malach carried the limp Bonnie to a sort of roughly hewn stump of tree like an altar, laid her on it and began to pluck at the many layers of her clothing, clumsily, pulling at them with sticklike fingers that broke off with little crackling sounds even as cloth tore. They didn't seem to care that they broke their fingers off - as long as they accomplished their task.

And then they were using bits of torn cloth, even more clumsily, to tie Bonnie, spread-eagled, to four knobby posts snapped off their own bodies and hammered into the ground around the trunk with four powerful blows by the thick-armed one.

Meanwhile, from somewhere even farther away in the shadows, a third man-tree shuffled forward. And Elena saw that this one was, undeniably, unmistakably male.

For a moment Elena worried that Damon might lose it, go mad, turn around and attack both the were-foxes, revealing his true allegiance now. But his feelings about Bonnie had obviously changed since he had saved her at Caroline's. He appeared perfectly relaxed beside Shinichi and Misao, sitting back and smiling, even saying something that made them laugh.

Suddenly something inside Elena seemed to plummet. This wasn't a qualm. It was full-blown terror. Damon had never looked so natural, so in tune, so happy with anyone as he did here with Shinichi and Misao. They couldn't possibly have changed him, she tried to convince herself. They couldn't have possessed him again so quickly, not without her, Elena, knowing it....

But when you showed him the truth, he was miserable, her heart whispered. Desperately miserable - miserably desperate. He might have reached for possession as a defiant alcoholic reaches for a bottle, wanting only forgetfulness. If she knew Damon, he had willingly invited the darkness back in.

He couldn't stand to stand in the light, she thought. And so now, he's able to laugh even at Bonnie's suffering.

And where did that leave her? With Damon defected to the other side, no longer ally, but enemy? Elena began to tremble with anger and hatred - yes, and fear, too, as she contemplated her position.

All alone to struggle against three of the strongest enemies she could imagine, and their army of deformed, conscienceless killers? Not to mention Caroline, the cheerleader of spite?

As if to corroborate her fears, as if to show her how slim her chances really were, the tree she was clinging to seemed suddenly to let go of her, and for a moment Elena thought she would fall, spinning and screaming, all the way to the ground. Her handholds and footholds seemed to disappear all at once, and she only saved herself by a frantic - and painful - scrambling through serrated pine needles up to the grooved, dark bark.

You are a human girl now, my dear, the strong, resinous smell seemed to be telling her. And you are up to your neck in the Powers of the undead and of sorcery. Why fight it? You've lost before you've begun. Give in now and it won't hurt so much.

If a person had been telling her this, trying to hammer it in, the words might have sparked some kind of defiance from the flint of Elena's character. But instead this was just a feeling that came over her, an aura of doom, a knowledge of the hopelessness of her cause, and the inadequacy of her weapons, that seemed to settle over her as gently and as inescapably as a fog.

She leaned her throbbing head against the trunk of the tree. She had never felt so weak, so helpless - or so alone, not since she had been a newly wakened vampire. She wanted Stefan. But Stefan hadn't been able to beat these three, and because of that she might never see him again.

Something new was happening on the roof, she realized wearily. Damon was looking down at Bonnie on the altar, and his expression was petulant. Bonnie's white face was staring up at the evening sky in determination, as if refusing any longer to weep or beg again.

"But...are all the hors d'oeuvres so predictable?" Damon asked, seeming genuinely bored.

You bastard, you'd turn on your best friend for amusement, Elena thought. Well, just you wait. But she knew the truth was that without him, she couldn't even put together Plan A, much less fight against these kitsune, these were-foxes.

"You told me that in the Shi no Shi , I would see acts of genuine originality," Damon was going on. "Maidens hypnotized to cut themselves..."

Elena ignored his words. She concentrated all her energy on the thudding pain in the center of her chest. She felt as if she were drawing blood from her tiniest capillaries, from the far reaches of her body, and collecting it here at her center.

The human mind is infinite, she thought. It is as strange and as infinite as the universe. And the human soul...

The three youngest of the possessed began dancing around the spread-eagled Bonnie, singing in falsely sweet little-girl voices:

"You are going to die in here,

When you die inhere , out there

They throw dirt right on your face!"

How delightful, Elena thought. Then she tuned back in to the drama unfolding on the roof. What she saw startled her. Meredith was now up on the widow's walk, moving as if she were underwater - entranced. Elena had missed how she'd gotten there - was it by some sort of magic? Misao was facing Meredith, giggling. Damon was laughing, too, but in mocking disbelief.

"And you expect me to believe that if I give this girl a pair of scissors..." he said, "she would actually cut her own - "

"Try and see for yourself," Shinichi interrupted, with one of his languid gestures. He was leaning against the cupola in the middle of the widow's walk, still trying to out-lounge Damon. "Didn't you see our prizewinner, Isobel? You carried her all the way here - didn't she ever try to speak?"

Damon held out a hand. "Scissors," he said, and a dainty pair of nail scissors rested in his palm. It seemed that, as long as Damon had Shinichi's magic key, the magic field around them would continue to obey him even in the real world. He laughed. "No, adult-size scissors, for gardening. The tongue's made of strong muscles, not paper."

What he held in his hand then were large pruning shears - definitely not toys for children. He hefted them, feeling their weight. And then, to Elena's utter shock, he looked straight up at her in her treetop refuge, not needing to search for her there at all - and winked.

Elena could only stare back in horror.

He knew, she thought. He knew where I was all the time.

That was what he had been whispering to Caroline about.

It hadn't worked – the Wings of Redemption hadn't worked, Elena thought, and it felt as if she were falling and would fall forever. I should have realized it would be no good. No matter what's done to him, Damon will always be Damon. And now he's offering me a choice: see my two best friends tortured and killed, or step forward and stop this horror by agreeing to his terms.

What could she do?

He had arranged the chess pieces brilliantly, she thought. The pawns on two different levels, so that even if Elena could somehow climb down to try to save Bonnie, Meredith would be lost. Bonnie was tied to four strong posts and guarded by Tree-Men. Meredith was closer, up on the roof, but to get her off Elena would have to get to her and then through Misao, Shinichi, Caroline, and Damon himself.

And Elena had to choose. Whether to step forward now, or be pushed forward by the anguish of one of the two who were almost a part of her.

She seemed to catch a faint strain of telepathy as Damon stood beaming there, and it said, This is the best night of my life.

