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

Chapter 30

Matt watched Mrs. Flowers go over Sheriff Mossberg's badge, holding it lightly in one hand and running her fingers over it with the other.

The badge came from Rebecca, Sheriff Mossberg's niece. It had seemed entirely a coincidence when Matt had almost run into her earlier that day. Then he'd noticed that she was wearing a man's shirt as a dress. The shirt had been familiar - a Ridgemont sheriff's shirt.

Then he had seen the badge still attached to it. You could say a lot of things about Sheriff Mossberg, but you couldn't imagine him losing his badge. Matt had forgotten all sense of gallantry and snatched at the little metal shield before Rebecca could stop him. He'd had a sick feeling in his stomach then, and it had only gotten worse since. Mrs. Flowers's expression was doing nothing to comfort him.

"It wasn't in direct contact with his skin," she said softly, "so the images I get are hazy. But oh, my dear Matt" - she lifted shadowed eyes to his - "I am afraid." She shivered, sitting at her kitchen table chair, where two mugs of hot spiced milk sat untouched.

Matt had to clear his throat and touch the scalding milk to his lips. "You think we need to go out to look."

"We must," said Mrs. Flowers. She shook her head, with its soft, wispy white curls, sadly. "Dear Ma ma is most insistent, and I can feel it too; a great disturbance in this artifact."

Matt felt the faintest shade of pride tingeing his fear for having secured the "artifact" - and then he thought, yeah, robbing badges from the shirts of twelve-year-old girls is really something to be proud of.

Mrs. Flowers's voice came from the kitchen. "You'd best put on several shirts and sweaters as well as a pair of these." She emerged sideways through the kitchen door, holding several long coats, apparently from the closet in front of the kitchen door, and several pairs of gardening gloves.

Matt jumped up to help her with the armfuls of coats and then went into a coughing fit as the smell of mothballs and of - something else, something spicy - surrounded him.

"Why do - I feel - like Christmas?" he said, forced to cough between each few words.

"Oh, now that would be Great-Aunt Morwen's clove preservation recipe," Mrs. Flowers replied. "Some of these coats are from Mother's time."

Matt believed her. "But it's still warm out. Why should we wear coats at all?"

"For protection, dear Matt, for protection! These clothes have spells woven into the material to safeguard us from evil."

"Even the gardening gloves?" Matt asked doubtfully.

"Even the gloves," Mrs. Flowers said firmly. She paused and then said in a quiet voice, "And we'd better gather some flashlights, Matt dear, because this is something we're going to have to do in the darkness."

"You're kidding!"

"No, sadly, I am not. And we should get some rope to tie ourselves together. Under no circumstances must we enter the thicket of the Old Wood tonight."

An hour later, Matt was still thinking. He hadn't had any appetite for Mrs. Flowers's hearty Braised Eggplant au Fromage dinner, and the wheels in his brain just wouldn't stop turning.

I wonder if this is how Elena feels, he thought, when she's putting together Plans A, B, and C. I wonder if she ever feels this stupid doing it.

He felt a tightening around his heart, and for the three-hundred-thousandth time since he'd left her and Damon, he wondered if he'd done the right thing.

It had to be right, he told himself. It hurt the worst, and that's the proof of it. Things that really, really hurt are the right thing to do.

But I just wanted to say good-bye to her....

But if you'd said good-bye, you'd never have left. Face it, moron, as far as Elena goes you're the world's biggest loser. Ever since she found a boyfriend she liked better than you, you've been working like you were Meredith and Bonnie to help her keep him and keep away The Bad Guy. Maybe you should get you all little matching T-shirts saying: I am a dog. I serve the Princess Ele -

SMACK!

Matt leaped up, and landed crouching, which was more painful than it looked in movies.

Rattle-Smick!

It was the loose shutter on the other side of the room. That first bang had really been a slam, though. The exterior of the boardinghouse was in pretty bad shape, and the wooden shutters there sometimes suddenly came free of their wintertime nails.

But was it really just a coincidence? Matt thought, as soon as his heart had stopped galloping. In this boardinghouse where Stefan had spent so much time? Maybe somehow there were still remnants of his spirit around, tuned to what people thought within these halls. If so, Matt had just been given a solid whack to the solar plexus, from the way he felt.

Sorry, bud, he thought, almost saying it out loud. I didn't mean to trash your girl. She's under a lot of pressure.

Trash his girl?

Trash Elena?

Hell, he'd be the first person to knock out anybody who trashed Elena. Provided Stefan didn't use vampire tricks to get in front of him!

And what was it Elena always said? You can't be too prepared. You can't have too many subplans because, just as sure as God made a pesky shell around a peanut, your major plan was going to have some flaws.

That was why Elena also worked with as many people as possible. So what if C and D workers never needed to get involved. They were there if they were needed.

Thinking this, and with his head feeling a lot clearer than it had since he had sold the Prius and given Stefan's money to Bonnie and Meredith for plane fare plus, Matt went to work.

"And then we took a walk around the estate, and saw the apple orchard, and the orange orchard, and the cherry orchard," Bonnie told Elena, who was lying down, looking small and defenseless, in her four-poster bed, which had been hung with dusty-gold sheer panels, right now held back by heavy tassels in various shades of gold.

Bonnie was sitting comfortably in a gold upholstered chair that had been drawn to the bed. She had her small bare feet up on the sheets.

Elena was not being a good patient. She wanted to get up, she insisted. She wanted to be able to walk around. That would do her more good than all the oatmeal and steak and milk and five-times-a-day visits from Dr. Meggar, who had come to live at the estate.

She knew what they were all really afraid of, though. Bonnie had blurted it all out in one long sobbing, keening wail one night when the little redhead had been on duty beside her.

"Y-you screamed and all the v-vampires heard it, and Sage just picked up Meredith and me like two kittens, one under each arm, and he ran to where the screaming was. But b-by then so many people had gotten to you first! You were unconscious but so was Damon, and somebody said, 'They-they've been attacked and I th-think they're dead!' And every-b-body was s-saying, 'Call the G-Guardians!' And I fainted, a little."

"Shhh," Elena had said kindly - and cannily. "Have some Black Magic to make it feel better."

Bonnie had had some. And some more. And then she'd gone on with the story. "But Sage must've known something because he said, 'Here, I'm a doctor, and I'm going to examine them.' And you would really believe him, the way he said it!"

"And then he looked at both of you, and I guess he knew right away what happened, because he said, 'Fetch a carriage! I need to take them t-to Dr. Meggar, my colleague.' And the Lady Fazina herself came and said that they could have one of her carriages, and just send it back wh-whenever. She's sooooo rich! And then, we got you two out the back way because there were - were some bastards who said, let them die. They were real demons, white like snow, called Snow Women. And then, then, we were just in the carriage and, oh my God! Elena! Elena, you died! You stopped breathing twice! And Sage and Meredith just kept doing CPR on you. And I - I prayed so h-h-hard."

Elena, fully into the story by now, had cuddled her, but Bonnie's tears kept coming back.

"And we knocked at Dr. Meggar's as if we were going to burst the door in - and - and someone told him - and he examined her and said, 'She needs a transfusion.' And I said, 'Take my blood.' Because remember in school when we both gave blood to Jody Wright and we were practically the only ones who could do it because we were the same kind? And then Dr. Meggar got two tables ready like that" - Bonnie had snapped her fingers - "and I was so scared I could hardly hold still for the needle, but I did. I did, somehow! And they gave you some of my blood. And, meanwhile, you know what Meredith did? She let Damon bite her. She really did. And Dr. Meggar sent the carriage back to the house to ask for servants who 'wanted a bonus' because th-that's what it's called here - and the carriage came back full. And I don't know how many Damon bit, but it was a lot! Dr. Meggar said it was the best medicine. And Meredith and Damon and all of us talked and we convinced Dr. Meggar to come here, I mean to live, and Lady Ulma is going to turn that whole building he was living in into a hospital for the poor people. And ever after that we've just been trying to get you well. Damon was fine the next morning. And Lady Ulma and Lucen and he - I mean it was their idea but he did it, sent this pearl to Lady Fazina - it was one that her father had never found a client rich enough to buy, because it's so big, like a good handful in size but irregular, that means with twists and turns, and a sheen like silver. They put it on a thick chain and sent it to her."

Bonnie's eyes had filled again. "Because she saved both you and Damon. Her carriage saved your lives." Bonnie had leaned forward to whisper, "And Meredith told me - it's a secret, but not from you - that being bitten isn't that bad. There!" And Bonnie, like the kitten she was, had yawned and stretched. "I would have been bitten next," she'd said almost wistfully, and quickly added, "but you needed my blood. Human blood, but mine especially. I guess they know all about blood types here because they can taste and smell the differences." Then she gave a little jump and said, "Do you want to look at the fox key half? We were so sure it was all over and we'd never ever find it, but when Meredith went in the bedroom to get bitten - and I promise that was all they did - Damon gave it to her and asked her to keep it. So she did and she took good care of it and it's in a little chest Lucen made out of something that looks like plastic but it's not."

Elena had admired the little crescent, but other than that there was nothing to do in bed but talk and read classical books or encyclopedias from Earth. They wouldn't even let her and Damon rest in the same room.

Elena knew why. They were afraid she wouldn't just talk to Damon. They were afraid that she would get near to him and smell his exotic familiar smell, made up of Italian bergamot, mandarin, and cardamom, and that she would look up into his black eyes that could hold universes inside the pupils, and that her knees would go weak and she'd wake up a vampire.

They didn't know anything! She and Damon had been safely exchanging blood for weeks before the crisis. If there was nothing to drive him out of sanity again, the way the pain had before, he would conduct himself like a perfect gentleman.

"Hm," Bonnie said, upon hearing this protest, pushing a tiny throw pillow around with toenails that had been painted silver. "I maybe wouldn't tell them that you've been exchanging blood so many times from the beginning. It might make them go 'Aha!' or something. You know, read something into it."

"There's nothing to read into. I'm here to collect my beloved Damon and Stefan is just helping me."

Bonnie looked at her with her brows knitted and her mouth pursed, but didn't venture a word.

"Bonnie?"

"Um-hm?"

"Did I just say what I thought I said?"

"Um-hm."

Elena, with one motion, gathered an armful of pillows and deposited them on her face. "Could you please tell chef that I want another steak and a big glass of milk?" she requested in a muffled voice from under the pillows. "I'm not well."

Matt had a new junk car. He was always able to get his hands on one when he really needed it. And now he was driving, in fits and starts, to Obaasan's house.

Mrs. Saitou's house, he corrected himself hastily. He didn't want to tread on unfamiliar cultural customs, not when he was asking for a favor.

The door at the Saitous' was opened by a woman Matt had never seen before. She was an attractive woman, dressed very dramatically in a wide scarlet skirt - or maybe in very wide scarlet pants - she stood with her feet so far apart that it was hard to tell. She wore a white blouse. Her face was striking: two swaths of straight black hair and a smaller, neater swath of bangs that came to her eyebrows.

But the most striking thing of all about her was that she was holding a long curved sword, pointed directly at Matt.

"H-hi," Matt said, when the door swung open to reveal this apparition.

"This is a good house," the woman replied. "This is not a house of evil spirits."

"I never thought it was," Matt said, retreating as the woman advanced. "Honest."

The woman shut her eyes, seemed to be searching for something in her own mind. Then, abruptly, she lowered the sword. "You speak the truth. You mean no harm. Please come in."

"Thank you," Matt said. He'd never been so happy to have an older woman accept him.

"Orime," came a thin, feeble voice from upstairs. "Is that one of the children?"

"Yes, Hahawe," called the woman that Matt couldn't help thinking of as "the woman with the sword."

"Send him up, why don't you?"

"Of course, Hahawe."

"Ha ha - I mean 'Hahawe'?" Matt said, turning a nervous laugh into a desperate sentence as the sword swung by his midriff again. "Not Obaasan?"

The sword-woman smiled for the first time. "Obaasan means grandmother. Hahawe is one of the ways to say mother. But mother won't mind at all if you call her Obaasan; it's a friendly greeting for a woman of her age."

"Okay," Matt said, trying his best to seem like an all-around friendly guy.

Mrs. Saitou gestured him up the stairs and he peeped into several rooms before he found one with a large futon in the exact middle of a completely bare floor, and in it a woman who seemed so tiny and doll-like as not to be real.

Her hair was just as soft and black as the sword-woman's downstairs. It was put up or arranged somehow so that it lay around her like a halo as she lay on the bed. But the dark lashes on the pale cheeks were shut and Matt wondered if she had fallen into one of the sudden slumbers of the elderly.

But then quite abruptly, the doll-like lady opened her eyes and smiled. "Why, it's Masato-chan!" she said, looking at Matt.

Bad beginning. If she didn't even recognize that a blond guy wasn't her Japanese friend from about sixty years ago...

But then she was laughing, with her small hands in front of her mouth. "I know, I know," she said. "You're not Masato. He became a banker, very rich. Very thick. Especially in the head and the stomach."

She smiled at him again. "Sit down, please. You can call me Obaasan if you want, or Orime. My daughter was named for me. But life has been hard for her, as it was for me. Being a shrine maiden - and a samurai...it takes discipline and much work. And my Orime did so well...until we came here. We were looking for a town that would be peaceful and quiet. Instead, Isobel found...Jim. And Jim was...untrue."

Matt's throat swelled with the desire to defend his friend, but what defense could there be? Jim had spent one night with Caroline - at Caroline's pressing invitation. And he had become possessed and had brought that possession to his girlfriend Isobel, who had pierced her body grotesquely - among other things.

"We've got to get them," Matt found himself saying earnestly. "The kitsune who started it all - who started it with Caroline. Shinichi and his sister Misao."

"Kitsune." Obaasan was nodding her head. "Yes, I said there would be one involved from the very beginning. Let me see; I blessed some charms and amulets for your friends...."

"And some bullets. I just sort of filled my pockets," Matt said, embarrassed, as he spilled out a jumble of different calibers on the edge of her futon cover. "I even found some prayers on the Web about getting rid of them."

"Yes, you've been very thorough. Good." Obaasan looked at the hard copies he'd printed of the prayers. Matt squirmed, knowing that he had only been running down Meredith's To-Do list, and that the credit really belonged to her.

"I'll bless the bullets first and then I'll write out more amulets," she said. "Put the amulets wherever you need protection most. And, well, I suppose you know what to do with the bullets."

"Yes, ma'am!" Matt fumbled in his pockets for the last few, put them into Obaasan's outstretched hands. Then she chanted a long, elaborate prayer holding her tiny hands out over the bullets. Matt didn't find the incantation frightening, but he knew that as a psychic he was a dud, and that Bonnie had probably seen and heard things he couldn't.

"Should I aim for any particular part of them?" Matt asked, watching the old woman and trying to follow along on his own copy of the prayers.

"No, any part of the body or head will do. If you take out a tail, you'll make it weaker, but you'll enrage it, as well." Obaasan paused and coughed, a small dry old-lady cough. Before Matt could offer to run downstairs and get her a drink, Mrs. Saitou entered the room with a tray and three cups of tea in little bowls.

"Thank you for waiting," she said politely as she knelt fluidly to serve them. Matt found with the first sip that the steaming green tea was much better than he'd expected from his few experiences at restaurants.

And then there was silence. Mrs. Saitou sat looking at the teacup, Obaasan lay looking white and shrunken under the futon cover, and Matt felt a storm of words building up in his own throat.

Finally, even though good sense was counseling him not to speak, he burst out, "God, I'm so sorry about Isobel, Mrs. Saitou! She doesn't deserve any of this! I just wanted you to know that I - I'm just so sorry, and I'm going to get the kitsune who's at the bottom of it. I promise you, I'll get him!"

"Kitsune?" Mrs. Saitou said sharply, staring at him as if he'd gone mad. Obaasan looked on in pity from her pillow. Then, without waiting to gather up the tea things, Mrs. Saitou jumped up and ran out of the room.

Matt was left speechless. "I - I - "

Obaasan spoke from her pillow. "Don't be too distressed, young man. My daughter, although a priestess, is very modern in her outlook. She would probably tell you that kitsune don't even exist."

"Even after - I mean how does she think Isobel - ?"

"She thinks that there are evil influences in this town, but of the 'ordinary, human' kind. She thinks Isobel did what she did because of the stress she was under, trying to be a good student, a good priestess, a good samurai."

"You mean, like, Mrs. Saitou feels guilty?"

"She blames Isobel's father for much of it. He is a 'salaryman' back in Japan." Obaasan paused. "I don't know why I have told you all this."

"I'm sorry," Matt said hastily. "I wasn't trying to snoop."

"No, but you care about other people. I wish Isobel had had a boy like you instead of her daughter."

Matt thought of the pitiful figure he'd seen at the hospital. Most of Isobel's scars would end up invisible under her clothes - presuming she learned to speak again. Bravely, he said, "Well, I'm still up for grabs."