You could always just jump, came the fog-like hypnotic whisper of annihilation once again. End the dead-end road you're on. End your suffering. End all the pain...just like that.

"Now it's my turn," Caroline was saying, brushing past the twins to face Meredith herself. "It was supposed to be my choice in the first place. So it's my turn now."

Misao was laughing hysterically, but Meredith was already stepping forward, still in a trance.

"Oh, have it your own way," Damon said. But he didn't move, still staring curiously, as Caroline said to Meredith, "You've always had a tongue like an adder's. Why don't you make it forked for us - right here, right now? Before you cut it into pieces."

Meredith held out her hand without a word, like an automaton.

Still with her eyes on Damon, Elena breathed in slowly. Her chest seemed to be going into spasms as it had when the sucker plants had wound their way around her and cut off her breath. But not even sensations in her own body could stop her.

How could I choose? she thought. Bonnie and Meredith - I love both of them.

And there's nothing else to do, she realized numbly, the feeling draining from her hands and her lips. I'm not even sure if Damon can save both of them, even if I agree to...submit to him. These others - Shinichi, Misao, even Caroline - they want to see blood. And Shinichi not only controls trees, but just about everything in the Old Wood, including those monstrous Tree-Men. Maybe this time Damon has over-reached himself, taken on more than he could handle. He wanted me - but he went too far to get me. I can't see any way out.

And then she did see. Suddenly everything fell into place and was brilliantly clear.

She knew .

Elena stared down at Bonnie, almost in a state of shock. Bonnie was looking at her, too. But there was no expectation of rescue in that small, triangular face. Bonnie had already accepted her fate: agony and death.

No, Elena thought, not knowing whether Bonnie could hear her.

Believe, she thought to Bonnie.

Not blindly, never blindly. But believe in what your mind tells you is the truth, and what your heart tells you is the right path. I would never let you go - or Meredith either.

I believe, Elena thought, and her soul was rocked by the force of it. She felt a sudden surge within herself, and she knew that it was time to go. One word was ringing in her mind as she stood and let go of her handholds on the tree trunk. And that one word echoed in her mind as she dove headfirst from her sixty-foot perch in the tree.

Believe.

Chapter 37

As she fell, it all rushed through her mind.

The first time she had seen Stefan...she had been a different person then. Ice-cold outside, manic inside - or was it the other way around? Still numb from the death of her parents so long ago. Jaded by the world and by anything to do with boys...A princess in an icy tower...with a lust only for conquest, for power...until she'd seen him .

Believe.

Then the world of the vampires...and Damon. And all the wicked wildness she'd found inside herself, all the passion. Stefan was her lynchpin, but Damon was the fiery breath beneath her wings. However far she went, Damon seemed to lure her on just a little farther. And she knew that one day it would be too far...for both of them. But for now, all she had to do was simple.

Believe.

And Meredith, and Bonnie, and Matt. She had changed relations with them, oh, most definitely. At first, not knowing what she had done to deserve friends like these three, she hadn't even bothered to treat them as they deserved. Yet they had all stuck by her. And now she did know how to appreciate them - knew that if it came to that, she would die for them.

Below, Bonnie's eyes had followed her dive. The audience on the widow's walk looked, too, but it was Bonnie's face that she stared into: Bonnie startled and terrified and disbelieving and about to scream and realizing at the same time that no screaming would save Elena from a headlong dive to her death.

Bonnie, believe in me. I'll save you.

I remember how to fly.

Chapter 38

Bonnie knew that she was going to die.

She had had a clear premonition of it just before those things - the trees that moved like humans, with their hideous faces and their thick, knotted arms - had surrounded the little band of humans in the Old Wood. She had heard the howl of the black weir dog, turned, and just caught a glimpse of one vanishing in the glare of her flashlight. The dogs had a long history in Bonnie's family: when one of them howled, a death was soon to come.

She'd guessed then that it would be hers.

But she hadn't said anything, even when Dr. Alpert had said, "What in the name of heaven was that ?" Bonnie was practicing being brave. Meredith and Matt were brave. It was something built into them, an ability to keep going when any sane person would run away and hide. They both put the group's good ahead of their own. And of course Dr. Alpert was brave, not to mention strong, and Mrs. Flowers seemed to have decided that the teenagers were her own special charges to take care of.

Bonnie had wanted to show that she could be brave, too. She was practicing holding her head up and listening for things in the bushes, while simultaneously listening with her psychic senses for any sign of Elena. It was hard to juggle the two kinds of hearing. There was a lot to hear with her real ears; all kinds of quiet chucklings and whisperings from the bushes that didn't belong there. But from Elena there wasn't a sound, not even when Bonnie called her name over and over: Elena, Elena, Elena!

She's human again, Bonnie had realized sadly, at last. She can't hear me or make contact. Out of all of us, she's the only one who didn't miraculously escape.

And it was then that the first of the Tree-Men loomed up in front of the group of searchers. Like something out of a nursery-tale nightmare, it was a tree and then - suddenly - it was a thing , a treelike giant that suddenly moved swiftly toward them, its upper branches bunching together to become long arms, and then everyone was screaming and trying to get away from it.

Bonnie would never forget how Matt and Meredith had tried to help her run then.

The Tree-Man wasn't fast. But when they turned and ran from it they found that there was another one behind them. And more to the right and the left. They were surrounded.

And then, like cattle, like slaves, they were herded. Any of them that tried to resist the trees were slapped and cuffed by hard and sharp-thorned branches, and then, with a lithe branch wound around the neck, were dragged .

They'd been caught - but they hadn't been killed. Instead they were being taken somewhere. It wasn't hard to imagine why: in fact Bonnie could imagine a whole lot of different whys. It was just a matter of picking which was the scariest.

In the end, after what seemed like hours of forced walking, Bonnie began to recognize things. They were going back to the boardinghouse again. Or rather, they were going back to the real boardinghouse for the first time. Caroline's car was outside. The house was again lit from top to bottom, but there were dark windows here and there.

And their captors were waiting for them.

And now, after her outburst of weeping and pleading, she was trying to be brave once more.

When that boy with the strange hair had said that she would be the first, she'd understood exactly what he meant, and how she was going to die - and suddenly she wasn't brave at all - inside. But she wouldn't scream again.

She could just see the widow's walk, and the sinister figures on it, but Damon had laughed when the Tree-Men had begun to pluck her clothes off. Now he was laughing as Meredith held the garden shears. She wouldn't beg him again, not when it wouldn't make any difference anyway.

And now she was on her back, with her arms and legs tied so she was helpless, clothed in strips and rags. She wanted them to kill her first, so she wouldn't have to watch Meredith cut her own tongue to pieces.

Just as she felt a last scream of fury welling up inside her like a snake climbing a pole, she had seen Elena high above her in a white pine tree.

"Wings of the Wind," Elena whispered as the ground rushed up toward her, very fast.

The wings unfolded instantly from somewhere inside Elena. They weren't real, they spanned some forty feet and were made of golden gossamer, the color ranging from deepest Baltic amber at her back to ethereal pale citrine at the tips. They were almost still, barely rising and falling, but they held her up, the wind rushing under them, and they got her to exactly where she needed to go.

Not to Bonnie. That was what they would all be expecting. From her height, she just might be able to snatch Bonnie free, but she had no idea how to cut Bonnie's bonds or whether she could lift off again.

Instead Elena swerved toward the widow's walk at the last moment, snatched the pruning shears out of Meredith's upraised hand, and then caught a handful of long, silky black-and-scarlet hair. Misao shrieked. And then...

That was when Elena really needed some belief. So far she had really just been gliding, not flying. But now she needed uplift; she needed the wings to work...and once again, although there was no time, she was with Stefan, and feeling...

...the first time she had kissed him. Other girls might have waited until it was the other way around, letting the boy take the lead, but not Elena. Besides, at first Stefan had thought that all kissing meant was seducing prey....

...the first time he had kissed her, understanding that it wasn't a predatory relationship...

And now she needed to really fly....

I know I can....

But Misao was just so heavy - and Elena's memory was faltering. The great golden wings trembled and became still. Shinichi was trying to climb a creeper to get to her, and Damon was holding Meredith motionless.

And, too late, Elena realized that it wasn't going to work.

She was alone, and she couldn't fight this way. Not against so many.

She was alone, and pain that made her want to shriek was lancing through her back. Misao was somehow making herself heavier, and in another minute she would be too heavy for Elena's trembling wings to hold up.

She was alone, and like the rest of the humans, she was going to die -

And then, through the agony that was causing fine sweat to break out all over her body, she heard Stefan's voice.

"Elena! Let go! Fall and I'll catch you!"

How strange, Elena thought, as if in a dream. His love and panic had distorted his voice somehow - making him sound different. Making him sound almost like -

"Elena! I'm with you!"

- like Damon.

Shaken out of her dream, Elena looked below her. And there was Damon, standing protectively in front of Meredith, looking up at her, with his arms held out.

He was with her.

"Meredith," he went on, "girl, this is no time to be sleepwalking! Your friend needs you! Elena needs you!"

Slowly, dully, Meredith turned her face up. And Elena saw life and animation restored to it as her eyes focused on the trembling of the great golden wings.

"Elena!" she shouted, "I'm with you! Elena!"

How did she know to say that? The answer was - that she was Meredith - and Meredith always knew what to say.

And now the cry was being taken up by another voice: Matt's.

"Elena!" he shouted, in a sort of acclamation. "I'm with you, Elena!"

And Dr. Alpert's deep voice: "Elena! I'm with you, Elena!"

And Mrs. Flowers, surprisingly strong: "Elena! I'm with you, Elena!"

And even poor Bonnie: "Elena! We're with you, Elena!"

While deep in her heart, the real Stefan whispered, "I'm with you, my angel."

"We're all with you, Elena!"

She didn't drop Misao. It was as if the great golden wings had caught an updraft; in fact, they almost lifted her straight up, out of control - but somehow she managed to keep herself steady. She was still looking down and she saw the tears spill from her eyes and fall toward Damon's outstretched arms. Elena didn't know why she was crying, but part of it was sorrow for ever having doubted him.

Because Damon wasn't just on her side. Unless she was wrong, he was willing to die for her - was courting death for her. He threw himself into the entangling creepers and vines, all reaching for Meredith or for Elena.

It had only taken an instant to get hold of Misao, but Shinichi was already leaping toward Elena, in fox form, lips drawn back, aiming to tear her throat out. These were no ordinary foxes. Shinichi was almost as big as a wolf - certainly the size of a large dog - and as vicious as a wolverine.

Meanwhile the entire widow's walk burst into a maze of vines, creepers, and fibrous tendrils, and Shinichi was being lifted by them. Elena didn't know which way to dodge. She needed time, and she needed a clear shot out of here.

All Caroline was doing was screaming.

And then Elena saw her opening. A gap in the creepers that she threw herself at, knowing in her subconscious that she was throwing herself over the railing as well, and somehow keeping her hold on Misao's hair. In fact, it must have been an extremely painful experience for the female kitsune as she swung back and forth like a pendulum below Elena.

The one glance Elena was able to give over her shoulder showed Damon, still moving faster than anything Elena had ever seen. He had Meredith in his arms now and was hurrying her through a gap that led to the cupula door. As soon as she stepped in, she appeared down on the ground and ran toward the altar where Bonnie was lying, only to slam into one of the Tree-Men. For a moment, as Damon glanced toward Elena, their gazes met and something electric passed between them. It made Elena tingle all over, that look did.

Then she refocused: Caroline was screaming again; Misao was using her whip to get a grip on Elena's leg and was calling on Tree-Men to give her a lift. Elena needed to fly higher. She had no idea how she was controlling her golden gossamer wings, but nothing seemed to snarl them; and they obeyed her slightest whim as though she had always had them. The great trick was to not think of how to get somewhere, but just to imagine being there.

On the other hand, the Tree-Men were growing. It was like some childhood nightmare of giants, and at first it made Elena feel that it was she who was shrinking. But the hideous creatures were actually overtopping the house now, and their upper, snake-like branches slashed into her legs while Misao lashed out with her whip. Elena's jeans were in shreds now. She swallowed a cry of pain.

I have to fly higher.

I can do it.

I'm going to save you all.

I believe.

Faster than the swoop of a hummingbird, she was darting up in the clear air again, still holding Misao by her long black-and-red hair. And Misao was screaming, screams that Shinichi echoed even as he fought with Damon.

And then, just as she and Damon had planned, just as she and Damon had hoped , Misao turned into her true form and Elena was holding a large and heavy, writhing vixen by the scruff of its neck.