Obaasan smiled faintly at him, then put her head back down on the pillow - no, it was a wooden headrest, Matt realized. It didn't look very comfortable. "It's a great pity when there has to be strife between a human family and the kitsune," she said. "Because there are rumors that one of our ancestors took a kitsune wife."

"Say what?"

Obaasan laughed, again behind concealing fists. "Mukashi-mukashi, or as you say, long ago in the times of legend, a great Shogun became angy at all the kitsune on his estate for the mischief they made. For many long years they were up to all sorts of pranks, but when he suspected them of ruining the crops in the fields, that was it. He roused every man and woman in his household, and told them to take sticks and arrows and rocks and hoes and brooms and flush out all the foxes that had dens on his estate, even the ones between the attic and the roof. He was going to have every single fox killed without mercy. But the night before he did this, he had a dream in which a beautiful woman came and said she was responsible for all the foxes on the estate. 'And,' she said, 'while it is true that we make mischief, we repay you by eating the rats and mice and insects that really spoil the crops. Won't you agree to take your anger out just on me and execute me alone instead of all the foxes? I will come at dawn to hear your answer.'

"And she kept her word, this most beautiful of kitsune, arriving at dawn with twelve beautiful maidens as attendants, but she outshone all of them just as the moon outshines a star. The Shogun could not bring himself to kill her, and in fact asked for her hand in marriage, and married her twelve attendants to his twelve most loyal retainers as well. And it is said that she was always a faithful wife, and bore him many children as fierce as Amaterasu the sun goddess, and as beautiful as the moon, and that this continued until one day the Shogun was on a journey and he happened to accidentally kill a fox. He hurried home to explain to his wife that it hadn't been intentional, but when he arrived he found his household in mourning, for his wife had already left him, with all his sons and daughters."

"Oh, too bad," Matt muttered, trying to be polite, when his brain elbowed him in the ribs. "Wait. But if they all left..."

"I see you're an attentive young man," the delicate old woman laughed. "All his sons and daughters were gone...except the youngest, a girl of peerless beauty, although she was just a child. She said, 'I love you too much to leave you, dear father, even if I must wear a human shape all my life.' And that is how we are said to be descended from a kitsune."

"Well, these kitsune aren't just causing mischief or ruining crops," Matt said. "They're out to kill. And we have to fight back."

"Of course, of course. I didn't mean to upset you with my little story," Obaasan said. "I'll write out those amulets for you now."

It was as Matt was leaving that Mrs. Saitou appeared at the door. She put something into his hand. He glanced down at it and saw the same calligraphy that Obaasan had given him. Except that it was much smaller and written on...

"A Post-it note?" Matt asked, bewildered.

Mrs. Saitou nodded. "Very useful for slapping on the faces of demons or the limbs of trees or such." And, as he stared at her in complete amazement, "My mother doesn't know all there is to know about everything."

She also handed him a sturdy dagger, smaller than the sword she was still carrying, but very serviceable - Matt immediately cut himself on it.

"Put your faith in friends and your instincts," she said.

Slightly dazed, but feeling encouraged, Matt drove to Dr. Alpert's house.

Chapter 31

"I'm feeling much better," Elena told Dr. Meggar. "I'd like to take a walk around the estate." She tried not to bounce up and down on the bed. "I've been eating steak and drinking milk and I even took that vile cod liver oil you sent. Also I have a very firm grasp of reality: I'm here to rescue Stefan and the little boy inside Damon is a metaphor for his unconscious, which the blood we shared allowed me to 'see.'" She bounced once, but covered it by reaching for a glass of water. "I feel like a happy puppy pulling at the leash." She exhibited her newly designed slave bracelets: silver with lapis lazuli inserts in fluid designs. "If I die suddenly, I am prepared."

Dr. Meggar's eyebrows worked up and down. "Well, I can't find anything wrong with your pulse or your breathing. I don't see how a nice afternoon walk can hurt you. Damon's certainly up and walking. But don't you go giving Lady Ulma any ideas. She still needs months of bed rest."

"She has a nice little desk made from a breakfast tray," Bonnie explained, gesturing to show size and width. "She designs clothes on that." Bonnie leaned forward, wide-eyed. "And you know what? Her dresses are magic."

"I wouldn't expect anything less," grunted Dr. Meggar.

But the next moment Elena remembered something unpleasant. "Even when we get the keys," she said, "we have to plot the actual jailbreak."

"What's a jailbreak?" Lakshmi asked excitedly.

"It's like this - we've got the keys to Stefan's cell, but we still need to figure out how we're going to get into the prison, and how we're going to smuggle him out."

Lakshmi frowned. "Why not just go in with the line and take him out the gate?"

"Because," Elena said, trying for patience, "they won't let us just walk in and get him." She narrowed her eyes as Lakshmi put her head in her hands. "What're you thinking, Lakshmi?"

"Well, first you say that you're going to have the key in your hand when you go to the prison, then you act like they're not going to let him out of the prison."

Meredith shook her head, bewildered. Bonnie put a hand to her forehead as if it ached. But Elena slowly leaned forward.

"Lakshmi," she said, very quietly, "are you saying that if we have a key to Stefan's cell it's basically a pass in and out of prison?"

Lakshmi brightened up. "Of course!" she said. "Otherwise, what would a key be good for? They could just lock him in another cell."

Elena could hardly believe the wonder of what she had just heard, so she immediately began trying to poke holes in it. "That would mean we could go straight from Bloddeuwedd's party to the prison and just take Stefan out," she said with as much sarcasm as she could inject into her voice. "We could just show our key and they'd let us take him away."

Lakshmi nodded eagerly. "Yes!" she said joyfully, the sarcasm having gone right over her head. "And, don't be mad, okay? But I wondered why you never went to visit him."

"We can visit him?"

"Sure, if you make an appointment."

By now Meredith and Bonnie had come to life and were supporting Elena on either side. "How soon can we send someone to make an appointment?" Elena said through her teeth, because it was taking all her effort to speak - her entire weight was resting on her two friends. "Who can we send to make an appointment?" she whispered.

"I'll go," Damon said from the crimson darkness behind them. "I'll go tonight - give me five minutes."

Matt could feel that he had on his most cross and stubborn expression.

"C'mon," Tyrone said, looking amused. They were both gearing up for a trip into the thicket. This meant putting on two of the mothball-clove-recipe coats each and then using duct tape to fasten the gloves to the coats. Matt was sweating already.

But Tyrone was a good guy, he thought. Here Matt had come out of nowhere and said, "Hey, you know that bizarre thing you saw with poor Jim Bryce last week? Well, it's all connected to something even more bizarre - all about fox spirits and the Old Wood, and Mrs. Flowers says that if we don't figure out what's going on, we're going to be in real trouble. And Mrs. Flowers isn't just a batty old lady at the boardinghouse, even though everybody says so."

"Of course she isn't," Dr. Alpert's brusque voice had said from the doorway. She put down her black bag - still a country doctor, even when the town was in crisis - and addressed her son. "Theophilia Flowers and I have known each other a long time - and Mrs. Saitou, too. They were both always helping people. That's their nature."

"Well - " Matt had seen an opportunity and jumped at it. "Mrs. Flowers is the one who needs help now. Really, really needs help."

"Then what're you sitting there for, Tyrone? Hurry up and go help Mrs. Flowers." Dr. Alpert had ruffled her own iron-gray hair with her fingers, then ruffled her son's black hair fondly.

"I was, Mom. We were just leaving when you came in."

Tyrone, seeing Matt's grim horror-story of a car, had politely offered to drive them to Mrs. Flowers's house in his Camry. Matt, afraid of a terminal blowout at some crucial moment, was only too happy to accept.

He was glad that Tyrone would be the lynchpin of the Robert E. Lee High football team in the coming year. Ty was the kind of guy you could count on - as witness his immediate offer of help today. He was a good sport, and absolutely straight and clean. Matt couldn't help but see how drugs and drinking had ruined not only the actual games, but the sportsmanship of the other teams on campus.

Tyrone was also a guy who could keep his mouth shut. He hadn't even peppered Matt with questions as they drove back to the boardinghouse, but he did give a wolf whistle, not at Mrs. Flowers, but at the bright yellow Model T she was driving into the old stables.

"Whoa!" he said, jumping out to help her with a grocery bag, while his eyes drank in the Model T from fender to fender. "That's a Model T Fordor Sedan! This could be one beautiful car if - " He stopped abruptly and his brown skin burned with a sunset glow.

"Oh, my, don't be embarrassed about the Yellow Carriage!" Mrs. Flowers said, allowing Matt to take another bag of groceries back through the kitchen garden and into the kitchen of the house. "She's served this family for nearly a hundred years, and she's accumulated some rust and damage. But she goes almost thirty miles an hour on paved roads!" Mrs. Flowers added, speaking not only proudly, but with the somewhat awed respect owed to high-speed travel.

Matt's eyes met Tyrone's and Matt knew there was only one shared thought hanging in the air between them.

To restore to perfection the dilapidated, worn, but still beautiful car that spent most of its time in a converted stable.

"We could do it," Matt said, feeling that, as Mrs. Flowers's representative, he should make the offer first.

"We sure could," Tyrone said dreamily. "She's already in a double garage - no problems about room."

"We wouldn't have to strip her down to the frame...she really rides like a dream."

"You're kidding! We could clean the engine, though: have a look at the plugs and belts and hoses and stuff. And" - dark eyes gleaming suddenly - "my dad has a power sander. We could strip the paint and repaint it the exact same yellow!"

Mrs. Flowers suddenly beamed. "That was what dear Mama was waiting for you to say, young man," she said, and Matt remembered his manners long enough to introduce Tyrone.

"Now, if you had said, 'We'll paint her burgundy' or 'blue' or any other color, I'm sure she would have objected," Mrs. Flowers said as she began to make ham sandwiches, potato salad, and a large kettle of baked beans. Matt watched Tyrone's reaction to the mention of "Mama" and was pleased: there was an instant of surprise, followed by an expression like calm water. His mother had said Mrs. Flowers wasn't a batty old lady: therefore she wasn't a batty old lady. A huge weight seemed to roll off Matt's shoulders. He wasn't alone with a fragile elderly woman to protect. He had a friend who was actually a little bigger than he was to rely on.

"Now both of you, have a ham sandwich, and I'll make the potato salad while you're eating. I know that young men" - Mrs. Flowers always spoke of men as if they were a special kind of flower - "need lots of good hearty meat before going into battle, but there's no reason to be formal. Let's just dig right in as things are done."

They had happily obeyed. Now they were preparing for battle, feeling ready to fight tigers, since Mrs. Flowers's idea of dessert was a pecan pie split between the boys, along with huge cups of coffee that cleared the brain like a power sander.

Tyrone and Matt drove Matt's junker to the cemetery, followed by Mrs. Flowers in the Model T. Matt had seen what the trees could do to cars and he wasn't going to subject Tyrone's whistle-clean Camry to the prospect. They walked down the hill to Matt and Sergeant Mossberg's hide, each of the boys giving a hand to help the frail Mrs. Flowers over rough bits. Once, she tripped and would have fallen, but Tyrone dug the toes of his DC shoes into the hill and stood like a mountain as she tumbled against him.

"Oh, my - thank you, Tyrone dear," she murmured and Matt knew that "Tyrone dear" had been accepted into the fold.

The sky was dark except for one streak of scarlet as they reached the hide. Mrs. Flowers took out the sheriff's badge, rather clumsily, due to the gardening gloves she was wearing. First she held it to her forehead, then she slowly drew it away, still holding it in front of her at eye-level. "He stood here and then he bent down and squatted here," she said, getting down in what was - in fact - the correct side of the hide. Matt nodded, hardly knowing what he was doing, and Mrs. Flowers said without opening her eyes, "No coaching, Matt dear. He heard someone behind him - and whirled, drawing his gun. But it was only Matt, and they spoke in whispers for a while.

"Then he suddenly stood up." Mrs. Flowers stood suddenly and Matt heard all sorts of alarming little pops and crackles in her delicate old body. "He went walking - striding - down into that thicket. That evil thicket."

She set off for the thicket as Sheriff Rich Mossberg had when Matt had watched him. Matt and Tyrone went hurrying after her, ready to stop her if she showed any signs of entering the remnant of Old Wood that still lived.

Instead, she walked around it, with the badge held to eye height. Tyrone and Matt nodded at each other and without speaking, each took one of her arms. This way they skirted the edge of the thicket, all the way around, with Matt going first, Mrs. Flowers next, and Tyrone last. At some point Matt realized that tears were making their way down Mrs. Flowers's withered cheeks.

At last, the fragile old woman stopped, took out a lacy handkerchief - after one or two tries - and wiped her eyes with a gasp.

"Did you find him?" Matt asked, unable to hold in his curiosity any longer.

"Well - we'll have to see. Kitsune seem to be very, very good at illusions. Everything I saw could have been an illusion. But" - she heaved a sigh - "one of us is going to have to step into the Wood."

Matt gulped. "That'll be me, then - "

He was interrupted. "Hey, no way, man. You know their ops, whatever they are. You've got to get Mrs. Flowers out of this - "

"No, I can't risk just asking you to come over here and get hurt - "

"Well, what am I doing out here, then?" Tyrone demanded.

"Wait, my dears," Mrs. Flowers said, sounding as if she were about to cry. The boys shut up immediately, and Matt felt ashamed of himself.

"I know a way that you both can help me, but it's very dangerous. Dangerous for the two of you. But perhaps if we only have to do it once, we can cut the risk of danger and increase our chance of finding something."

"What is it?" Tyrone and Matt said almost simultaneously.

A few minutes later, they were prepped for it. They were lying side by side, facing the wall formed by the tall trees and tangled underbrush of the thicket. They were not only roped together, but they had Mrs. Saitou's Post-it notes placed all over their arms.

"Now when I say 'three' I want you both to reach in and grab at the ground with your hands. If you feel something, keep hold of it and pull your arm out. If you don't feel anything, move your hand a little and then pull it out as fast as you can. And by the way," she added calmly, "if you feel anything trying to pull you in or immobilize your arm, yell and fight and kick and scream, and we'll help you to get out."

There was a long, long minute of silence.

"So basically, you think there are things all around on the ground in the thicket, and that we might get hold of them just by reaching in blindly," Matt said.

"Yes," Mrs. Flowers said.

"All right," said Tyrone, and once again Matt glanced at him approvingly. He hadn't even asked "What kind of things could pull us into the Wood?"

Now they were in position and Mrs. Flowers was counting "One, two, three," and then Matt had thrust his right arm in as far as it would go and was sweeping his arm while groping.

He heard a shout from beside him. "Got it!" And then instantly: "Something's pulling me in!"

Matt pulled his own arm out of the thicket before trying to help Tyrone. Something dropped down on it, but it hit a Post-it note and it felt as if he'd been whacked by a piece of a Styrofoam.

Tyrone was thrashing wildly and had already been dragged in to his shoulders. Matt grabbed him by the waist and used all his strength to haul backward. There was a moment of resistance - and then Tyrone came popping out as if suddenly released like a cork. There were scratches on his face and neck, but none where the overcoats had covered him or where the Post-it notes were.

Matt felt a desire to say "Thank you," but the two women who had made him amulets were far away, and he felt stupid saying it to Tyrone's coat. In any case, Mrs. Flowers was fluttering and thanking people enough for three.

"Oh, my, Matt, when that big branch came down I thought your arm would be broken - at least. Thank the dear Lord that the Saitou women make such excellent amulets. And, Tyrone dear, please take a swig out of this canteen - "

"Uh, I don't really drink much - "

"It's just hot lemonade, my own recipe, dear. If it weren't for both you boys, we wouldn't have succeeded. Tyrone, you found something, yes? And then you were caught and would never have been released if Matt hadn't been here to save you."

"Oh, I'm sure he'd've got out," Matt said hurriedly, because it must be embarrassing for anybody like The Tyreminator to admit they needed help.

Tyrone, however, just said soberly, "I know. Thanks, Matt."

Matt felt himself blush.

"But I didn't get anything after all," Tyrone said disgustedly. "It felt like a piece of old pipe or something - "

"Well, let's have a look," Mrs. Flowers said very seriously.

She turned the strongest flashlight on the object Tyrone had risked so much to bring out of the thicket.

At first Matt thought it was a gigantic rawhide dog bone. But then an all-too-familiar shape made him look closer.

It was a femur, a human femur. The biggest bone in the body, the one from the leg. And it was still white. Fresh.

"It doesn't seem to be plastic," Mrs. Flowers said in a voice that seemed very far away.

It wasn't plastic. Matt could see where little tiny bits had curled up and away from the exterior. It wasn't rawhide, either. It was...well, real. A real human leg bone.

But that wasn't the most horrifying thing; the thing that sent Matt spiraling out into darkness.

The bone was polished clean and marked with the imprints of dozens of tiny little teeth.

Chapter 32

Elena was radiantly happy. She had gone to sleep happy, only to wake up again happy, serene in the knowledge that soon - soon she would visit Stefan, and that after that - surely very soon - she would be able to take Stefan away.