There was a difficult moment while Elena got the balance right. She had to remember that there was more weight in back because Misao had six tails and was heaviest where a real fox would be lightest.

By then she had swooped back to her perch in the tree, and she stood there, able to look down on the scene below, the Tree-Men too slow to keep up. The plan had gone perfectly, except that Damon, of all people, had forgotten what he was supposed to be doing. Far from retreating into possession, he had fooled Shinichi and Misao beautifully - and Elena, too. Now, according to their plan he was supposed to be taking care of any innocent bystanders, letting Elena lure Shinichi on.

Instead something inside him seemed to have snapped; and he was methodically beating the human-shaped Shinichi's head against the house, shouting: "Damn...you! Where...is...my...brother?"

"I - could kill you - right now - " Shinichi shouted back, but he was short of breath. He wasn't finding Damon an easy opponent.

"Do it!" Damon returned immediately. "And then she" - pointing to the perching Elena - "will cut your sister's throat!"

Shinichi's contempt was scathing.

"You expect me to believe that a girl with an aura like that will kill - "

There comes a time when you have to make a stand. And for Elena, blazing with defiance and glory, this was that time. She took a deep breath, begged the Universe's forgiveness, and leaned down, positioning the pruning shears. Then she squeezed as hard as she could.

And a red-tipped black vixen's tail fell twisting to the ground, while Misao shrieked in pain and rage. As the tail fell it writhed, and it lay in the middle of the clearing, squirming like a snake that wasn't quite defeated yet. Then it became transparent and faded away.

That was when Shinichi really screamed, "Do you know what you've done, you ignorant bitch? I'll bring this place down on top of you! I'll tear you apart!"

"Oh, yes, of course you will. But first," Damon spoke each word deliberately, "you have to get past me."

Elena barely registered their words. It hadn't been easy for her to squeeze those shears. It had meant thinking about Meredith with the shears in her own hands, and Bonnie lying on the altar, and Matt, earlier, writhing on the ground. And Mrs. Flowers, and the three lost little girls, and Isobel and - a great deal - about Stefan.

But as for the first time in her life she drew another's blood with her own hands, she had a sudden strange sense of responsibility - of new accountability . As if an icy wind had blown her hair back sharply and said into her frozen, gasping face: Never without reason. Never without necessity. Never unless there's no other solution available.

Elena felt something inside her grow up, all at once. Too fast to say good-bye to childhood, she had become a warrior.

"You all thought I couldn't fight," she called to the assembled group. "You were wrong. You thought I was powerless. You were wrong there, too. And I'll use the last drop of my Power in this fight, because you twins are real monsters. No, you're - abominations. And if I die I'll rest with Honoria Fell, and I'll watch over Fell's Church again."

Fell's Church will rot and die writhing with maggots, a voice near her ear said, and it was a deep bass voice, nothing like Misao's shrill screaming. Elena knew even as she turned that it was the white pine tree. A hard scaly bough, laden with those serrated, resin-sticky needles, slammed into her midriff, throwing her off balance - and making her involuntarily open her hands. Misao promptly escaped, and burrowed into the Christmas-tree-like branches.

"Bad...trees...go...to...Hell," Elena cried, throwing her entire body weight into digging the shears she held into the base of the branch that had tried to crush her. It tried to pull away, and she twisted the shears in the wounded dark bark, relieved when a large piece fell off, with only a long string of resin left to show where it had been.

Then she looked for Misao. The fox wasn't finding it as easy as she might have thought, navigating a tree. Elena looked at the cluster of tails. Strangely, there was no stump, no blood, no sign that the fox had been injured.

Was that why she wasn't turning human? The loss of a tail? Even if she were naked when she changed back to her human self - as some stories of werewolves had it - she'd be in better condition to climb down.

Because Misao seemed finally to have chosen the slow but sure method of descent - to have branch after branch take hold of her fox body and pass it down to the next. Which meant she was only about ten feet below Elena.

And all Elena had to do was to coast over the needles down to her and then - by wings or other means - stop. If she believed in her wings. If the tree didn't throw her off.

"You're too slow," Elena shouted. Then she began the coast to overcome the distance - not far in human body-lengths - to her goal.

Until she saw Bonnie.

Bonnie's slight body was still lying on the altar, pale and cold-looking. But now four of the hideous Tree-Men had hold of her, one at each hand and one at each foot. They were already pulling so hard that she was lifted up into the air.

And Bonnie was awake. But not screaming. Not making a noise to attract attention to herself; and Elena realized with a rush of love and horror and desperation that that was why she hadn't been making a fuss before. She wanted the major players here to fight their fight without the bother of rescuing her.

The Tree-Men leaned back.

Bonnie's face contorted in agony.

Elena had to get to Misao. She needed the double fox key to free Stefan, and the only people who could tell her where it was were Misao and Shinichi. She looked up at the darkness above and noticed that it seemed a little less dark than when she had last seen it, the sky a dark swirling gray instead of dead black - but there was no help there. She looked down. Misao, making a little better time with her escape. If Elena let her get away...Stefan was her love. But Bonnie - Bonnie was her friend - ever since childhood....

And then she saw Plan B.

Damon was fighting Shinichi - or trying.

But Shinichi was always an easy centimeter away from where Damon's fist was. Shinichi's fists, on the other hand, always connected solidly with their targets, and right now Damon's face was a bloody mask.

"Use wood!"Misao was coaching in a shriek, her childlike manner having suddenly vanished. "You men, you idiots, all you think of is your fists !"

Shinichi broke a pillar support from the widow's walk one-handed, showing his true strength. Damon smiled beatifically. He was, Elena knew, going to enjoy this, even though it meant all the many little wounds those wooden splinters would entail.

It was in the middle of this that Elena shouted, "Damon, look down!" Her voice seemed weak over the cacophony of shrieks and sobs and screams of fury all around. "Damon! Look down – at Bonnie !"

Nothing so far had been able to break Damon's concentration - he seemed determined to find out where Stefan was being kept - or to kill Shinichi trying.

Now, to Elena's slight surprise, Damon's head jerked around immediately. He looked down.

"A cage," shouted Shinichi. "Build me a cage."

And tree branches leaned in from all sides to pin him and Damon into their own little world, a lattice to keep them contained.

The Tree-Men leaned back farther. And despite herself, Bonnie screamed.

"You see?" laughed Shinichi. "Each of your friends will die in that agony or worse. One by one, we will take you!"

That was when Damon really seemed to go crazy. He began moving like quicksilver, like a leaping flame, like some animal with reflexes far faster than Shinichi's. Now there was a sword in his hand, undoubtedly conjured up by the magical house key, and the sword slashed through the branches even as the branches reached out to trap him. And then he was airborne, leaping over the railing for the second time that night.

This time Damon's balance was perfect, and far from breaking bones, he made a graceful, catlike landing just beside Bonnie. And then his sword was flashing in an arc, sweeping all around Bonnie, and the tough, fingerlike tips of the branches that held her were cut cleanly away.

A moment later, Bonnie was being lifted, being held by Damon as he leaped easily off the rough-hewn altar and was lost in the shadows near the house.

Elena let out the breath she'd been holding and turned back to her own affairs. But her heart was beating more strongly and faster, with joy and with pride and with gratitude, as she slid down the painful, cutting-edged needles, and almost flashed past Misao, who was being whisked out of her way - not quite in time.

She got a good grip on the nape of the fox's neck. Misao keened a strange animal lament and sank her teeth into Elena's hand so hard that it felt as if they were going to meet. Elena bit her lip until she felt blood come, trying not to scream.

Be crushed, and die, and turn to loam, the tree said in Elena's ear. Your kind can feed my kin for once. The voice was ancient, malevolent and very, very frightening.

Elena's legs reacted without pausing to consult her mind. They pushed off hard and then the golden butterfly wings unfurled again, not beating but undulating, holding Elena steady above the altar.

She pulled the snarling vixen's muzzle up - not too close - to her own face. "Where are the two pieces of the fox key?" she demanded. "Tell me or I'll take off another tail. I swear I will. Don't fool yourself - it's not just your pride that you're losing, is it? Your tails are your Power. What would it feel like to have none at all?"

"Like being a human – except you , you freak." Now Misao was laughing again in her panting-dog way, her fox ears flat to her head.

"Just answer the question!"

"As if you would understand the answers I could give. If I told you that one was inside the silver nightingale's instrument, would that give you any kind of idea?"

"It might if you explained it a little more clearly!"

"If I told you that one was buried in Blodwedd's ballroom, would you be able to find it?" Again the panting grin as the fox gave clues that led nowhere - or everywhere.

"Are those your answers?"

"No!"Misao shrieked suddenly and kicked with her feet, as if they were dog's legs scrabbling in the dirt. Except that the dirt was Elena's midriff, and the scrabbling legs felt as if they might well puncture her entrails. She felt her camisole tear.

"I told you; I'm not playing around here!" Elena cried. She lifted the vixen with her left arm, even though it ached with tiredness. With her right hand, she positioned the shears.

"Where is the first part of the key?" Elena demanded.

"Search for yourself! You only have the whole world to look through, and every thicket besides." The fox went for her throat again, white teeth actually scoring Elena's flesh.

Elena forced that arm to hold Misao higher. "I warned you, so don't say that I didn't or that you have any reason to complain!"

She squeezed the shears.

Misao gave a squeal that was almost lost in the general commotion. Elena, feeling more and more tired, said, "You're a complete liar, aren't you? Look down if you want. I didn't cut anywhere close to you. You just heard the shears click and screamed."

Misao very nearly got a claw into Elena's eye. Oh, well. Now, for Elena, there were no more moral or ethical issues. She wasn't causing pain, she was simply draining Power. The shears wentsnap, snap, snap , and Misao screamed and cursed her, but below them the Tree-Men were shrinking.

"Where is the first part of the key?"

"Let me go and I'll tell." Suddenly Misao's voice was less shrill.

"On your honor - if you can say that without laughing?"

"On my honor and my word as a kitsune. Please! You can't leave a fox without a real tail! That's why the ones you cut didn't hurt. They're badges of honor. But my real tail is in the middle, it's tipped with white, and if you cut me there; you'll see blood and it will leave a stump." Misao seemed thoroughly cowed, thoroughly ready to cooperate.

Elena knew about judging people and intuition, and both her mind and her heart were telling her not to trust this creature. But she wanted so much to believe, to hope....

Making a slow curving descent so that the vixen was close to the ground - she would not give in to the temptation to drop her from sixty feet up - Elena said, "Well? On you honor, what are the answers?"

Six Tree-Men came to life around her and plunged at her, with greedy, grasping finger branches.

But Elena wasn't taken completely off guard. She hadn't let go of her grip on Misao; only slackened it. Now she tightened the grip again.

A wave of strength buoyed her so that she lifted fast and swept by the widow's walk and a furious Shinichi and weeping Caroline. Then Elena met Damon's eyes. They were filled with hot, fierce pride in her. She was filled with hot, fierce passion.

"I am not an angel," she announced to any of the group who hadn't quite managed to grasp this yet. "I am not an angel and I am not a spirit. I'm Elena Gilbert and I've been to the Other Side. And right now I'm ready to do whatever needs to be done, which seems to include kicking some ass!"

There was a clamor below that at first she couldn't identify. Then she realized it was the others - it was her friends. Mrs. Flowers and Dr. Alpert, Matt and even wild Isobel. They were cheering - and they were visible because suddenly the backyard was in daylight.

Am I doing that? Elena wondered, and realized that somehow she was. She was lighting up the clearing in which Mrs. Flowers' house stood, while leaving the woods around dark.

Maybe I can extend it, she thought. Make the Old Wood into something younger and less evil.

If she had been more experienced, she would never have attempted it. But right here and right now she felt that she could take anything on. She looked at the four directions of the Old Wood around her quickly, and she cried, "Wings of Purification!" and watched the huge, frosty, iridescent butterfly wings spread high and wide, and then wider, and then spread some more.

She was aware of a silence, of being so enrapt in something she was doing that even Misao's struggles didn't matter. It was a silence that reminded her of something: of all the most beautiful strains of music coming together into one, single, powerful chord.

And then the Power blasted out from her - not destructive Power like that Damon had sent many times, but a Power of renewal, of springtime, of love, youth, and purification. And she watched as the light spread farther and farther, and the trees grew smaller and more familiar, with more clearings in between thickets. Thorns and hanging creepers disappeared. On the ground, spreading out like a circle expanding, flowers of all colors bloomed, sweet violets in clumps here and banks of Queen Anne's lace there, and wild roses climbing everywhere. It was so beautiful that it made her chest ache.