Bonnie and Meredith weren't surprised when she wanted to see Damon about two things: one being who should go and two being what she was going to wear. What did surprise them were her choices.

"If it's all right," she said slowly at the beginning, tracing a finger round and round on the large table in one of the parlors as everyone gathered the next morning, "I would like for just a few people to go with me. Stefan's been badly treated," she went on, "and he hates to look bad in front of other people. I don't want to humiliate him."

There was sort of a group blush at this. Or maybe it was a group flush of resentment - and then a group blush of culpability. With the western windows slightly open, so that an early-morning red light fell over everything, it was hard to tell. Only one thing was certain: everyone wanted to go.

"So I hope," Elena said, turning to look Meredith and Bonnie in the eye, "that none of you are hurt if I don't choose you to come with me."

That tells both of them they're out, Elena thought as she saw understanding blossom in both faces. Most of her plans depended on how her two best friends reacted to this.

Meredith gallantly stepped up to bat first. "Elena, you've been through hell - literally - and almost died doing it - to get to Stefan. You take with you the people who will do the most good."

"We realize it isn't a popularity contest," Bonnie added, swallowing, because she was trying not to cry. She really wants to go, Elena thought, but she understands. "Stefan may feel more embarrassed in front of a girl than a boy," Bonnie said. And she didn't even add "even though we would never do anything to embarrass him," Elena thought, going around for a hug and feeling Bonnie's soft little birdlike body in her arms. Then she turned and felt Meredith's warm and slim hard arms, and as always felt some of her tension drain away.

"Thank you," she said, wiping tears from her eyes afterward. "And you're right, I think it would be harder to face girls than boys in the situation he's in. Also it will be harder to face friends he already knows and loves. So I would like to ask these people to go with me: Sage, Damon, and Dr. Meggar."

Lakshmi leaped up as interested as if she had been chosen. "Where's he in jail?" she asked, quite cheerfully.

Damon spoke up. "The Shi no Shi."

Lakshmi's eyes became round. She stared at Damon for a moment, and then she was bounding out the door, her shaken voice floating behind her: "I've got chores to do, master!"

Elena turned to look directly at Damon. "And what was that little reaction?" she asked in a voice that would have frozen lava at thirty meters.

"I don't know. Truly, I don't. Shinichi showed me kanji characters and said that they were pronounced 'Shi no Shi' and they meant 'the Death of Death' - as in lifting the curse of death from a vampire."

Sage coughed. "Oh, my trusting little one. Mon cher idiot. To not get a second opinion..."

"I did, actually. I asked a middle-aged Japanese lady at a library if the romaji - that's the Japanese words written out in our letters, meant the Death of Death. And she said yes."

"And you turned on your heel and walked out," Sage said.

"How do you know?" Damon was getting angry.

"Because, mon cher, those words mean many things. It all depends upon the Japanese characters first used - which you did not show her."

"I didn't have them! Shinichi wrote it in the air for me, in red smoke." Then in a kind of angry anguish: "What other things do they mean?"

"Well, they can mean what you said. They also could mean 'the new death.' Or 'the true death.' Or even - 'The Gods of Death.' And given the way Stefan has been treated..."

If stares had been stakes, Damon would have been a goner by now. Everyone was looking at him with hard, accusing eyes. He turned like a wolf at bay and bared his teeth at them in a 250-kilowatt smile. "In any case, I didn't imagine it was anything remarkably pleasant," he said. "I just thought it would help him to get rid of the curse of being a vampire."

"In any case," Elena repeated. Then she said, "Sage, if you would go and make sure that they'll let us in when we arrive, I would be enormously grateful."

"As good as done, Madame."

"And - let me see - I want everyone to wear something a little different to go visit him. If it's all right I'll go talk to Lady Ulma."

She could feel Bonnie's and Meredith's bewildered looks on her back as she left.

Lady Ulma was pale, but bright of eye when Elena was escorted into her room. Her sketchbook was open, a good sign.

It took only a few words and a heartfelt look before Lady Ulma said firmly, "We can have everything done in an hour or two. It's just a matter of calling the right people. I promise."

Elena squeezed her wrist very, very gently. "Thank you. Thank you - miracle worker!"

"And so I am to go as a penitent," Damon said. He was right outside Lady Ulma's door when Elena came out and Elena suspected him of some eavesdropping.

"No, that never even occurred to me," she said. "I just think that slave's clothing on you and the other guys will make Stefan less self-conscious. But why should you think I wanted to punish you?"

"Don't you?"

"You're here to help me save Stefan. You've gone through - " Elena had to stop and look in her sleeves for a clean handkerchief, until Damon offered her a black silk one.

"All right," he said, "we won't get into that. I'm sorry. I think of things to say and then I just say them, no matter how unlikely I think they are, considering the person I'm speaking to."

"And don't you ever hear another little voice? A voice that says that people can be good, and may not be trying to hurt you?" Elena asked wistfully, wondering how loaded with chains the child was now.

"I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes. But, as that voice is generally wrong in this wicked world, why should I pay it any attention?"

"I wish sometimes you would just try," Elena whispered. "I might be in a better position to argue with you, then."

I like this position just fine, Damon told her telepathically and Elena realized - how did this happen over and over? - that they had melted into an embrace. Worse, she was wearing her morning attire - a long silky gown and a peignoir of the same material, both in the palest of pearly blues, which turned violet in the rays of the ever-setting sun.

I - like it too, Elena admitted, and felt shockwaves go through Damon from his surface, through his body, and deep, deep into that unfathomable hole that one could see by looking into his eyes.

I'm just trying to be honest, she added, almost frightened by his reaction. I can't expect anyone else to be honest if I'm not.

Don't be honest, don't be honest. Hate me. Despise me, Damon begged her, at the same time caressing her arms and the two layers of silk that were all that stood between his hands and her skin.

"But why?"

Because I can't be trusted. I'm a wicked wolf, and you're a pure soul, a snow-white newborn lamb. You mustn't let me hurt you.

Why should you hurt me?

Because I might - no, I don't want to bite you - I only want to kiss you, just a little, like this. There was revelation in Damon's mind-voice. And he did kiss so sweetly, and he always knew when Elena's knees were going to give out and picked her up before she could fall on the floor.

Damon, Damon, she was thinking, feeling very sweet herself because she knew she was giving him pleasure, when she suddenly realized.

Oh! Damon, please let me go - I have to go have a fitting right now!

Deeply flushed, he slowly, reluctantly put her down, grabbed her before she could fall, and put her down again.

I think I shall have to go have a fit right now as well, he told her earnestly as he stumbled out of the room, missing the door the first time.

Not a fit - a fitting! Elena called after him, but she never knew if he had heard. She was pleased, though, that he had let her go, without really understanding anything except that she was saying no. That was quite a bit of improvement.

Then she hurried in to Lady Ulma's room, which was filled with all sorts of people, including two male models, who had just been garbed in trousers and long shirts.

"Sage's clothes," said Lady Ulma, nodding at the large one, "and Damon's." She nodded at the smaller man.

"Oh, they're perfect!"

Lady Ulma looked at her with just the slightest doubt in her eyes. "These are made of genuine sacking," she said. "The meanest, lowest cloth in the slave hierarchy. Are you sure they will wear them?"

"They're wearing them or they aren't going at all," Elena said flatly and winked.

Lady Ulma laughed. "Good plan."

"Yes - but what do you think of my other plan?" Elena asked, genuinely interested in Lady Ulma's opinion, even while she blushed.

"My dear benefactress," Lady Ulma said. "I used to watch my mother put together such outfits...after I had turned thirteen, of course - and she told me that they always made her happy, for she was bringing joy to two at once, and that the purpose was nothing but joy. I promise you, Lucen and I will be done in no time. Now, should you not be getting ready?"

"Oh, yes - oh, I do love you, Lady Ulma! It's so funny that the more people you love, the more you want to love!" And with that Elena went running back to her own rooms.

Her maids-in-waiting were all there and all ready. Elena took the quickest, briskest bath of her life - she was keyed up - and found herself on a couch in the middle of a smiling, keen-eyed bunch, each neatly doing her job without interfering with the others.

There was a depilatory, of course - in fact one for each leg, one for her armpits, and one for her eyebrows. While these women and the women with soft creams and unguents were at work, creating a unique fragrance for Elena, another one thoughtfully considered her face and body as a whole.

This woman touched up Elena's eyebrows to darken them, and gilded Elena's eyelids with metallic cosmetic paint before using something that added at least a quarter-inch to Elena's eyelashes. Then she extended Elena's eyes with exotic horizontal lines of kohl. Finally, she carefully made Elena's lips a rich glossy red that somehow gave the impression that they were continually puckered for a kiss. After this the woman sprinkled the faintest of iridescence all over Elena's body. Finally, a very large canary diamond that had been sent up from Lucen's jewelry bench was firmly cemented into her navel.

It was while the hairdressers were seeing to the last of the little curls on her forehead that the two boxes and a scarlet cape came from Lady Ulma's women. Elena thanked all her ladies-in-waiting and beauticians sincerely, paid them all a bonus that had them twittering, and then asked them to leave her alone. When they dithered, she asked them again, just as politely, but in louder tones. They went.

Elena's hands were trembling as she took out the outfit Lady Ulma had created. It was quite as decent as a bathing suit, but it looked like jewelry strategically placed on wisps of golden tulle. It all coordinated with the canary diamond: from the necklace to the armlets to the golden bracelets that denoted that, however expensively Elena was dressed, she was still a slave.

And that was it. She was going clad in tulle and jewelry, perfume and paint, to see her Stefan. Elena put the scarlet cloak on very, very carefully to avoid rumpling or smearing anything below, and slipped her feet into delicate golden sandals with very high heels.

She hurried downstairs and was exactly on time. Sage and Damon were wearing cloaks tightly closed - which meant that they were dressed in the sacking outfits underneath. Sage had had Lady Ulma's coach made ready. Elena settled her matching golden bracelets on her wrists, hating them because she had to wear them, pretty as they were against the white fur trim on her scarlet cloak. Damon held out a hand to help her into the coach.

"I get to ride inside? Does that mean I don't have to wear - " But looking at Sage, her hopes were crushed.

"Unless we want to curtain all the windows," he said, "you're legally traveling outside without slave bracelets."

Elena sighed and gave her hand to Damon. Standing against the sun, he was a dark silhouette. But then, as Elena blinked in the light, he stared in astonishment. Elena knew he'd seen her gilded eyelids. His eyes dropped to her pursed-to-be-kissed lips. Elena blushed.

"I forbid you to order me to show you what's under the cloak," she said hastily. Damon looked thwarted.

"Hair in tiny curls all over your forehead, cloak that covers everything from neck to toes, lipstick like..." He stared again. His mouth twitched as if he were being compelled to fit it to hers.

"And it's time to go!" Elena caroled, hastily getting into the carriage. She felt very happy, although she understood why freed slaves would never wear anything like a bracelet again.

She was still happy when they reached the Shi no Shi - that large building that seemed to combine a prison with a training facility for gladiators.

And she was still happy as the guards at the large Shi no Shi checkpoint let them into the building without showing any signs of ill feeling. But then, it was hard to say if the cloak had any effect on them. They were demons: sullen, mauve-skinned, bullock-steady.

She noticed something that was at first a shock and then a river of hope inside her. The front lobby of the building had a door in one side that was like the door in the side of the depot/slaveshop: always kept shut; strange symbols above; people walking up to it in different costumes and announcing a destination before turning the key and opening the door.

In other words: a dimensional door. Right here in Stefan's prison. God alone knew how many guards would be after them if they tried to use it, but it was something to keep in mind.

The guards on the lower floors of the Shi no Shi building, in what was most definitely a dungeon, had clear and obnoxious reactions to Elena and her party. They were some smaller species of demon - imps, maybe, Elena thought - and they gave the visitors a hard time over everything. Damon had to bribe them to be allowed in to the area where Stefan's cell was, to go in alone, without one guard per visitor, and to allow Elena, a slave, to go in to see a free vampire.

And even when Damon had given them a small fortune to get past these obstacles, they sniggered and made harsh guttural gurglings in their throats. Elena didn't trust them.

She was correct.

At a corridor where Elena knew from her out of body experiences they should have turned left, instead they went straight through. They passed another set of guards, who almost collapsed from sniggering.

Oh - God - are they taking us to see Stefan's dead body? Elena wondered suddenly. Then it was Sage who really helped her. He put out a large arm and bodily held her up, until she found her legs again.

They went on walking, deeper into what was a filthy and stinking stone-floored dungeon now. Then abruptly they turned right.

Elena's heart raced on before them. It was saying wrong, wrong, wrong, even before they got to the last cell in the line. The cell was completely different from Stefan's old cell. It was surrounded, not by bars, but by a sort of curlicued chicken wire that was lined with sharp spikes. No way to hand in a bottle of Black Magic. No way to get the bottle top in position to pour into a waiting mouth on the other side. No room, even, to get a finger or the mouth of a canteen through for the cellmate to suck. And the cell itself wasn't filthy, but it was bare of everything except a supine Stefan. No food, no water, no bed to hide anything in, no straw. Just Stefan.

Elena screamed and had no idea if she screamed words or just a formless sound of anguish. She threw herself into the cell - or tried to. Her hands grabbed onto curls of steel as sharp as razor that caused blood to well up instantly wherever they touched, and then Damon, who had the fastest reactions, was pulling her back.

And then he just pushed past her and stared. He stared open-mouthed at his younger brother - a gray-faced, skeletal, barely breathing young man, who looked like a child lost in his rumpled, stained, threadbare prison uniform. Damon raised a hand, as if he'd forgotten the barrier already - and Stefan flinched. Stefan seemed not to know or recognize any of them. He peered more closely at the drops of blood left on the razor-sharp fencing where Elena had grasped it, sniffed, and then, as if something had penetrated the fog of his bafflement, looked around dully. Stefan looked up at Damon, whose cloak had fallen, and then, like a baby's, Stefan's gaze wandered on.

Damon made a choking sound and turned and, knocking anyone in his way aside, ran the other way down the corner. If he was hoping that enough guards would follow him that his allies could get Stefan out, he was wrong. A few followed, like monkeys, calling out insults. The rest stayed put, behind Sage.

Meanwhile, Elena's mind was churning and churning out plans. Finally she turned to Sage. "Use all the money we have plus this," she said, and she reached under her cloak for her canary diamond necklace - over two dozen thumb-sized gems - "and call to me if we need more. Get me half an hour with him. Twenty minutes, then!" - as Sage began to shake his head. "Stall them, somehow; get me at least twenty minutes. I'll think of something if it kills me."

After a moment Sage looked her in the eyes and nodded. "I will."

Then Elena looked at Dr. Meggar pleadingly. Did he have something - did something exist - that would help?

Dr. Meggar's eyebrows went down, then their inner sides went up. It was a look of grief, of despair. But then he frowned and whispered, "There's something new - an injection that's said to help in dire cases. I could try it."

Elena did her best not to fall at his feet. "Please! Please try it! Please!"

"It won't help beyond a couple of days - "

"It won't need to! We'll get him out by then!"

"All right." Sage had by now herded all the guards away, saying, "I'm a dealer in gems and there's something you all should see."

Dr. Meggar opened his bag and took out of it a syringe. "Wooden needle," he said with a wan smile as he filled it with a clear red liquid from a vial. Elena had taken another syringe and she examined it eagerly as Dr. Meggar coaxed Stefan by imitation to put his arm up to the bars. At last Stefan did as Dr. Meggar wished - only to jump away with a cry of pain as a syringe was plunged into his arm and stinging liquid injected.

Elena looked at the doctor desperately. "How much did he get?"

"Only about half. It's all right - I filled it with twice the dose and pushed as hard as I could to get the" - some medical word Elena didn't recognize - "into him. I knew it would hurt him more, injecting that fast, but I accomplished what I wanted."

"Good," Elena said rapturously. "Now I want you to fill this syringe with my blood."

"Blood?" Dr. Meggar looked dismayed.

"Yes! The syringe is long enough to go through the bars. The blood will drip out the other side. He can drink it as it comes out. It might save him!" Elena said every word carefully, as if speaking to a child. She desperately wanted to convey her meaning.

"Oh, Elena." The doctor sat down, with a clink, and took a hidden bottle of Black Magic out of his tunic. "I'm so sorry. But it's hard enough for me to get blood out of a vial. My eyes, child - they're ruined."

"But glasses - spectacles - ?"

"They're no good to me anymore. It's a complicated condition. But you have to be very good to actually tap a vein in any case. Most doctors are pretty hopeless; I'm impossible. I'm sorry, child. But it's been twenty years since I was successful."

"Then I'll find Damon and have him open my aorta. I don't care if it kills me."

"But I do."

This new voice coming from the brilliantly lighted cell in front of them made both the doctor and Elena jerk their heads up.

"Stefan! Stefan! Stefan!" Uncaring of what the razor fence would do to her flesh, Elena leaned over to try to hold his hands.