Misao hissed. Elena's trance was finally broken, and she looked around to see that the shambling, hideous Tree-Men had disappeared in the full sunlight and in their place was a wide patch of sorrel dotted with fossilized trees in odd shapes. Some looked almost human. For a moment Elena regarded the scene, puzzled, and then she realized what else was different. All the real humans were gone.

"I never should have brought you here!" And that, to Elena's surprise, was Misao's voice. She was speaking to her brother. "You spoiled everything because of that girl. Shinichi no baka!"

"Idiot, yourself!" Shinichi shouted at Misao. "Onore! You're reacting just the way they want - "

"What else am I supposed to do?"

"I heard you giving the girl clues," Shinichi snarled. "You'd do anything for the sake of your looks, you selfish - "

"You can say that to me? While you haven't lost even one tail yourself?"

"Just because I'm faster - "

Misao cut him off. "That's a lie and you know it! Take it back!"

"You're too weak to fight! You should have run long ago! Don't come crying to me about it."

"Don't you dare speak to me like that!" And Misao leaped from Elena's grasp and attacked Shinichi. He had been wrong. She was a good fighter. In a second they were a destruction zone, rolling over and over as they fought changing forms all the while. Black and scarlet fur flew. Out of the ball of turning bodies came scraps of speech -

" - still won't find the keys - "

" - not both of them, anyway - "

" - even if they did - "

" - what would it matter?"

" - still have to find the boy - "

" - I say it's only sporting to let them try - "

Misao's horrible shrill giggle. "And see what they find - "

" - in the Shi no Shi !"

Abruptly the fight ended and they both became human. They were battered, but Elena felt that there was nothing more that she could do if they chose to fight again.

Instead Shinichi said, "I'm breaking the globe. Here ," he turned to Damon and shut his eyes, "is where your precious brother is. I'm putting it into your mind - if you can decode the map. And once you get there, you'll die. Don't say I didn't warn you."

To Elena he bowed and said, "I regret that you'll be dying, too. But I've memorialized you in an ode.

Wild rose and lilac,

Bee's balm and daisy,

Elena's smile chases

The winter away.

Bluebell and violet,

Foxglove and iris,

Watch where she treads

And then watch the grass sway.

Wherever her feet pass,

White flowers part the grass - "

"I'd rather hear a straight explanation of where the keys are," Elena said to Shinichi, knowing that after that song she wouldn't get any more from Misao. "Frankly, I'm sick and tired of all your bullshit ."

She noticed that once again everyone was staring at her and she could feel why. She could feel a difference in her voice, in her stance, in her patterns of speech. But mostly, inside , what she felt was freedom.

"We'll give you this much," Shinichi said. "We won't move them. Find them from the clues - or by other means, if you can." He winked at Elena and turned away - to meet a pale and trembling Nemesis.

Caroline. Whatever else she'd been doing for the last few minutes, she had been crying, and rubbing her eyes, and wringing her hands - or so Elena guessed from the distribution of her makeup.

"You, too?" she said to Shinichi. "You, too?"

Shinichi smiled his lazy smile. "And what two am I?" He held up two fingers in the V symbol to differentiate his two from Caroline's.

"You've fallen for her, too? Making up songs - giving her clues to find Stefan - "

"They're not very good clues," Shinichi said comfortingly and smiled again.

Caroline tried to hit him, but he caught her fist. "And you think you're leaving now?" Her voice was pitched at a scream - not as high as Misao's glass-splintering shriek, but with its own fearsome vibrato.

"I know we're leaving." He glanced at the sullen Misao. "After one more item of business. But not with you."

Elena tensed up, but Caroline was trying to attack Shinichi again. "After what you said to me? After all that you said ?"

Shinichi looked her up and down, seeming to actually see her for the first time. He also looked genuinely bewildered. "Said to you?" he asked. "Have we spoken before tonight?"

There was a high-pitched giggle. Everyone turned. Misao was standing, giggling, her hands over her mouth.

"I used your image," she said to her brother, her eyes on the floor as if confessing to a minor fault. "And your voice. In the mirror, when I would give her orders. She was on the rebound from some guy who'd dumped her. I told her I'd fallen in love with her and that I wanted to get revenge on her enemies - if she'd just do a few little things for me."

"Like spreading malach through little girls," Damon said grimly.

Misao giggled again. "And a boy or two. I know what it feels like to have those malach inside you. It doesn't hurt at all. They're just - there."

"Have you ever had one force you to do something you didn't want to?" Elena demanded. She could feel her blue eyes blazing. "Do you think that would hurt, Misao?"

"It wasn't you?" Caroline was still looking at Shinichi; she obviously couldn't keep up with the script. "It wasn't you ?"

He sighed, smiling slightly. "Not me. Golden hair is my undoing, I'm afraid. Golden...or fiery red against black," he added hastily, glancing at his sister.

"So it was all a lie," Caroline said, and for a moment, desperation was written on her face larger than anger, with sadness larger than both. "You're just another Elena fan."

"Look," Elena said bluntly, "I don't want him. I hate him. The only guy I care about is Stefan!"

"Oh, he's the only guy, is he?" Damon asked, with a glance toward Matt, who had carried Bonnie up close to them while the fox-fight was going on. Mrs. Flowers and Dr. Alpert had followed.

"You know what I mean," Elena told Damon.

Damon shrugged. "Many a golden-haired lassie ends as the rough yeoman's bride." Then he shook his head. "Why am I spouting drek like this?" His compact body seemed to tower over Shinichi.

"It's just a residual effect...from being possessed...you know." Shinichi fluttered his hands, his eyes still on Elena. "My thought patterns..."

It looked as if another fight was brewing, but then Damon just smiled and said, narrow-eyed, "So you let Misao have her way with the town while you went after Elena and me."

"And - "

"Mutt," Damon said hastily and automatically.

"I was going to say Stefan," Elena said. "No, I would guess that Matt was the victim of one of Misao and Caroline's little schemes before he and I ran into you when you were completely possessed."

"And now you think you can just walk away," Caroline said, in a shaking, menacing voice.

"We are walking away," Shinichi said stiffly.

"Caroline, wait," Elena said. "I can help you – with Wings of Purification. You're being controlled by a malach."

"I don't need your help! I need a husband !"