"No," Stefan whispered, as if sharing a precious secret. "Put your fingers here and here - on top of mine. This fence is only specially treated steel - it numbs my Power but it can't break my skin."

Elena put her fingers there and there. And then she was touching Stefan. Really touching him. After so long.

Neither of them spoke. Elena heard Dr. Meggar get up and quietly creep away - to Sage, she supposed. But her mind was full of Stefan. She and he simply looked at each other, trembling, with tears quivering on their lashes, feeling very young.

And very close to death.

"You say I always make you say it first, so I'll confound you. I love you, Elena."

Teardrops fell from Elena's eyes.

"Just this morning I was thinking how many people there are to love. But really it's only because there's one in the first place," she whispered back to him. "One forever. I love you, Stefan! I love you!"

Elena drew back for a moment and wiped her eyes the way all clever girls know how to do without ruining their makeup: by putting her thumbs beneath her lower lashes and leaning backward, scooping tears and kohl into infinitesimal droplets in the air.

For the first time she could think.

"Stefan," she whispered, "I'm so sorry. I wasted time this morning getting dressed up - well, dressed down - to show you what's waiting for you when we get you out. But now...I feel...like..."

Now there were no tears in Stefan's eyes, either. "Show me," he whispered back eagerly.

Elena stood, and without theatrics, shrugged the cloak off. Shut her eyes, her hair in hundreds of kiss curls, little wispy spirals that were plastered around her face. Her gilded eyelids, waterproof, still gilded. Her only clothing the wisps of golden tulle with jewels attached to make it decent. Her entire body iridescent, perfection in the first bloom of youth that could never be matched or re-created.

There was a sound like a long sigh...and then silence, and Elena opened her eyes, terrified that Stefan might have died. But he was standing up, clutching at the iron gate as if he might wrench it off to get to her.

"I get all this?" he whispered. "All this for you. Everything for you," Elena said. At that moment there was a soft sound behind her and she whirled to see two eyes shining in the dimness of the cell opposite Stefan's.

Chapter 33

To her surprise, Elena felt no anger, only a determination to protect Stefan if she could.

And then she saw that in the cell she'd assumed was empty, there was a kitsune.

The kitsune looked nothing like Shinichi or Misao. He had long, long hair as white as snow - but his face was young. He was wearing all white, too, tunic and breeches out of some flowing, silky material and his tail practically filled the small cell, it was so fluffy. He also had fox ears which twitched this way and that. His eyes were the gold of fireworks.

He was gorgeous.

The kitsune coughed again. Then he produced - from his long hair, Elena thought, a very, very small and thin-skinned leather bag.

Like, Elena thought, the perfect bag for one perfect jewel.

Now the kitsune took a pretend bottle of Black Magic (it was heavy and a pretend drink was delicious), and filled the little bag with it. Then he took a pretend syringe (he held it as Dr. Meggar had and tapped it to get the bubbles out) and filled it from the little bag. Finally, he stuck the pretend syringe through his own bars and depressed his thumb, emptying it.

"I can feed you Black Magic wine," Elena translated. "With his little pouch I can hold it and fill the syringe. Dr. Meggar could fill the syringe, too. But there's no time, so I'm going to do it."

"I - " began Stefan.

"You are going to drink as fast as you can." Elena loved Stefan, wanted to hear his voice, wanted to fill her eyes with him, but there was a life to be saved, and the life was his. She took the little pouch with a bow of thanks to the kitsune and left her cloak on the floor. She was too intent on Stefan to even remember how she was dressed.

Her hands wanted to shake but she wouldn't let them. She had three bottles of Black Magic here: her own, in her cloak, Dr. Meggar's, and somewhere, in his cloak, Damon's.

So with the delicate efficiency of a machine, she repeated what the kitsune had shown her over and over. Dip, pull up lever, push through bars, squirt. Over and over and over.

After about a dozen of these Elena developed a new technique, the catapult. Filling the tiny bag with wine and holding it by the top until Stefan got his mouth positioned, and then, all in one motion, smashing the bag with her palm and squirting a fair amount straight into Stefan's mouth. It got the bars sticky, it got Stefan sticky; it would never have worked if the steel had been razor-sharp for him, but it actually forced a surprising amount down his throat.

The other bottle of Black Magic wine she put in the kitsune's cell, which had regular bars. She didn't quite know how to thank him, but when she could spare a second, she turned to him and smiled. He was chugging the Black Magic straight from the bottle, and his face was set in an expression of cool, appreciative pleasure.

The end came too quickly. Elena heard Sage's voice booming, "It is no fair! Elena will not be ready! Elena has not had enough time with him!"

Elena didn't need an anvil dropped on her head. She shoved the last bottle of Black Magic wine into the kitsune's cell, she bowed for the last time and gave him back his tiny pouch - but with the canary diamond from her navel in it. It was the largest piece of jewelry she had left and she saw him turn it over precisely in long-nailed fingers and then rise to his feet and make a tiny bow to her. There was a moment for a mutual smile and then Elena was cleaning up Dr. Meggar's bag, and pulling on her red cloak. Then she was turning to Stefan, jelly inside once more, gasping: "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to make it a medical visit."

"But you saw the chance to save my life and just couldn't pass it up."

Sometimes the brothers were very much alike.

"Stefan, don't! Oh, I love you!"

"Elena." He kissed her fingers, pressed to the bars. Then, to the guards: "No, please, please, don't take her away! For pity's sake, give us one more minute! Just one!"

But Elena had to let go of his fingers to hold her cloak together. The last she saw of Stefan, he was pounding on the bars with his fists and calling, "Elena, I love you! Elena!"

Then Elena was dragged out of the hallway and a door shut between them. She sagged.

Arms went around her, helped her to walk. Elena got angry! If Stefan was being put back in his old lice-ridden cell - as she supposed he was, right about now - he was being made to walk. And these demons did nothing gently, she knew that. He was probably being driven like an animal with sharp instruments of wood.

Elena could walk, too.

As they reached the front of the Shi no Shi lobby Elena looked around. "Where's Damon?"

"In the coach," Sage answered in his gentlest voice. "He needed some time."

Part of Elena said, "I'll give him time! Time to scream once before I rip his throat out!" But the rest of her was just sad.

"I didn't get to say anything I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him how sorry Damon is; and how Damon's changed. He didn't even remember that Damon had been there - "

"He talked to you?" Sage seemed astonished.

The two of them, Sage and Elena, walked out of the final marble doors of the building of the Gods of Death. That was the name Elena had chosen for it in her own mind.

The carriage was at the curb in front of them, but no one got in. Instead, Sage gently steered Elena a little distance from the others. There he put his large hands on her shoulders and spoke, still in that very soft voice,

"Mon Dieu, my child, but I do not want to say this to you. It is that I must. I fear that even if we get your Stefan out of jail by the day of Lady Bloddeuwedd's party that - that it will be too late. In three days he will already be..."

"Is that your medical opinion?" Elena said sharply, looking up at him. She knew her face was pinched and white and that he pitied her greatly, but what she wanted was an answer.

"I am not a medical man," he said slowly. "I am just another vampire."

"Just another Old One?"

Sage's eyebrows went up. "Now, what gave you that little idea?"

"Nothing. I'm sorry if I'm wrong. But will you please get Dr. Meggar?"

Sage looked at her for a long minute more, then departed to get the doctor. Both men came back.

Elena was ready for them. "Dr. Meggar, Sage only saw Stefan at the beginning, before you gave him that injection. It was Sage's opinion that Stefan would be dead in three days. Given the effects of the injection, do you agree?"

Dr. Meggar peered at her and she could see the shine of tears in his short-sighted eyes. "It is - possible - just possible that if he has enough willpower, he could still be alive by then. But most likely..."

"Would it make any difference to your opinion if I said that he drank maybe a third of a bottle of Black Magic wine tonight?"

Both men stared at her. "Are you saying - "

"Is this just a plan you have now?"

"Please!" Forgetting about her cape, forgetting everything, Elena grasped Dr. Meggar's hands. "I found a way to get him to drink about that much. Does it make a difference?" She squeezed the elderly hands until she could feel bone.

"It certainly should." Dr. Meggar looked bewildered and afraid to hope. "If you really got that much into his system, he would be almost certain to live until the night of Bloddeuwedd's party. That's what you want, isn't it?"

Elena sank back, unable to resist giving his hands a little kiss as she let go.

"And now let's go tell Damon the good news," she said.

In the carriage, Damon was sitting bolt upright, his profile outlined against a blood-red sky. Elena got in and shut the door behind her.

With no expression at all, he said, "Is it over?"

"Over?" Elena wasn't really this dense, but she figured it was important that Damon be clear in his own mind as to what he was asking.

"Is he - dead?" Damon said wearily, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

Elena allowed the silence to go on for a few beats longer. Damon must know Stefan was not likely to actually die in the next half hour. Now that he wasn't getting instant confirmation of this his head snapped up.

"Elena, tell me! What happened?" he demanded, urgency in his voice. "Is my brother dead?"

"No," Elena said quietly. "But he's likely to die in a few days. He was coherent this time, Damon. Why didn't you speak to him?"

There was an almost palpable drawing-in on Damon's part. "What do I have to say to him that matters?" he asked harshly. "'Oh, I'm sorry I almost killed you'? 'Oh, I hope you make it another few days'?"

"Things like that, maybe, if you lose the sarcasm."

"When I die," Damon said cuttingly, "I'm going to be standing on my own two feet and fighting."

Elena slapped him across the mouth. There wasn't room to get much leverage here, but she put as much Power behind the motion as she dared without risking breaking the carriage.

Afterward, there was a long silence. Damon was touching his bleeding lip, accelerating the healing, swallowing his own blood.

Finally he said, "It never even occurred to you that you are my slave, did it? That I'm your master?"

"If you're going to retreat into fantasy, that's your affair," Elena said. "Myself, I have to deal with the real world. And, by the way, soon after you ran away, Stefan was not only standing but laughing."

"Elena" - on a quick rising note. "You found a way to give him blood?" He grasped her arm so hard it hurt.

"Not blood. A little Black Magic. With two of us there, it would have gone twice as fast."

"There were three of you there."

"Sage and Dr. Meggar had to distract the guards."

Damon took his hand away. "I see," he said, expressionlessly. "So I failed him yet again."

Elena looked at him with sympathy. "You're completely inside the stone ball now, aren't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The stone ball you stick anything that might hurt you inside. You even draw yourself inside it, although it must be very cramped in there. Katherine must be in there, I suppose, walled off in her own little chamber." She remembered the night at the hotel. "And your mother, of course. I should say, Stefan's mother. She was the mother you knew."

"Don't...my mother..." Damon couldn't even form a coherent sentence.

Elena knew what he wanted. He wanted to be held and soothed and told it was all right - just the two of them, under her cloak with her warm arms holding him. But he wasn't going to get it. This time she was saying no.

She had promised Stefan that this was for him, alone. And, she thought, she would keep to the spirit of that promise, if she hadn't kept to the letter, forever.

As the week progressed, Elena was able to recover from the pain of seeing Stefan. Although none of them could speak about it except in choked, brief exclamations, they listened when Elena said that there was still a job to be done, and that if they managed to complete it well they would be able to go home soon - while if they did not complete it, Elena didn't care whether she went home or stayed here in the Dark Dimension.

Home! It had the sound of a haven, even though Bonnie and Meredith knew firsthand what kind of hell was lurking in Fell's Church for them. But somehow anything would be preferable to this land of bloody light.

With hope kindling interest in their surroundings, they were once again able to feel pleasure at the dresses Lady Ulma was having made for them. Designing was the one pursuit that the lady could still enjoy during her official bed rest, and Lady Ulma had been hard at work with her sketchbook. Since Bloddeuwedd's party would be an indoor/outdoor affair, all three dresses had to be carefully designed to be attractive both under candlelight and under the giant red sun's crimson rays.

Meredith's gown was deep metallic blue, violet in the sunlight, and it showed an entirely different side of the girl from the siren in the skin-tight mermaid dress who had attended Fazina's gala. It reminded Elena somehow of something an Egyptian princess would wear. Once again, it left Meredith's arms and shoulders bare, but the modest narrow skirt that fell in straight lines to her sandals, and the delicacy of the sapphire beads that adorned the shoulder straps served to give Meredith an unassuming look. That look was emphasized by Meredith's hair, which Lady Ulma dictated be worn down, and her face, which was bare of makeup except kohl around the eyes. At her throat, a necklace made of the very largest oval-cut sapphires formed an elaborate collar. She also had matching blue gems on her wrists and slender fingers.

Bonnie's dress was a little clever invention: it was made of a silvery material which took on a pastel tinge of the color of the ambient lighting. Moonlight-colored indoors, it shone a soft shimmering pink, almost exactly the color of Bonnie's strawberry hair, when she was outside. It sported a belt, necklace, bracelets, earrings, and rings all of matching cabochon-cut white opals. Bonnie's curls were to be carefully pinned up and away from her face, in a daringly mussed-up mass, leaving her translucent skin to shine softly rose in the sunlight, and ethereally pale inside.

Once again, Elena's dress was the simplest and the most striking. Her gown was scarlet, the same color under blood-red sun or indoor gas lamp. It was rather low cut, giving her creamy skin a chance to shine golden in the sunlight. Clinging close to her figure, it was slashed up one side to give her room to walk or dance. On the afternoon of the party Lady Ulma had Elena's hair carefully brushed into a tangled cloud that shimmered Titian outdoors, golden indoors. Her jewelry ranged from an inset of diamonds at the bottom of the neckline, to diamonds on her fingers, wrists and one upper arm, plus a diamond choker that fit over Stefan's necklace. All these would blaze as red as rubies in the sunlight, but would occasionally glint another startling color, like a burst of mini-fireworks. Onlookers, Lady Ulma promised, would be dazzled.

"But I can't wear these," Elena had protested to Lady Ulma. "I might not get to see you again before we get Stefan - and from that moment we're on the run!"

"It's the same for all of us," Meredith had added quietly, looking at each of the girls in their "indoor" colors of silvery-blue, scarlet, and opal. "We're all wearing the most jewelry we've ever worn indoors or out - but you might lose it all!"

"And you might need it all," Lucen had said quietly. "All the more reason for you each to have jewelry that you can trade for carriages, safety, food, whatever. It's simply designed, too - you can wrench out a stone and use it as payment, and the jewels are not in an elaborate setting that might not be to some collector's taste."

"In addition to which, they are all of the highest quality," Lady Ulma had added. "They are the most flawless examples of their kind we could get on such short notice."

At that point, all three girls had reached their limit, and rushed the couple - Lady Ulma on her enormous bed, sketchbook always beside her, and Lucen standing nearby - and cried and kissed and generally undid the beautiful jobs that had been done on their faces.

"You're like angels to us, do you know that?" Elena sobbed. "Just like fairy godparents or angels! I don't know how I can say good-bye!"

"Like angels," Lady Ulma had said then, wiping a tear from Elena's cheek. Then she grasped Elena, saying "Look!" and gestured to herself comfortably in bed, with a couple of blooming, dewy-eyed young women ready to attend to her wishes. Lady Ulma had then nodded at the window, out of which a small mill stream could be seen, and some plum trees, with ripe fruit blazing like jewels on the branches, and then with a sweep of her hand indicated the gardens, orchards, fields, and forests on the estate.

Then she had taken Elena's hand and smoothed it over her own softly curving abdomen. "You see?" she had spoken almost in a whisper. "Do you see all of this - and can you remember how you found me? Which of us is an angel now?"

At the words "how you found me" Elena's hands had flown up to cover her face - as if she'd been unable to bear what memory showed her at that moment. Then she was hugging and kissing Lady Ulma again, and a whole new round of cosmetic-destroying embraces had begun.

"Master Damon was even kind enough to buy Lucen," Lady Ulma had said, "and you may not be able to picture it, but" - here she had looked at the quiet, bearded jeweler with eyes full of tears - "I feel for him as you feel for your Stefan." And then she had blushed and hidden her face in her hands.

"He's freeing Lucen today," Elena had said, dropping to her knees to rest her head against Lady Ulma's pillow. "And giving the estate to you irrevocably. He's had a lawyer - an advocate, you'd say - working on the papers all week with a Guardian. They're done now, and even if that hideous general should come back, he couldn't touch you. You have your home forever."

More crying. More kissing. Sage, who had been innocently walking down the hallway, whistling, after a romp with his dog, Saber, had passed Lady Ulma's room and had been drawn in. "We'll all miss you, too!" Elena had wept. "Oh, thank you!"

Later that day, Damon had made good on all of Elena's promises, besides giving a large bonus to each member of the staff. The air had been full of metallic confetti, rose petals, music, and cries of farewell as Damon, Elena, Bonnie, and Meredith had been carried to Bloddeuwedd's party - and away forever.

"Come to think of it, why didn't Damon free us?" Bonnie asked Meredith as they rode in litters toward Bloddeuwedd's mansion. "I can understand that we needed to be slaves to get into this world, but we're in now. Why not make honest girls of us?"

"Bonnie, we're honest girls already," Meredith reminded her.

"And I think the point is that we were never real slaves at all."

"Well, I meant: Why doesn't he free us so that everyone knows we're honest girls, Meredith, and you know it."

"Because you can't free somebody who's free already, that's why."

"But he could have gone through the ceremony," Bonnie persisted. "Or is it really hard to free a slave here?"

"I don't know," Meredith said, breaking at last under this tireless inquisition. "But I'll tell you why I think he doesn't do it. I think that it's because this way he's responsible for us. I mean, it's not that slaves can't be punished - we saw that with Elena." Meredith paused while they both shuddered at the memory. "But, ultimately, it's the slave owner that can lose their life over it. Remember, they wanted to stake Damon for what Elena did."

"So he's doing it for us? To protect us?"

"I don't know. I...suppose so," Meredith said slowly.

"Then - I guess we've been wrong about him in the past?" Bonnie generously said "we've" instead of "you've." Meredith had always been the one of Elena's group most resistant to Damon's charm.

"I...suppose so," Meredith said again. "Although it seems that everyone is forgetting that until recently Damon helped the kitsune twins to put Stefan here! And Stefan definitely hadn't done anything to deserve it."

"Well, of course that's true," Bonnie said, sounding relieved not to have been too wrong, and at the same time strangely wistful.

"All Stefan ever wanted from Damon was peace and quiet," Meredith continued, as if on more steady ground there.

"And Elena," Bonnie added automatically.

"Yes, yes - and Elena. But all Elena wanted was Stefan! I mean - all Elena wants..." Meredith's voice trailed off. The sentence didn't seem to work properly in the present tense anymore. She tried again. "All Elena wants now is..."

Bonnie just watched her speechlessly.

"Well, whatever she wants," Meredith concluded, rather shaken, "she wants Stefan to be a part of it. And she doesn't want any of us to have to stay here - in this...this hellhole."

In another litter just beside them things were very quiet. Bonnie and Meredith were so used by now to traveling in closed litters that they hadn't even realized that another palanquin had drawn abreast of them and that their voices carried clearly in the hot, still afternoon air.

In the second litter, Damon and Elena both looked very hard at the silken curtains fluttering open.

Now, Elena, with an almost mad air of needing something to do, hurriedly unwound a cord and the curtains dropped into place.

It was a mistake. It closed Elena and Damon into a surreal glowing red oblong, in which only the words that they had just heard seemed to have validity.

Elena felt her breath coming too quickly. Her aura was slipping. Everything was slipping sideways.

They don't believe that I only want to be with Stefan!

"Steady on," Damon said. "This is the last night. By tomorrow - "

Elena held up a hand to keep him from saying it.

"By tomorrow we'll have found the key and gotten Stefan and we'll be out of here," Damon said anyway.

Jinx, thought Elena. And sent up a prayer after it.

They rode in silence up toward Bloddeuwedd's grand mansion. For a surprisingly long time Elena didn't realize that Damon was trembling. It was a quick, involuntary shaken breath that alerted her.

"Damon! Dear - dear heaven!" Elena was stricken, at a loss, not for words, but for the right words. "Damon, look at me! Why?"

Why? Damon replied in the only voice he could trust not to tremble or crack or break. Because - do you ever think of what's happening to Stefan while you're going to a party wearing splendid clothes, being carried along, to drink the finest wine and to dance - while he - while he -  The thought remained unfinished.

This is just what I needed right before being seen in public, Elena thought, as they reached the long driveway to Bloddeuwedd's home. She tried to call on all of her resources before the curtains were drawn and they were free to step out at the location of the second half of the key.

Chapter 34

I don't think about those things, Elena answered in the same way Damon had spoken and for the same reason. I don't think because if I do I'll go insane. But if I go insane, what good will I be to Stefan? I couldn't help him. Instead I block it all out with walls of iron and I keep it away at any cost.

"And you can manage that?" Damon asked, his voice shaking slightly.

"I can - because I have to. Remember in the beginning when we were arguing about the ropes around our wrists? Meredith and Bonnie had doubts. But they knew that I would wear handcuffs and crawl after you if that was what it took." Elena turned to look at Damon in the crimson darkness and added, "And you've given yourself away, time after time, you know." She slipped arms around him to touch his healed back, so that he would have no doubt about what she meant.

"That was for you," Damon said harshly.

"Not really," Elena replied. "Think about it. If you hadn't agreed to the Discipline, we might have run out of town, but we could never have helped Stefan after that. When you get down to it, everything, all you've done, you've done for Stefan."

"When you get down to it, I was the one who put Stefan here in the first place," Damon said tiredly. "I figure we're just about even now."

"How many times, Damon? You were possessed when you let Shinichi talk you into it," Elena said, feeling exhausted herself. "Maybe you need to be possessed again - just a little - so you remember how it feels."

Every cell in Damon's body seemed to flinch away from this idea. But aloud he just said, "There's something that everyone has missed, you know. About the archetypal story of how two brothers killed each other simultaneously, and became vampires because they'd dallied with the same girl."

"What?" Elena said sharply, shocked out of her tiredness. "Damon, what do you mean?"

"What I said. There's something you've all missed. Ha. Maybe even Stefan has missed it. The story gets told and retold, but nobody catches it."

Damon had turned his face away. Elena moved closer to him, just a bit, so he could smell her perfume, which was attar of roses that night. "Damon, tell me. Tell me, please!"

Damon started to turn toward her -

And it was at that moment that the liftmen stopped. Elena had only a second to wipe her face, and the curtains were being drawn.

Meredith had told them all the myth about Bloddeuwedd, which she'd got from a story-telling globe. All about how Bloddeuwedd had been made out of flowers and brought to life by the gods, and how she had betrayed her husband to his death, and how, in punishment, she had been doomed to spend each night from midnight to dawn as an owl.

And, apparently, there was something the myths didn't mention. The fact that she had been doomed to live here, banished from the Celestial Court into the deep red twilight of the Dark Dimension.

All things considered, it was logical that her parties started at six in the evening.

Elena found that her mind was jumping from subject to subject. She accepted a goblet of Black Magic from a slave as her eyes wandered.

Every woman and most of the men at the party were wearing clever attire that changed color in the sun. Elena felt quite modest - after all, everything out of doors seemed to be pink or scarlet or wine-colored. Downing her goblet of Magic, Elena was slightly surprised to find herself going into automatic party-mode behavior, greeting people she'd met earlier in the week with cheek kisses and hugs as if she'd known them for years. Meanwhile she and Damon worked their way toward the mansion, sometimes with, sometimes against the tide of constantly moving people.

They made it up one steep set of white (pink) marble stairs, which sported on either side banks of glorious blue (violet) delphiniums and pink (scarlet) wild roses. Elena stopped here, for two reasons. One was to get a new goblet of Black Magic. The first had already given her a pleasant glow - although of course everything was constantly glowing here. She was hoping that the second cup would help her forget everything that Damon had brought up in the litter except the key - and help her remember what she'd been fretting over originally, before her thoughts had been hijacked by Bonnie and Meredith's talk.

"I expect the best way is just to ask someone," she told Damon, who was suddenly and silently at her elbow.

"Ask what?"

Elena leaned a little toward the slave who'd just supplied her with a fresh goblet. "May I ask - where is Lady Bloddeuwedd's main ballroom?"

The liveried slave looked surprised. Then, with his head, he made a gesture all around. "This plaza - below the canopy - has gained the name the Great Ballroom," he said, bowing over his tray.

Elena stared at him. Then she stared around her.

Under a giant canopy - it looked semipermanent to her and was hung all around with pretty lanterns in shades that were enhanced by the sun - the smooth grass lawn stretched away for hundreds of yards on all sides.

It is bigger than a football field.

"What I'd like to know," Bonnie was asking a fellow guest, a woman who had clearly been to many of Bloddeuwedd's affairs and knew her way around the mansion, "is this: which room is the main ballroom?"

"Oh, my deah, it depends on what you mean," the guest replied cheerfully. "Theah's the Great Ballroom out of doors - you must have seen it while climbing - the big pavilion? And then theah's the White Ballroom inside. That's lit with candelabras and has the curtains drawn all round. Sometimes it's called the Waltz Room, since all that is played in there is waltzes."

But Bonnie was still caught in horror a few sentences back. "There's a ballroom outside?" she said shakily, hoping that somehow she hadn't heard right.

"That's it, deah, you can see through that wall theah." The woman was telling the truth. You could see through the wall, because the walls were all of glass, one beyond another, allowing Bonnie to see what seemed to be an illusion done with mirrors: lighted room after lighted room, all filled with people. Only the last room on the bottom floor seemed to be made out of something solid. That must be the White Ballroom.

But through the opposite wall, where the guest was pointing - oh, yes. There was a canopy top. She remembered vaguely passing it. The other thing she remembered was...

"They dance on the grass? That - enormous field of grass?"

"Of course. It's all especially cut and rolled smooth. You won't trip over a weed or hummock of ground. Are you sure you're feeling quite well? You look rathah pale. Well" - the guest laughed - "as pale as anyone can look in this light."

"I'm fine," Bonnie said dazedly. "I'm just...fine."

The two parties met later and told each other of the horrors that they had unearthed. Damon and Elena had discovered that the ground of the outdoor ballroom was almost as hard as rock - anything that had been buried there before the ground was rolled smooth by heavy rollers would now be packed down in something like cement. The only place that anyone could dig there was around the perimeter.

"We should have brought a diviner," Damon said. "You know, someone who uses a forked stick or a pendulum or a bit of a missing person's clothing to home in on the correct area."

"You're right," Meredith said, her tone clearly adding for once. "Why didn't we bring a diviner?"

"Because I don't know of any," Damon said, with his sweetest, most ferocious barracuda smile.

Bonnie and Meredith had found that the inside ballroom's flooring was rock - very beautiful white marble. There were dozens of floral arrangements in the room, but all that Bonnie had stuck her small hand into (as unobtrusively as possible) were simply cut flowers in a vase of water. No soil, nothing that could justify using the term "buried in."

"And besides, why would Shinichi and Misao put the key in water they knew would be thrown out in a few days?" Bonnie asked, frowning, while Meredith added,

"And how do you find a loose floorboard in marble? So we can't see how it could be buried there. By the way, I checked - and the White Ballroom has been here for years, so there's no chance that they dumped it under the building stones, either."

Elena, by now drinking her third goblet of Black Magic, said, "All right. The way we look at this is: one room scratched off the list. Now, we've already got half of the key - look how easy that was - "

"Maybe that was just to tease us," Damon said, raising an eyebrow. "To get our hopes up, before dashing them completely...here."

"That can't be," Elena said desperately, glaring at him. "We've come so far - farther than Misao ever imagined we would. We can find it. We will find it."

"All right," Damon said, suddenly deadly serious. "If we have to pretend to be staff and use pickaxes on that soil outdoors, we'll do it. But first, let's go through the entire house inside. That seemed to work well last time."

"All right," Meredith said, for once looking straight at him and without disapproval. "Bonnie and I will take the upstairs floors and you can take the downstairs ones - maybe you can make something of that White Waltz Ballroom."

"All right."

They set to work. Elena wished that she could calm down. Despite most of three goblets of Black Magic oscillating inside her - or perhaps because of them - she was seeing certain things in new lights. But she must keep her mind on the quest - and only on the quest. She would do anything - anything - she told herself, to get the key. Anything for Stefan.

The White Ballroom smelled of flowers and was garlanded with large, opulent blooms in the midst of abundant greenery. Standing arrangements were placed to shield an area around a fountain into an intimate nook where couples could sit. And, although there was no visible orchestra, music poured into the ballroom, demanding a response from Elena's susceptible body.

"I don't suppose you know how to waltz," Damon said suddenly, and Elena realized that she had been swaying in time to the beat, eyes closed.

"Of course I do," Elena answered, a little offended. "We all of us went to Ms. Hopewell's classes. That was the equivalent of charm school in Fell's Church," she added, seeing the funny side of it and laughing at herself. "But Ms. Hopewell did love to dance, and she taught us every dance and movement she thought was graceful. That was when I was about eleven."

"I suppose it would be absurd for me to ask you to dance with me," Damon said.

Elena looked at him with what she knew were large and puzzled eyes. Despite the low-cut scarlet dress, she didn't feel like an irresistible siren tonight. She was too wrought up to feel the magic woven in the cloth, magic which she now realized was telling her she was a dancing flame, a fire elemental. She supposed that Meredith must feel like a quiet stream, flowing swiftly and steadily to her destination, but sparkling and glinting all the way. And Bonnie - Bonnie, of course was a sprite of the air, meant to dance as lightly as a feather in that opalescent dress, barely subject to gravity.

But abruptly Elena remembered certain glances of admiration she had seen directed toward herself. And now suddenly Damon was vulnerable? Yet he didn't imagine she would dance with him?

"Of course I would love to dance," she said, realizing with a slight shock that she hadn't noticed before, that Damon was in flawless white tie. Of course, it was on the one night when it might hinder them, but it made him look like a prince of the blood.

Her lips quirked slightly at the title. Of the blood...oh, yes.

"Are you sure you know how to waltz?" she asked him.

"A good question. I took it up in 1885 because it was known to be riotous and indecent. But it depends on whether you are speaking of the peasant waltz, the Viennese Waltz, the Hesitation Waltz, or - "

"Oh, come on, or we'll miss another dance." Elena grabbed his hand, feeling tiny sparks as if she'd stroked a cat's fur the wrong way, and pulled him into the swaying crowd.

Another waltz began. Music flooded into the room and lifted Elena almost off her feet as the small hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her body tingled all over as if she had drunk some sort of celestial elixir.

It was her favorite waltz since childhood: the one she'd been brought up on. Tchaichovsky's Sleeping Beauty waltz. But some child part of her mind could never help but pairing the sweet sweeping notes that came after the thundering, electrifying beginning together with the words from the Disney movie version:

I know you; I danced with you once upon a dream....

As always, they brought tears to her eyes; they made her heart sing and her feet want to fly rather than dance.

Her dress was backless. Damon's warm hand was on her bare skin there.

I know, something whispered to her, why they called this dance riotous and indecent.

And now, certainly, Elena felt like a flame. We were meant to be this way. She couldn't remember if it was an old quote of Damon's or something new he was just barely whispering to her mind now. Like two flames that join and merge into one.

You're good, Damon told her, and this time she knew that it was him speaking and that it was in the present.

You don't need to patronize me. I'm too happy already! Elena laughed back. Damon was an expert, and not just at the precision of the steps. He danced the waltz as if it were still riotous and indecent. He had a firm lead, which of course Elena's human strength could not break. But he could interpret little signals of her own, about what she wanted and he obliged her, as if they were ice dancing, as if at any moment they might twirl and leap.

Elena's stomach was slowly melting and taking her other internal organs with it.

And it never once occurred to her to think what her high school friends and rivals and enemies would have thought of her melting over classical music. She was free of petty spite, petty shame over differences. She was through with labeling. She wished that she could go back to show everyone that she'd never meant it in the first place.

The waltz was over all too soon and Elena wanted to push the Replay button and do it from the beginning again. There was a moment just when the music stopped where she and Damon were looking at each other, with equal exaltation and yearning and -

And then Damon bowed over her hand. "There is more to the waltz than just moving your feet," he said, not looking up at her. "There is a swaying grace that can be put into the movements, a leaping flame of joy and oneness - with the music, with a partner. Those are not matters of expertise. Thank you very much for giving me the pleasure."

Elena laughed because she wanted to cry. She never wanted to stop dancing. She wanted to tango with Damon - a real tango, the kind you were supposed to have to get married after. But there was another mission...a necessary mission that had to be completed.

And, as she turned, there were a whole crowd of other things in front of her. Men, demons, vampires, beastlike creatures. All of them wanted a dance. Damon's tuxedoed back was walking away from her.

Damon!

He paused but did not turn back. Yes?

Help me! We need to find the other half of the key!

It seemed to take him a moment to assess the situation, but then he understood. He came back to her, and taking her by the hand said in a clear, ringing voice, "This girl is my...personal assistant. I do not desire that she dance with anyone other than myself."

There was a restless murmuring at this. The kind of slaves that got taken to balls of this sort were not usually the kind that were forbidden to interact with strangers. But just then there was a sort of flurry at the side of the room, eventually pressing toward the opposite side where Damon and Elena were.

"What is it?" Elena asked, the dance and the key both forgotten.

"Who is it, I'd ask, rather," Damon replied. "And I'd answer: our hostess, Lady Bloddeuwedd herself."

Elena found herself crowding behind other people to get a glimpse of this most extraordinary creature. But when she actually saw the girl standing alone in the doorway to the ballroom, she gasped.

She was made out of flowers... Elena remembered. What would a girl made out of flowers look like?