There was utter silence on the roof. Not even Matt stepped up to the plate on this one.

"Or at least a fianc��¦," Caroline muttered, one hand on her abdomen. "My family would accept that."

"We'll work it out," Elena said softly - then, firmly, "Caroline, believe it."

"I wouldn't believe in you if..." Caroline's answer was obscene. Then she spat in Elena's direction. And then she was silent, by her own choice or because the malach inside her wanted it.

"Back to business," Shinichi said. "Let's see, our price for the service of the clues and the location is a little block of memory. Let's say...from the time I first met Damon until now. Taken from Damon's mind." He smiled nastily.

"You can't do that!" Elena felt panic shoot through her, starting in her heart and flying out to the farthest reaches of every limb. "He's different now: he's remembered things - he's changed. If you take that memory away - "

"So will all the sweet changes go," Shinichi told her. "Would you rather I took your memory?"

"Yes!"

"But you were the only one who heard the clues about the key. And in any case I don't want to see things from your eyes. I want to see you...through his eyes."

By now, Elena was ready to start another fight on her own. But Damon said, distancing himself already, "Go ahead and take what you like. But if you don't get out of this town right after, I take off your head with these shears."

"Agreed."

"No, Damon - "

"Do you want Stefan back?"

"Not at that price!"

"Too bad," Shinichi put in. "There is no other bargain."

"Damon! Please - think about it!"

"I have thought. It's my fault that the malach spread so far in the first place. It's my fault for not investigating what was going on with Caroline. I didn't care what happened to humans as long as the new arrivals kept away from me . But I can fix some of the things I did to you by finding Stefan." He half turned to her, the old devil-may-care smile on his lips. "After all, taking care of my brother is my job."

"Damon - listento me."

But Damon was looking at Shinichi. "Agreed," he said. "You have yourself a deal."

Chapter 39

"We won the battle, but not the war," Elena said sadly. She thought it was the day after their fight with the kitsune twins. She couldn't be sure of anything except that she was alive, that Stefan was gone, and that Damon was back to his old self again.

"Maybe because we didn't have my precious brother," he said, as if to prove it. They were driving in the Ferrari, trying to find Elena's Jaguar - in the real world.

Elena ignored him. She also ignored the soft but vaguely annoying hiss that came from some device he'd installed that was not a radio, that just seemed to play voices and static.

A new kind of Ouija board? Audio instead of all that tedious spelling?

Elena felt herself shiver inside.

"You did give your word to go with me and find him. I swear it by - by the Other World."

"You tell me that I did, and you're not a liar - no, not to me. I can read your facial expressions now that you're a human. If I gave my word, I gave my word."

Human? Elena thought. Am I? What am I? - with the kind of Powers I have? Even Damon can see that the Old Wood has changed in the real world. It's not an ancient, half-dead forest anymore. There are spring flowers in midsummer. There's life everywhere.

"And in any case, it will give me plenty of time to be alone with you - my princess of darkness."

And we're back to that again, Elena thought wearily. But he'd leave me here stranded if I once suggested that we had laughed and walked in a clearing together - with him on his knees to adjust my footstool. Even I'm beginning to wonder if it was real.

There was a slight bump - as nearly as one could tell from Damon's style of driving.

"Got it!" he cheered himself - and then, when Elena turned, ready to wrench the wheel to make him stop - he added coolly, "It was a piece of tire , for your information. Not many animals are black, arched, and a few tenths of an inch thick."

Elena said nothing. What was there to say to Damon's quips? But deep down she felt relieved that Damon wasn't given to running over furry little animals as an amusement.

We're going to be alone together for quite some time, she thought - and then realized that there was another reason she couldn't just tell Damon to dry up and die. Shinichi had put the location of Stefan's cell into Damon's mind, not hers. She needed him desperately, to take her to the location, and to fight whoever was keeping Stefan captive.

But it was fine if he had forgotten that she had any Powers. Something to save for a rainy day.

At just that moment, Damon exclaimed "What the - " and leaned forward to adjust dials on the not-radio.

" - peating; all units be on the lookout for one Matthew Honeycutt, male Caucasian, five foot eleven inches, blond hair, blue eyes - "

"What is that?" Elena demanded.

"A police scanner. If you want to be able to really live in this great land of freedom, it's best to know when to run - "

"Damon, don't get me started on your lifestyle. I meant what was that about Matt?"

"It looks as if they've decided to bring him in at last. Caroline didn't get much revenge yesterday night. I guess she's taking a shot at it now."

"Then we've got to get to him first – anything could happen if he stays in Fell's Church. But he can't take his car, and he won't fit in this one. What are we going to do?"

"Leave him to the police?"

"Don't, please. We have to - " Elena was beginning, when in a clearing to the left, like some vision sent to approve her scheme, the Jaguar appeared.

"That's the car we're taking," she told Damon flatly. "At least it's roomy. If you want your police scanner doo-hickey in it, then you'd better start uninstalling it from this one."

"But - "

"I'll go get Matt. I'm the only one he'll listen to. Then we'll leave the Ferrari in the Wood - or dump it in the creek if you want."

"Oh, the creek, by all means."

"Actually, we may not have time for that. We'll just leave it in the Wood."

Matt stared at Elena. "No. I won't run."

Elena turned the full intensity of her blue eyes on him. "Matt, get in the car. Now . You have to. Caroline's dad is related to the judge who signed the order to get you. It's a lynching, Meredith says. Even Meredith is telling you to run. No, you don't need clothes; we'll get clothes."

"But - but - it's not true - "

"They'll make it true. Caroline will weep and sob. I never thought a girl would do this to get revenge, but Caroline is in a class of her own. She's gone nuts."

"But - "

"I said, get in! They'll be here any minute. They've already been to your house and Meredith's house. What are you doing at Bonnie's, anyway?"

Bonnie and Matt glanced at each other. "Uh, just having a look at Bonnie's mom's car," Matt said. "It's on the fritz again, and - "

"Never mind! Come with me! Bonnie, what are you doing? Calling Meredith back?"

Bonnie jumped slightly. "Yes."

"Tell her good-bye and we love her and good-bye. Take care of the town - we'll be in touch - "

As the red Jaguar pulled away, Bonnie said into the phone, "You were right. She's pulling a Straight A away. I don't know whether Damon's going - he wasn't in the car."

She listened for a moment and then said, "Okay, I will. I'll see you."