She would have skin like the faintest blush of pink on an apple blossom, Elena thought, staring unashamedly. Her cheeks would be slightly deeper pink, like a dawn-colored rose. Her eyes, enormous in her delicate, perfect face, would be the color of larkspur, with heavy feathery black lashes that would make them droop half-shut, as if she walked always half in a dream. And she would have yellow hair as pale as primroses, falling down almost to the floor, wound in braids that were themselves incorporated into thicker braids until the whole mass was brought together just above her delicate ankles.

Her lips would be as red as poppies, half-open and inviting. And she would give off a scent that was like a bouquet of all the first blossoms of spring. She would walk as if swaying in the breeze.

Elena could only remember standing, gazing after this vision like the dozens of other guests around her. Just one more second to drink in such loveliness, her mind begged.

"But what was she wearing?" Elena heard herself say aloud. She could not remember either a stunning dress or a glimpse of lustrous apple-blossom skin through the many braids.

"Some sort of gown. It was made out of what else? Flowers," Damon put in wryly. "She was wearing a dress made of every kind of flower I've ever seen. I don't understand how they stayed put - maybe they were silk and sewn together." He was the only one who didn't seem dazzled by this vision.

"I wonder if she would talk to us - just a few words," Elena said. She was longing to hear the delicate, magical girl's voice.

"I doubt it," a man in the crowd answered her. "She doesn't talk much - at least until midnight. Say! It's you! How're you feeling?"

"Very well, thank you," Elena replied politely, and then quickly stepped back. She recognized the speaker as one of the young men who had forced their cards on Damon at the end of the Godfather's ceremony, the night of her Discipline.

Now she just wanted to get away unobtrusively. But there were too many of the men, and it was clear that they were not about to let her and Damon go.

"This is the girl I told you about. She goes into a trance and no matter how she's marked; she doesn't feel a thing - "

" - blood running down her sides like water and she never flinched - "

"They're a professional act. They go on the road...."

Elena was just about to say, coolly, that Bloddeuwedd had strictly forbidden this kind of barbarism at her party, when she heard one of the young vampires saying, "Don't you know, I was the one who persuaded Lady Bloddeuwedd to ask you to this get-together. I told her about your act and she was most interested to see it."

Well, scratch one excuse, Elena thought. But at least be nice to these young men. They might be helpful somehow later.

"I'm afraid I can't do it tonight," she said, quietly, so that they would be quiet themselves. "I'll apologize to Lady Bloddeuwedd directly, of course. But it just isn't possible."

"Yes, it is." Damon's voice, just behind her, astounded her. "It's quite possible - given that someone finds my amulet."

Damon! What are you saying?

Hush! What I have to.

"Unfortunately, about three and a half weeks ago I lost a very important amulet. It looks like this." He brought out the half of the fox key and let them all take a good look at it.

"Is that what you used to do the trick?" someone asked, but Damon was far too clever for that.

"No, many people saw me do the act just a week or so ago without it. This is a personal amulet, but with part of it missing, I simply don't feel like doing magic."

"It looks like a little fox. You're not a kitsune?" someone - too clever for their own good, Elena thought - asked next.

"It may look like that to you. It's actually an arrow. An arrow with two green stones at the arrowhead. It's a - masculine charm."

A female voice somewhere in the crowd said: "I shouldn't think you need any more masculine charm than you have right now!" and there was laughter.

Chapter 35

"Nevertheless" - Damon's eyes took on a steely glint - "without the amulet my assistant and I will not perform."

"But - with it you will? I say, are you saying that you lost your amulet here?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. Just around the time the party arrangements were being set up." Damon flashed a beautiful, haunting smile at the young vampires and then turned it off suddenly. "I had no idea I would have your help, and I was trying to find a way to get an invitation. So I took a look around to see how the place would be laid out."

"Don't tell me it was before the grass was rolled," someone said apprehensively.

"Unfortunately, yes. And I was given a psychic message, which told me that the k - the amulet is buried somewhere here."

There was a chorus of groans from the crowd.

Then there were individual voices raised, pointing out the difficulties: the rock-hardness of the rolled grass, the many ballrooms with their many floral arrangements in soil, the kitchen garden and flower gardens (which we haven't even seen yet, Elena thought.)

"I realize the virtual impossibility of finding this," Damon said, taking the half of the fox key back into his hand and making it disappear neatly by passing it near Elena's hand, which was ready to receive it. She now had a special place for it - Lady Ulma had seen to that.

Damon was saying, "That is why I simply said no at the beginning. But you pressed me, and now I've given you the full answer."

There was some more grumbling, but then people began walking out in ones and twos and threes, talking about the best places to start looking.

Damon, they're going to destroy Bloddeuwedd's grounds, Elena protested silently.

Good. We'll offer all the jewels you three girls have on you, as well as all the gold I have on me, as a recompense. But what four people can't do, maybe a thousand can.

Elena sighed. I still wish we'd had the chance to talk to Bloddeuwedd. Not just to hear her speak, but to ask her some questions. I mean what reason would a beautiful blossom like her have to protect Shinichi and Misao?

Damon's telepathic answer was brief. Well, let's try the top rooms, then. That was where she was headed, anyway.

They found a case of crystal stairs - quite difficult to locate when all the walls were transparent, and frightening to ascend. Once on the second floor they looked for another one. Eventually Elena found it, by stumbling over the first step.

"Oh," she said, looking from the step, which now showed itself through a line of red across its front edge, to her shin, which showed the same damage. "Well, it may be invisible, but we aren't."

"It's not quite invisible." Damon was channeling Power to his eyes, she knew. She'd been doing the same - but these days she wondered which of them had more of her blood in them: him or her?

"Don't strain yourself, I can see the steps," he said. "Just shut your eyes."

"My eyes - " Before she could ask why she knew why and before she could scream he had picked her up, his body warm and solid and the only solid thing anywhere around. He headed up the stairs holding her so that her dress was out of the way of the blood droplets that fell freely into space.

For someone afraid of heights, it was a wild, terrifying ride: even though she knew Damon was in top condition and would not drop her and even though she was certain he could see where he was going. Still, left to herself and her own volition, she would never have made it farther than the first stair. As it was, she didn't even dare wiggle much in case she threw Damon off balance. She could only whimper and try to endure.

When, an eternity later, they reached the top, Elena wondered who would carry her down, or if she would be left here the rest of her life.

They were confronted by Bloddeuwedd, the most enchantingly inhuman creature Elena had yet seen. Enchanting...but odd. Was there not a slight primrose pattern to her hair in back and on the sides? Wasn't her face actually the shape of an apple-blossom petal as well as having the petal's faint bloom?

"You are in my private library," she said.

And, as if a mirror had cracked, Elena came free of the last of Bloddeuwedd's glamour.

The gods had made her out of flowers...but flowers don't speak. Bloddeuwedd's voice was toneless and flat. It ruined the image of the flower-made girl completely.

"We're sorry," Damon said - naturally not at all out of breath. "But we'd like to ask you some questions."

"If you think I will help you, I will not," the flower-petal girl said in the same nasal tone. "I hate humans."

"But I am a vampire, as you have surely already discerned," Damon was beginning, laying the charm on thick, when Bloddeuwedd interrupted him. "Once a human, always a human."

"I beg your pardon?"

Damon's loss of control might have been the best thing that could have happened, Elena thought, trying to keep behind him. He was so clearly sincere about his scorn for humans that Bloddeuwedd softened a little.

"What did you come to ask?"

"Only if you had seen one of two kitsune lately: they're brother and sister and call themselves Shinichi and Misao."

"Yes."

"Or they might - I'm sorry? Yes?"

"The thieves came to my house at night. I was at a party. I flew back from the party and almost caught them. Kitsune are hard to catch, though."

"Where..." Damon swallowed. "Where were they?"

"Running down the front stairs."

"And do you remember the date that they were here?"

"It was the night that the grounds were made ready for this party. Stone rollers went over the grass. The canopy was erected."

Weird things to do at night, Elena thought, but then she remembered - again. The light was always the same.

But her heart was beating fast. Shinichi and Misao could only have been here for one reason: to drop off half of the fox key.

And maybe drop it in the Great Ballroom, Elena thought. She watched dully as the entire outside of the library rotated, almost like a giant planetarium, so that Bloddeuwedd could pick out a globe and place it in some contraption that must make the music play in various rooms.

"Excuse me," Damon said.

"This is my private library," Bloddeuwedd said coldly against the swelling of the glorious ending to the Firebird Suite.

"Meaning now we must leave?"

"Meaning now I am going to kill you."

Chapter 36

"What?" shouted Damon over the music, while adding: Run - go! telepathically to Elena.

If it had merely been Elena's life, she would have been glad enough to die here with the thunderous beauty of Firebird all around her, rathr than facing those steep, invisible steps alone.

But it wasn't just her life. It was Stefan's life, too. Still, the flower maiden didn't look particularly menacing, and Elena couldn't summon up enough adrenaline to try making it down that hidous stairway.

Damon, let's both go. We have to search the Great Ballroom outside. Only you're strong enough....

A hesitation. Damon would rather fight than face that enormous, impossible green field outside, Elena thought.

But Bloddeuwedd, despite her words, was now spinning the room around them again, so that she, at the edge of some invisible walkway, could find the exact orb she wanted.

Damon lifted Elena in his arms and said: Shut your eyes.

Elena not only shut her eyes, but put her hands over them as well. If Damon was going to drop her, she wasn't going to help matters by shouting "Look out!" as he did it.

The sensations themselves were sickening enough. Damon leaped from step to step like an ibex. He seemed barely to touch the steps in going down and Elena wondered - quite suddenly - if anything were after them.

If so, it was information she needed to know. She began to lift her hands and heard Damon whisper-snarl "Keep them shut!" in a voice that few people liked to argue with.

Elena peeked out between her hands, met Damon's exasperated eyes, and saw nothing following them. She clamped her hands back together and prayed.

If you were really a slave, you wouldn't last a day here, you know, Damon informed her, taking a final leap into space and then setting her down on invisible - but at least level - ground.

I wouldn't want to, Elena sent coldly. I swear, I'd rather die.

Be careful what you promise, Damon flashed his splendid smile down at her suddenly. You may end up in other dimensions trying to fulfill your word.

Elena didn't even try to one-up him. They were out, free, and racing through the glass house down to the stairs to the lower floor - a little tricky in her state of mind, but bearable - and finally out the door. On the grass of the Great Ballroom they found Meredith and Bonnie...and Sage.

He was actually in white tie as well, although his jacket strained at his shoulders. In addition, Talon was sitting on one - so the problem might be taken care of fairly soon, as she was ripping the material and drawing blood. Sage didn't seem aware of it. Saber was at his master's side, looking at Elena with eyes too thoughtful to be mere animal eyes, but without malice.

"Thank God you came back!" Bonnie cried, running to them. "Sage came and he has a marvelous idea."

Even Meredith was excited. "You remember how Damon said we should have brought a diviner? Well, we have two now." She turned to Sage. "Please tell them."

"As a rule, I don't take these two to parties." Sage reached down to scratch under Saber's throat. "But a little bird told me that you might be in trouble." His hand moved up to stroke Talon, ruffling the falcon's feathers slightly. "So, dites-moi, please: Just how much have you two been handling the half-key you do possess?"

"I touched it tonight and in the beginning, the night we found it," said Elena. "But Lady Ulma handled it and Lucen made a chest for it and we've all handled that."

"But outside the box?"

"I've held it and looked at it once or twice," said Damon.

"Eh bien! The kitsune smells should be much stronger on it. And kitsune have very distinctive smells."

"So you mean that Saber - " Elena's voice gave out for pure faintness.

"Can sniff out anything with the smell of kitsune on it. Meanwhile, Talon has very good eyesight. She can fly overhead and look for the glint of gold in case it's in plain sight somewhere. Now show them what they will be searching for."

Elena obligingly held out the crescent shaped half-key for Saber to sniff.

"Voil��! And Talon, now you take a good look." Sage backed away to what was, Elena supposed, Talon's optimal seeing distance. Then when he came back, he said, " Commençons!" and the black dog exploded away, nose to ground, while the falcon took off in grand, high, sweeping circles.

"So you think the kitsune were on this grass?" Elena asked Sage, as Saber began racing back and forth, nose still just above the grass - and then suddenly veered out onto the middle of the marble steps.

"But assuredly, they were here. You see how Saber runs, like a black panther, with his head low, and his tail straight? He has business in hand, him! He is hot on the scent."

I know someone else who gives off the same feeling, Elena thought as she glanced back at Damon, who stood with his arms folded, motionless, coiled like a spring, waiting for whatever news the animals would bring.

She happened to glance at Sage at the same moment, and she saw an expression on his face that - well, it was probably the same expression she'd been wearing a minute ago. He glanced at her and she blushed.

"Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur," she said, looking away quickly.

"Parlez-vous français, Madame?"

"Un peu," Elena said humbly - an unusual condition for her. "I can't really keep up a serious conversation. But I loved going to France." She was about to say something else, when Saber barked once, sharply, to attract attention and then sat bolt upright at the curb.

"They came or left in a carriage or litter," Sage translated.

"But what did they do in the house? I need a trail going the other way," Damon said, looking up at Sage with something like raw desperation.

"All right, all right. Saber! Contremarche!"

The black dog instantly turned around, put its nose to the ground as if it afforded him the greatest delight, and began running back and forth across the stairs and the lawn that formed the "Great Ballroom" - now becoming pitted with holes as people took shovels, pickaxes, and even large spoons to it.

"Kitsune are hard to catch," Elena murmured into Damon's ear.

He nodded, glancing at his watch. "I hope we are, too," he murmured back.

There was a sharp bark from Saber. Elena's heart leaped in her chest.

"What?" she cried. "What is it?" Damon passed her, grabbed her hand, and dragged her in his wake.

"What has he found?" Elena gasped as they all reached the same point simultaneously.

"I don't know. It's not part of the Great Ballroom," replied Meredith. Saber was sitting up proudly in front of a bed of tall, clustering pale lavender (deep violet) hydrangeas.

"They don't look like they're doing too well," said Bonnie.

"And it's not below any of the upper ballrooms, either," Meredith said, stooping to get at Saber's height and then look up. "There's just the library."

"Well, I know one thing without a question," Damon said. "We're going to have to dig up this flower patch and I don't fancy asking Ms. Larkspur-eyes-Now-I-have-to-kill-you for her permission."

"Oh, did you think they were larkspur, her eyes? Because I thought of bluebells, rahthah," said a guest behind Bonnie.

"Did she really say she had to kill you? But why?" another guest, nearer to Elena asked nervously.

Elena ignored them. "Well, let's put it this way, she's certainly not going to like it. But it's the only clue we've got." Except, I suppose, if the kitsune meant to leave it here, but then took off in a coach, she added voicelessly to Damon.

"So that means the show can commence," cried one of the young vampire fans, stepping toward Elena.

"But I don't have my amulet back," Damon said flatly, moving in front of Elena like an impenetrable wall.

"But you will in minutes, surely. Look, couldn't some fellows backtrack with the dog to wherever the bad guys came from - came to the estate from, if you get me? And meanwhile we can be getting on with the show?"

"Can Saber do that?" Damon asked. "Follow a carriage?"

"With a fox in it? But of course. Actually, I could go with them," Sage said quietly. "I could make sure that these two enemies are caught if they are on the other end of the trail. Show them to me."

"These are the only shapes I know." Damon reached out two fingers and touched Sage's temple. "But, of course, they'll have more forms, possibly infinite ones."

"Well, they are not our priority, I assume. The, ah, amulet is."

"Yes," Damon said. "Even if you don't land a blow on them, get the key half and race back."

"So? Even more important than revenge," Sage said softly, shaking his head in wonder. Then he added quickly. "Well, I will wish us good luck. Any adventurous types who want to go with me? Ah, good, four - very well, five, Madame - is enough."

And he was gone.

Elena looked at Damon, who was looking back with blank, black eyes. "You really expect me to do - that - again?"

"All you need to do is stand there. I'll make sure you lose as little blood as possible. And if you ever want to stop we can have a signal."

"Yes, but now I understand. And I can't handle it."

His face went cold suddenly. Shutting her out.

"You're not required to handle anything. Besides, isn't it enough if I say it's a fair bargain for Stefan?"

Stefan! Elena's entire body went through some sort of elemental change. "Let me share it," she begged, and knew that she was begging and knew what Damon was going to say.

"Stefan is going to need you when we get out. Just make sure you can handle that."

Stop. Think. Don't bash his head in, Elena's brain told her. He's pushing your buttons. He knows how to do it. Don't let him push your buttons.

"I can handle both," she said. "Please, Damon. Don't treat me as if I were - one of your one-nighters, or even your Princess of Darkness. Talk to me as if I were Sage."

"Sage? Sage is the most frustrating, cunning - "

"I know. But you talk to him. And you used to talk to me, and now you're not. Listen to me. I can't bear to go through this scenario again. I'll scream."

"Now you're threatening - "

"No! I'm telling you what will happen. Unless you gag me, I'll scream. And scream. As I would scream for Stefan. I can't help it. Maybe I'm breaking down...."

"But don't you see?" Suddenly he had whirled around and taken hold of her hands. "We're almost at the end. You, who've been the strongest all along - you can't break down now."

"The strongest..." Elena was shaking her head. "I thought we were right there, on the verge of understanding each other."

"All right." His words came as hard chips of marble now. "What if we do five?"

"Five?"

"Five strokes instead of ten. We'll promise to do the other five when the 'amulet' is found, but we'll run when we do find it."

"You would have to break your word."

"If it takes that - "

"No," she said flatly. "You say nothing. I'll tell them. I'm a liar and a cheat and I've always played with men. We'll see if I can't finally put my talents to good use. And there's no point in trying any of the other girls," she added, glancing up. "Bonnie and Meredith are wearing gowns that would fall right off if you slashed them. Only I have a bare back." She pirouetted in place to show off how her dress met only very high at the neck in a halter and very low in the back in a V.

"Then we're agreed." Damon had a slave refill his goblet and Elena thought: we're going to be the tipsiest act in history, if nothing else.

She couldn't help but shiver. The last time she had felt an inner trembling was from Damon's warm hand on her bare back as they danced. Now, she felt something much icier, just a draft of cold air perhaps. But it drew her mind to the feeling of her own blood running down her sides.

Suddenly Bonnie and Meredith were there beside her, forming a barricade between her and the increasingly curious and excited crowd.

"Elena, what's happened? They said a barbarian human girl was to be whipped - " began Meredith.

"And you just knew it had to be me," completed Elena. "Well, it's true. I don't see how I can get out of it."

"But what have you done?" Bonnie asked frantically.

"Been an idiot. Let some fraternity-type vampire boys think that it was a sort of magic act," Damon put in. His face was still grim.

"That's a little unfair, isn't it?" Meredith asked. "Elena told us about the first time. It sounded as if they jumped to the conclusion that it was an act all by themselves."

"We should have denied it then. Now, we're stuck with it," Damon said flatly. Then, as if he were making an effort, "Oh, well, maybe we'll get what we came for, anyway."

"That was how we found out - some idiot came running down the steps yelling about an amulet with two green stones."

"It was all we could think of," Elena explained wearily. "It's worth it for Damon and I to do this if only we can find the other half of the key."

"You don't have to do it," Meredith said. "We can just leave."

Bonnie stared at her. "Without the fox key?"

Elena shook her head. "We've already been through all that. The unanimous decision was to do it this way. She looked around. "Now where are the guys that wanted to see it so much?"

"Looking in the field - that used to be a ballroom," Bonnie replied. "Or getting shovels - lots of 'em - from Bloddeuwedd's gardening compound. Ow! Why'd you pinch me, Meredith?"

"Oh, my, did that pinch? I meant to do this - "

But Elena was already striding away, as eager now as Damon was to get it over with. Half over with. I just hope he remembers to change into his leather jacket and black jeans, she thought. In white tie - the blood -

I won't let there be any blood.

The thought was sudden and Elena didn't know where it came from. But in the deepest reaches of her being, she thought: he's been punished enough. He was trembling in the litter. He thought about another person's well-being from minute to minute. It's enough now. Stefan wouldn't want him to be hurt any more.

She glanced up to see one of the Dark Dimension's small, misshapen moons moving visibly above her. This time the surrender she made to it was bright red, a feather shining in sullen crimson light. But she gave herself up to it unreservedly, body and soul, and it rested on the hallowed spring of eternal blood that was her womanhood. And then she knew what she had to do.

"Bonnie, Meredith, look: we're a triumvirate. We have to try to share this with Damon."

No one looked enthusiastic.

Elena, whose pride had been entirely broken from the moment she first saw Stefan in his cell, knelt down in front of them on the hard marble step. "I'm begging you - "

"Elena! Stop that!" Meredith gasped.

"Please get up! Oh, Elena - " Bonnie was a breath away from tears.

And so, it was small, softhearted Bonnie who turned the tide. "I'll try to teach Meredith how. But anyway, we'll at least share it between the three of us."

Hug. Kiss. A murmur into strawberry hair, "I know what you see in the dark. You're the bravest person I know."

And then, leaving a stunned Bonnie behind, Elena went to collect spectators for her own whipping.

Chapter 37

Elena had been tied, like someone in a B-movie who will soon be released, standing upright against a pillar. Digging on the field was still going on in a dilatory way as the vampires who had put her up to this fetched an ash stick they had brought, and allowed Damon to inspect it. Damon himself was moving in slow motion. Trying to find points to kibitz about. Waiting for the rattling of coach wheels that would tell him the carriage was back. Acting brisk, but inside feeling as sluggish as half-cooled lead.

I've never been a sadist, he thought. I've always tried to give pleasure - except in fights. But it should be me in that prison cell. Can't Elena see that? It's my turn beneath the lash now.

He had changed into his "magician clothes," taking as long as he dared without looking as if he wanted to put this off. And now there were somewhere between six and eight hundred creatures, waiting to see Elena's blood spill, to watch Elena's back cut and miraculously heal again.

All right. I'm as ready as I'll ever be to do this.

He came into his body, into the now of what was happening.

Elena swallowed. "Share the pain" she'd said - without in the least knowing how to do it. But here she was, like a sacrifice tied to a pillar, staring at Bloddeuwedd's house and waiting for the blows to come.

Damon was giving the crowd an introductory speech, talking gibberish and doing it very well. Elena found a particular window of the house to stare at. And then she realized that Damon was no longer speaking.

A touch of the rod against her back. A telepathic whisper.

Are you ready?

Yes, she said immediately, knowing that she wasn't. And then hearing, against dead silence, a swish through the air.

Bonnie's mind floating into hers. Meredith's mind flowing like a stream. The blow was a mere cuff, although Elena felt blood spill.

She could feel Damon's bewilderment. What should have been a sword slash was a mere slap. Painful, but definitely bearable.

And once again. The triumvirate portioned out the pain before Damon's mind could receive it.

Keep the triangle moving. And a third.

Two more to go. Elena allowed her gaze to wander over the house. Up to the third floor where Bloddeuwedd had to be enraged at what had become of her party.

One more to go. The voice of a guest coming back to her. "That library. She has more orbs than most public libraries, and" - with his voice dropping for a moment -  "they say she has all sorts of spheres up there. Forbidden ones. You know."

Elena hadn't known and still could still hardly imagine what might be forbidden here.

In her library, Bloddeuwedd, a single, lonely figure, moved in the brilliantly lighted great sphere to find a new orb. Inside the house music would be playing, different music in each different room. Outside, Elena could hear nothing.

The last blow. The triumvirate managed to handle it, allotting agonizing pain amongst four people. At least, Elena thought, my dress was already as red as it could be.

And then it was over, and Bonnie and Meredith were quarrelling with some of the vampire ladies who wanted to help bathe the blood from Elena's back, showing it once again unblemished and perfect, glowing golden in the sunlight.

Better keep them away, Elena thought rather drowsily to Damon; some of them may be compulsive nail-biters or finger-lickers. We can't afford for anyone to taste my blood and feel the life-force in it; not when I've gone through so much to conceal my aura.

Although there was clapping and cheering everywhere, no one had thought to untie Elena's wrists. So she stood leaning against the pillar, gazing at the library.

And then the world froze.

All around her was music and motion. She was the still point in a turning universe. But she had to get moving, and fast. She yanked hard at her bonds, lacerating herself.

"Meredith! Untie me! Cut these ropes, quick!"

Meredith obeyed hastily.

When Elena turned, she knew what she would see. The face - Damon's face, bewildered, half-resentful, half-humble. It was good enough for her, right then.

Damon, we need to get to the -

But then they were engulfed by a riot. Well-wishers, fans, skeptics, vampires begging for "a tiny taste," gogglers who wanted to make sure that Elena's back was real and warm and unmarked. Elena felt too many hands on her body.

"Get away from her, damn you!" It was the primal savage roar of a beast defending its mate. People backed away from Elena, only to close in...very slowly and timidly...on Damon.

All right, Elena thought. I'll do it alone. I can do it alone. For Stefan, I can.

She shouldered her way through the crowd, accepting bunches of hastily dug-up flowers from admirers - and feeling more hands on her body. "Hey, she really isn't marked!" At last, Meredith and Bonnie helped her to get out - without them she would never have made it.

And then she was running, running into the house, not bothering to use the door that was near to Saber's barking place. She thought she knew what was there anyway.

On the second floor she spent a minute being bewildered before seeing a thin red line in nothingness. Her blood! See how many things it was good for? Right now it highlighted the first of the glass steps for her, the one she had stumbled into before.

And at that time, cradled in Damon's strong arms, she hadn't been able to imagine even crawling up these steps. Now she channeled all the Power she had into her eye nodes - and the stairs lit up. It was still terrifying. There were no handholds on either side, and she was woozy from excitement, fear, and loss of blood. But she forced herself up, and up, and up.

"Elena! I love you! Elena!"

She could hear the cry as if Stefan were beside her now.

Up, up, up...

Her legs ached.

Keep going. No excuses. If you can't walk, hobble. If you can't hobble, crawl.

She was crawling as she finally reached the top, the edge of the nest of the owl Bloddeuwedd.

At least it was still a pretty, if insipid-looking, maiden who greeted her. Elena realized at last what was wrong with Bloddeuwedd's looks. She had no animal vitality. She was, at heart, a vegetable.

"I am going to kill you, you know."

No, she was a vegetable with no heart.

Elena glanced around her. She could see outside from here, although in between was the dome that was made of shelves and shelves upon shelves of orbs, so everything was weirdly distorted.

There were no hanging creepers here, no flagrant displays of exotic, tropical blooms. But she was already in the center of the room, in Bloddeuwedd's owl nest. Bloddeuwedd was nowhere near it; she was on the contraption that let her reach her star balls.

The key could only be buried in that nest.

"I don't want to steal from you," Elena promised, breathing hard. Even as she spoke, she plunged two arms into the nest. "Those kitsune played a trick on both of us. They stole something of mine and put the key to it in your nest. I'm just taking back what they put in."

"Ha! You - human slave! Barbarian! You dared to violate my private library! People outside are digging up my beautiful ballroom, my precious flowers. You think you're going to get away again this time, but you're not! This time you're going to DIE!"

It was an entirely different voice than the flat, nasal, but still maidenlike tones that had greeted Elena before. This was a powerful voice, a heavy voice...

...a voice to go with the size of the nest.

Elena looked up. She couldn't make anything of what she saw. An enormous fur coat in a very exotic pattern? Some huge stuffed animal's back?

The creature in the library turned toward her. Or rather, its head swiveled toward her, while its back remained perfectly still. It rotated its head sideways and Elena knew that what she was seeing was a face. The head was even more hideous and more indescribable than she could have imagined. It had a sort of single eyebrow which dipped from the edge of one side of its forehead down toward the nose (or where the nose should have been) and then went up again. The feature was like a gigantic V-shaped brow and below it were two huge round yellow eyes that often blinked. There was no nose or mouth like a human's, but instead there was a large, cruel, hooked black beak. The rest of the face was covered in feathers, mostly white, turning mottled gray at the bottom, where the neck seemed to be. It was also gray and white in two hornlike projections that shot up from the top of the head - like a demon's horns, Elena thought wildly.

Then, with the head still staring at her, the body turned toward Elena.

It was the body of a sturdy woman, covered in white and grizzled feathers, Elena saw. Talons peeked out from under the lowest feathers.

"Hello," the creature said in a grating voice, its beak opening and closing to bite off the words. "I'm Bloddeuwedd, and I never let anyone touch my library. I am your death."

The words Can't we at least talk about it first? were on Elena's lips. She didn't want to be a hero. She certainly didn't want to take on Bloddeuwedd while searching for the key that must be here - somewhere.

Elena kept on trying to explain while frantically feeling inside the nest, when Bloddeuwedd extended wings that spanned the room and came at her.

And then, like a streak of lightning, something zipped between them, giving out a raucous cry.

It was Talon. Sage must have given the hawk orders when he left her.

The owl seemed to shrink a little - the better to attack, thought Elena.

"Please let me explain. I haven't found it yet, but there is something in your nest that doesn't belong to you. It's mine - and - and Stefan's. And the kitsune hid it the night you had to chase them off your estate. Do you remember that?"

Bloddeuwedd didn't answer for a moment. Then she showed that she had a simple, one-size-fits-all-situations philosophy.

"You set foot into my private quarters. You die," she said and this time when she swooped by Elena, Elena could hear the clack of her beak coming together.

Again something small and bright dove at Bloddeuwedd, aiming for her eyes. The great owl had to take her attention off Elena in order to deal with it.

Elena gave up. Sometimes you just needed help. "Talon!" she cried, unsure of how much human speech Talon understood. "Try to keep her occupied - just for a minute!"

As the two birds darted and wheeled and shrieked around her, Elena tried to search with her arms, while ducking when she needed to. But that great black beak was always too close. Once it sliced into her arm, but Elena was on an adrenaline high, and she hardly felt the pain. She kept searching without a pause.

Finally, she realized what she should have done from the beginning. She snatched up an orb from its transparent rack.

"Talon!" she called. "Here!"

The falcon dove down toward her and there was a snap. But afterward Elena still had all her fingers and the hoshi no tama was gone.

Now, now, Elena truly heard a shriek of rage from Bloddeuwedd. The giant owl went after the hawk, but it was like a human trying to slap a fly - an intelligent fly.

"Give that orb back! It's priceless! Priceless!"

"You'll get it back as soon as I find what I'm looking for." Elena, mad with terror and soaked in hormones, climbed all the way inside the nest and began searching the marble bottom with her fingers.

Twice Talon saved her by dropping orbs with a crash to the ground as the huge owl Bloddeuwedd was headed toward Elena. Each time, the noise of the crash caused the owl to forget about Elena and try to attack the hawk. Then Talon snatched another orb and swept at great speed right under the owl's nose.

Elena was beginning to have a nightmare feeling that everything she had known just a half hour before was wrong.

She had been leaning against the canopy pole, exhausted, staring up into the library and the maiden who inhabited it and the words had simply flowed into her mind.

Bloddeuwedd's orb room...

Bloddeuwedd's globe room...

Bloddeuwedd's...star ball room......Bloddeuwedd's ballroom.

Two ways to take the same words. Two very different kinds of rooms.

It was just as she was remembering this that her fingers touched metal.

Chapter 38

"Talon! Uh - heel!" Elena shouted and began to race as fast as she could to get out of the room. This was strategy. Would the owl become even smaller so as to get through the door or would it destroy its sanctuary in order to stay on top of Elena?

It was a good strategy, but it didn't amount to much in the end. The owl shrank to dart through the door, and then resumed gigantic size to attack Elena as she ran down the stairs.

Yes, ran. With all of her Power channeled to her eyes, Elena leaped from step to step as Damon had before. Now there was no time for fear, no time for thinking. There was only time to turn over in her fingers a small, hard, crescent-shaped object.

Shinichi and Misao - they did make it into her nest.

There must be a ladder or something made of glass that even Damon couldn't see, in the flowerbed where Saber had stopped and barked. No - Damon would have seen it, so they must have brought their own ladder.

That's why their trail ended there. They climbed straight up into the library. And they ruined the flowers in the bed, which is why the new flowers weren't doing so well.

Elena knew from Aunt Judith, from her childhood, that transplanted flowers took awhile to revive and perk up again.

Leap...jump...leap...I am a spirit of fire. I cannot miss a step. I am a fire elemental. Leap...leap...leap.

And then Elena was looking at level ground, trying not to leap into it, but a prisoner to her body which was already leaping. She fell hard enough to numb one side, but she kept hold of the precious crescent clenched in a deathgrip in her hand.

A gigantic beak smashed into glass where she had been a moment before she slid. Talons raked her back.

Bloddeuwedd was still after her.

Sage and his group of sturdy young male and female vampires traveled at the pace of a running dog. Saber could lead them, but only as fast as he himself could go. Fortunately few people seemed to want to instigate a fight with a dog that weighed as much as they did - that weighed more than many of the beggars and children they encountered as they reached the bazaar.

The children crowded around the carriage, slowing them further. Sage took the time to exchange an expensive jewel for a purse full of small change and he scattered the coins behind the carriage as they went, allowing Saber free reign.

They passed dozens of stalls and crossing streets, but Saber was no ordinary bloodhound. He had enough Power to confound most vampires. With perhaps only one or two of the key molecules stuck to his nasal membrane he could hunt down his goal. Where another dog might be fooled by one of the hundreds of similar kitsune trails they were traveling through, Saber examined and rejected each of them as being not quite the right shape, size, or sculpture.

There came a time, though, when even Saber seemed defeated. He stood in the center of a six-way crossroads, regardless of traffic, limping slightly, and going in circles. He couldn't seem to choose a path.