She hung up and got into action.

Dear Diary,

Today I ran away from home.

I guess you can't really call it running away when you're almost 18 and you take your own car - and when nobody knew you were home in the first place. So I'll just say, tonight I'm on the run.

The other slightly shocking thing is that I ran away with two different guys. And neither of them is my guy.

I say that, but...I can't help remembering things. The look in Matt's eyes in the clearing - I honestly think he was prepared to die to protect me. I can't help but think about what we once were to each other. Those blue eyes...oh, I don't know what's wrong with me!

And Damon. I know now that there's living flesh under the layers and layers of stone he's wrapped around his soul. It's deeply hidden, but it's there. If I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that he touches something deep inside me that makes me shiver - a part of myself even I don't understand.

Oh, Elena! Stop right now! You can't go near that dark part of yourself, especially now that you have Power. You don't dare go near it. Everything is different now. You have to be more responsible (something you're not at all good at!).

And Meredith won't be here to help me be responsible, either. How is this ever going to work out? Damon and Matt in the same car? On a road trip together? Can you imagine? Tonight, it was so late and Matt was so stunned by the situation that he couldn't really take anything in. And Damon only smirked. But he'll be in demonic form tomorrow, I know he will.

I still think it was a great pity that Shinichi had to take Wings of Redemption from Damon along with his memories. But I firmly believe that, deep down, there's a tiny part of Damon that remembers how he was when we were together. And now he has to be worse than ever to prove that what he remembers was all a lie.

So while you're reading this, Damon - I know you'll get hold of it somehow and snoop - let me tell you that you were nice for a while, actually NICE, and it was fun. We talked together. We even laughed - at the same jokes. And you...you were gentle.

And now you're going, "Nah, it's just another Elena-plot to get me to think I can turn around – but I know where I'm going, and I don't care." Does that ring a bell, Damon? Have you said those words to someone recently? And if not, how do I know them? Could it be that for once I'm telling the truth?

Now I'm going to forget that you're totally besmirching your honor by reading secret things that don't belong to you.

What else?

First: I miss Stefan.

Second: I didn't really pack for this. Matt and I swung by the boardinghouse, and he grabbed the money Stefan left for me while I grabbed an armful of clothes out of the closet - heaven knows what I've got: Bonnie's tops and Meredith's pants, and not a decent nightgown to my name.

But at least I also got you, precious friend, a present Stefan was saving for me. I never really liked typing in a file marked "Diary" anyway. Blank books like you are my style.

Third: I miss Stefan. I miss him so badly that I'm crying while I'm writing about clothes. It looks as if that's what I'm crying about, which makes me seem insanely shallow. Oh, sometimes I just want to scream.

Fourth: I want to scream now. It was only when we got back to Fell's Church that we found what horrors the malach had left for us. There is a fourth little girl I think may be possessed like Tami, Kristin, and Ava - I couldn't really tell, so I couldn't do anything. I have the feeling that we definitely haven't heard the last of this possession thing.

Fifth: But worst is what happened in the Saitou house. Isobel is in the hospital with raging infections in all her piercings. Obaasan, as everyone calls Isobel's grandmother, was not dead as the first paramedics who got there thought. She was in a deep trance - reaching out to us . Whether some of the courage I got, some of the belief in myself, was really due to her, is something I'll never know.

But in the den was Jim Bryce. He had...oh, I can't write it. He was the captain of the basketball team! But he had eaten away at himself: his whole left hand, most of his right-hand fingers, his lips. And he had put a pencil through his ear into his brain. They say (I heard this through Tyrone Alpert, the doctor's grandson) that it's called Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome (sp? I only heard it said) and that it's rare, but there are others just like him. That's what the doctors say. I say it was a malach making him do it. But they wouldn't let me in to try to take it out of him.

I can't even say he's alive. I can't say if he's dead. He's going to a sort of institution where they keep long-term cases.

We failed there. I failed. It wasn't really Jim Bryce's fault. So he was with Caroline just one night, and from there he passed the malach to his girlfriend Isobel and to his little sister Tami. Then both Caroline and little Tami passed it along to others. They tried to give it to Matt, but he wasn't about to let them.

Sixth, the three little girls that most definitely did get it were all under the orders of Misao, from what Shinichi said. They say that they don't remember anything about decorating themselves or propositioning strangers. They don't seem to remember anything about the time of their possession, and they act like very different little girls now. Nice. Calm. If I thought Misao gave up easily then I would be sure they'll be all right.

Worse is the thought of Caroline. She was a friend once and now - well, now I think she needs help more than ever. Damon got to her diaries - she kept her own diary by recording herself on video, and we watched her talk to the mirror...and watched the mirror talk back. Mostly it was her own image that showed, but sometimes, at the beginning or end of a session, it was Shinichi's face. He's good-looking, if a little wild. I can see how Caroline might fall for him and agree to be his carrier of malach in the town.

That's all over. I used the last of whatever Power I know I have taking the malach out of those girls.

Caroline, of course, wouldn't let me near her.

And then there were those fateful words of Caroline's: "I need a husband!" Any girl knows what that means. Any girl feels sorry for another who says it, even if they're unfriends.

Caroline and Tyler Smallwood were going together until about two weeks ago. Meredith says Caroline dropped him, and that kidnapping her for Klaus was Tyler's revenge. But if before that they'd been sleeping together with no protection (and Caroline is dumb enough to do it), she could certainly have known she was pregnant and been looking for another guy by the time Shinichi turned up. (Which was just before I - returned to life.) Now she's trying to pin it on Matt. It was pure bad luck that she said it happened on the same night the malach attacked Matt and that that old man from the Neighborhood Watch saw Matt drive home and pass out at the steering wheel as if he were drunk or on drugs.

Or maybe it wasn't just luck. Maybe that was all part of Misao's game, too.

I'm going to sleep now. Too much thinking. Too much worry. And, oh, I miss Stefan! He would help me deal with the worry in his own gentle but keen-sighted way.

I'm sleeping inside the car with the doors locked. The guys are sleeping outside it. At least, that's how we're starting - at their insistence. At least they agreed on that.

I don't think Shinichi and Misao will stay away from Fell's Church for long. I don't know if they'll leave it alone for a few days, or weeks, or a few months, but Misao will heal and they'll come back for us eventually.

That means that Damon, Matt, and I - we're fugitives in two worlds.

And I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow.

Elena