And nor could I, my friend, Sage thought. We've come so far, but it's clear they went on farther. No way to go up or dig down...Sage hesitated, looking around the crimson-colored wheel of roads.

And then he saw something.

Directly across from him, but to his left was a perfumery. It must sell hundreds of fragrances, and billions of scent molecules were deliberately being released into the air.

Saber was blind. Not blind in his keen liquid dark eyes. But where it mattered he was numbed and blinded by the billions of scents that were being blown up his nose.

The vampires in the carriage were calling to go on or go back. They had no sense of real adventure, them. They just wanted a nice show. And undoubtedly many had slaves who were recording the whipping for them so they could enjoy it at leisure at home.

At that moment a flash of blue and gold decided Sage. A Guardian! Eh, bien...

"Heel, Saber!"

Saber's head and tail drooped as Sage randomly picked one of the directions and had him race alongside the running vampire to get out of the thoroughfare and onto another street.

But then, miraculously, the tail went up again. Sage estimated that there could not be even one molecule of the kitsune's scent left in Saber's nostrils now...

...but the memory of the scent...that was still there.

Saber was once again in hunting mode, with head down, tail straight, all his Power and intelligence concentrated on one goal and one goal only: to find another molecule that matched the three-dimensional memory of the one in his mind. Now that he was not blinded by the searing smell of all those different concentrated odors, he was able to think more clearly. And thinking alerted him to slip in between streets, causing a commotion behind him.

"What about the carriage?"

"Forget about the carriage! Don't lose sight of that guy with the dog!"

Sage, trying to keep up with Saber himself, knew when a chase was about to end. Tranquillit��! he thought to Saber. He also barely whispered the word. He had never been certain if his animal friends were telepathic or not, but he liked to believe that they were, while behaving as if they were not. Tranquillit��! he told himself.

And so, when the huge black dog with the shining dark eyes and the man ran up the steps to one particular ramshackle building, they did it silently. Then, as if he'd had a pleasant stroll in the country, Saber sat and looked at Sage in the face, laughing-panting. He opened and closed his mouth in a silent parody of a bark.

Sage waited for the young vampires to catch up with him before be opened the door. And, as he wanted the element of surprise, he didn't knock. Instead he smashed a fist with the Power of a sledgehammer through the door and groped for locks and chains and bolts. He could feel none. He did feel a knob.

Before opening the door, and going into who knew what peril, he said to those behind him, "Any loot we take is the property of Master Damon. I am his foreman and it was only through my dog's skills that we have made it so far."

There was agreement, ranging from grumbling to indifferent.

"By the same token," Sage said, "whatever danger is in there, I face first. Saber! NOW!"

They burst into the room, nearly taking the door off its hinges.

Elena cried out involuntarily. Bloddeuwedd had just done what Damon would not, and lined her back with bloody furrows from her talons.

But even as Elena managed to find the glass door to the outside, she could feel other minds surging to help sustain her, to lift and share some of the pain.

Bonnie and Meredith were picking their way through huge shards of glass to get to her. They were screaming at the owl. And Talon, heroically, was attacking from above.

Elena couldn't stand it any longer. She had to see. She had to know that this metallic-feeling thing that she'd picked out of Bloddeuwedd's nest wasn't some bit of filthy rubbish. She had to know now.

Rubbing the tiny scrap of metal against the ill-fated scarlet dress, she took a moment to glance downward, to see crimson sunlight sparkle against gold and diamonds and two folded-back little ears and two bright green alexandrite eyes.

The duplicate of the first fox key half, but facing the other way.

Elena's legs almost gave way underneath her.

She was holding the second half of the fox key.

Hurriedly, then, Elena brought up her free hand and plunged her fingers down into the carefully made little pocket behind the diamond insert. It concealed a tiny pouch, specially sewn there by Lady Ulma herself. In it was the first half of the fox key, replaced there as soon as Saber and Talon had finished with it. Now, as she shoved the second half-key into the pocket with the first, she was disconcerted to feel movement in the pouch. The two pieces of the fox key were - what, becoming one?

A black beak slammed into the wall beside her.

Without even thinking, Elena ducked and rolled to escape it. When her fingers flew back to make sure that the pouch was tied up and secure, she was astonished to feel a familiar shape resting inside.

Not a key?

Not a key!

The world was spinning wildly around Elena. Nothing mattered; not the object; not her own life. The kitsune twins had tricked them, had made fools of the idiot humans and the vampire who had dared to face up to them. There was no double fox key.

Still, hope refused to die. What was it Stefan used to say? Mai dire mai - never say never. Knowing what a chance she was taking, knowing she was a fool for taking it, Elena thrust her finger again into the pouch.

Something cool slipped onto one finger and stayed there.

She glanced down and for a moment was arrested by the sight. There, on her ring finger, gleamed a gold, diamond-encrusted ring. It represented two abstract foxes curled together, one facing each way. Each fox had two ears, two green alexandrite eyes, and a pointed nose.

And that was all. Of what use was a trinket like this to Stefan? It bore no resemblance to the double-winged keys shown in the pictures of kitsune shrines.

As treasure, it was surely worth a million times less than what they had already spent to get it.

And then Elena noticed something.

A light shone from the eyes of one of the foxes. If she hadn't been staring at it so closely, or if she hadn't been by now in the White Waltz Ballroom, where colors showed true, she might not have noticed it. But the light was shining straight ahead of her as she turned her hand sideways. Now it was shining from four eyes.

It was shining in exactly the direction of Stefan's prison cell.

Hope rose up like a phoenix in Elena's heart, and took her soaring on a mental journey out of this labyrinth of glass rooms. The music playing was the waltz from Faust. Away from the sun, deep into the heart of the city, that was where Stefan was. And that was where the pale green light from the fox's eyes was shining.

Riding high on hope, she turned the ring. The light winked out of both fox's eyes, but when she turned the ring so that the second fox was in line with Stefan's cell, it winked on.

Secret signals. How long could she have owned a ring like that and done nothing if she hadn't already known where Stefan's prison was?

Longer than Stefan had left to live, probably.

Now she only had to survive long enough to reach him.

Chapter 39

Elena waded into the crowd feeling like a soldier. She didn't know why. Maybe because she had thought of a quest and had managed to complete it and stay alive and bring back loot. Maybe because she bore honorable wounds. Maybe because above her there was an enemy who was still out for her blood.

Come to think of it, she thought, I'd better get all these noncombatants out of here. We can keep them in a safe house - well, a few dozen safe houses and -

What was she thinking? Safe house was a phrase from a book. She wasn't responsible for these people - idiots, mostly, who had stood, slavering, and watched her being whipped. But - despite that, maybe she should get them out of here.

"Bloddeuwedd!" she cried dramatically and pointed to a wheeling silhouette above. "Bloddeuwedd is free! She gave me these!" - pointing to the three lacerations on her back. "She'll go after you, too!"

At first most of the angry exclamation seemed to be about the fact that Elena now had a marked back. Elena was in no mood to argue. There was only one person here she wanted to talk to now. Keeping Bonnie and Meredith close behind her, she called.

Damon! Damon it's me! Where are you?

There was so much telepathic traffic that she doubted he would hear her.

But finally, she caught a faint, Elena?...Yes...

Elena, hold on to me. Think of holding me physically, and I'll take us to a different frequency.

Hold on to a voice? But Elena imagined holding on to Damon tightly, tightly, while she physically held Bonnie's and Meredith's hands.

Now can you hear me? This time the voice was much clearer, much louder.

Yes. But I can't see you.

But I see you. I'm coming to - WATCH OUT!

Too late, Elena's senses warned her of a huge shadow plummeting from above. She couldn't move quickly enough to get out of the way of a snapping, alligator-sized beak.

But Damon could. Leaping from somewhere, he gathered her and Bonnie and Meredith all in one great armful and leaped again, hitting grass and rolling.

Oh, God! Damon!

"Is anybody hurt?" he asked aloud.

"I'm fine," Meredith said quietly, calmly. "But I suspect I owe you my life. Thank you."

"Bonnie?" Elena asked.

I'm okay. I mean, "I'm okay. But Elena, your back - "

For the first time, Damon was able to turn Elena and see the wounds on her back. "I...did that? But...I thought..."

"Bloddeuwedd did that," Elena said sharply, looking upward for a circling shape in the deep red sky. "She just barely touched me. She has talons like knives, like steel. We have to go, now!"

Damon put both hands on her shoulders. "And come back when things have calmed down, you mean."

"And never come back! Oh, God, here she comes!"

Something out of the corner of her eye became baseball-sized in an instant, volleyball-sized in a second, human-sized in a moment. And then they were all scattering, leaping, rolling, trying to get away, except Damon, who seized Elena and shouted, "This is my slave! If you have any argument with her, you first argue with me!"

"And I am Bloddeuwedd, created by the gods, condemned to be a murderer every night. I'll kill you first, then eat her, the thief!" Bloddeuwedd called back in her raucous new voice. "Two bites is all it will take."

Damon, I need to tell you something!

"I'll fight you, but my slave is out of it!"

"First bite; here I come!"

Damon, we have to go!

A scream of primal pain and fury.

Damon was standing slightly crouched with a huge piece of glass held in his hand like a sword and great black drops of blood were dripping from where he had - oh, God! Elena thought - he'd put out one of Bloddeuwedd's eyes!

"YOU WILL ALL DIE! ALL!"

Bloddeuwedd made a charge at a random vampire directly below her and Elena screamed as the vampire screamed. The black beak had caught him by one leg and was lifting him.

But Damon was running forward, jumping, slashing. With a scream of fury, Bloddeuwedd took to the sky again.

Now everyone understood the danger. Two other vampires rushed to take their comrade from Damon, and Elena was glad that her friends were not responsible for another life. She had too much on her hands already.

Damon, I'm leaving now. You can come with me or not. I've got the key.

Elena sent the words on the frequency that they were more or less alone on, and she sent it without dramatics. She had no room for drama left. She'd been stripped of everything except the need to get to Stefan.

This time, she knew Damon heard her.

At first, she thought Damon was dying. That Bloddeuwedd had somehow come back and pierced him through his entire body, as with a spear made of light. Then she realized that the feeling was rapture, and two tiny child hands reached out of the light and clung to hers, allowing her to pull a thin, ragged, but laughing child away free.

No chains, she thought dizzily. He's not even wearing slave bracelets.

"My brother!" he told her. "My little brother's going to live!"

"Well, that's a fine thing," Elena said shakily.

"He's going to live!" A tiny frown line appeared. "If you hurry! And take good care of him! And - "

Elena put two fingers over his lips, very gently. "You don't need to worry about anything like that. You just be happy."

The little boy laughed. "I will! I am!"

"Elena!"

Elena came out of - well, she supposed it was a daze, although it had been more real than many other things she'd experienced recently.

"Elena!" Damon was trying desperately to restrain himself. "Show me the key!"

Slowly, majestically, Elena lifted her hand.

Damon's shoulders tensed, for - something - went down.

"It's a ring," he said dully. The slow and majestic bit hadn't worked on him at all.

"That's what I thought at first. It's a key. I'm not asking you, or seeing if you agree with me; I'm telling you. It's a key. The light from its eyes points to Stefan."

"What light?"

"I'll show you later. Bonnie! Meredith! We're leaving."

"YOU'RE NOT IF I SAY YOU'RE NOT!"

"Watch out!" screamed Bonnie.

The owl was diving again. And again, at the last second, Damon gathered the three girls and leaped. The owl's beak struck not grass nor shards of glass but the marble steps. They cracked. There was a scream of pain and another, as Damon, nimble as a dancer, slashed at the giant bird's one good eye. He got in a cut right above it. Blood began to fill the eye.

Elena couldn't stand any more. Ever since starting out on this journey with Damon and Matt, she had been a vial filling with anger. Drop by drop, with each new outrage, that anger had filled and filled the vial. Now her rage was about to fill it to overflowing.

But then...what would happen?

She didn't want to know. She was afraid she wouldn't survive it.

What she did know was that she couldn't watch any more pain and blood and anguish right now. Damon genuinely enjoyed fighting. Good. Let him. She was going to Stefan if she had to walk the whole way.

Meredith and Bonnie were silent. They knew Elena in this mood. She wasn't fooling around. And neither of them wanted to be left behind.

It was exactly at that moment that the carriage came rumbling up to the base of the marble stairs.

Sage, who obviously knew something about human nature, demonic nature, vampiric nature, and various kinds of bestial nature, jumped out of the carriage with two swords drawn. He also whistled. In a moment a shadow - a small one - came streaking to him out of the sky.

Last, slowly, stretching each leg like a tiger, came Saber, who immediately pulled back his lips to show an amazing number of teeth.

Elena leaped toward the carriage, her eyes meeting Sage's. Help me, she thought desperately. And his eyes said just as plainly, Have no fear.

Blindly, she reached behind her with both hands. One small, fine-boned, lightly trembling hand was thrust into hers. One slim, cool hand, hard as a boy's but with long tapering fingers grabbed her other one.

There was no one here to trust. No one to say good-bye to, or leave messages of good-bye with. Elena scrambled into the carriage. She got into the backseat, the farthest from the front, to accommodate incoming humans and animals.

And in they did come, like an avalanche. She had dragged Bonnie with her, and Meredith had followed, so that when Saber leaped into his accustomed place he landed on three soft laps.

Sage hadn't wasted a moment. With Talon clamped on his left wrist, he left just enough room for Damon's final spring - and a spring it was. Cracked and broken, oozing black fluid, Bloddeuwedd's beak hit the end of the marble stairs where Damon had been standing.

"Directions!" shouted Sage, but only after the horses were heading at a gallop - somewhere, anywhere, away.

"Oh, please don't let her hurt the horses," Bonnie gasped.

"Oh, please don't let her split this roof like cardboard," said Meredith, somehow able to be wry even when her life was in danger.

"Directions, s'il vous plaît!" roared Sage.

"The prison, of course," panted Elena. She felt that it had been a long time since she had been able to get enough air.

"The prison?" Damon seemed distracted. "Yes! The prison!" But then, he added, pulling up something like a pillowcase filled with billiard balls, "Sage, what are these?"

"Loot. Booty. Spoils! Plunder!" As the horses swung in a new direction, Sage's voice seemed to get more and more cheerful. "And look around your feet!"

"More pillowcases...?"

"I wasn't prepared for a big haul tonight. But things worked out well anyway!"

By now, Elena was feeling one of the pillowcases for herself. The case was, indeed, full of clear, sparkling hoshi no tama. Star balls. Memories. Worth...

Worthless?

"Priceless...although of course we don't know what's on them." Sage's voice changed subtly. Elena remembered the warning about "forbidden spheres." What, in the name of the yellow sun, could they possibly forbid down here?

Bonnie was the first to pick up a disk and put it to her temple. She did it so quickly, with such flashing, birdlike movements, that Elena couldn't stop her.

"What is it?" Elena gasped, trying to pull the star ball away.

"It's...poetry. Poetry I can't understand," said Bonnie crossly.

Meredith had also picked up a sparkling orb. Elena reached for her but once again she was too late.

Meredith sat as if in a trance for a moment, then grimaced and put the sphere down.

"What?" demanded Elena.

Meredith shook her head. She wore a delicate expression of distaste.

"What?" Elena almost yelled. Then as Meredith put the star ball by her feet, Elena lunged at it. She clapped it to her own temple and immediately was dressed in black leather from head to toe. There were two broad, square men in front of her, without a lot of muscle tone. And she could see all of their musculature because they were stark naked except for rags such as beggars wore. But they weren't beggars - they looked well-fed and oily and it was clearly an act when one of them groveled, "We have trespassed. We beg your forgiveness, O master!"

Elena was reaching to take the sphere off her temple (they stuck gently, if you put a little pressure there) and saying, "Why don't they use the space for something else?"

Something else was immediately all around her. A girl, in poor clothing, but not sacking. She looked terrified. Elena wondered if she were being controlled.

And Elena was the girl.

Pleasedon'tletitgetmepleasedon'tletitgetme -

Let what get you? Elena asked, but it was like watching a movie or book character while they were going into a lonely house in a howling storm and the music had turned eerie. The Elena who was walking in fear could not hear the Elena who was asking practical questions.

I don't think I want to see how this one comes out, she decided. She put the star ball back at Meredith's feet.

"Do we have three sacks?"

"Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am; three sacks full."

Oh. That didn't work out very well. Elena was opening her mouth again, when Damon added quietly: "And one sack empty."

"Really? We do? Then let's all try to divide these. Anything - forbidden - goes in one sack. Weird stuff like Bonnie's poetry reading goes into another. Any news of Stefan - or of us - goes in the third. And nice things, like summer days, go in the fourth," Elena said.

"I think you are being optimistic, me," Sage said. "To expect to find an orb with Stefan on it so quickly - "

"Everybody, hush!" Bonnie said frantically. "This is Shinichi and Damon talking him into it."

Sage stiffened, as if taking a lightning bolt from the stormy sky, then he smiled. "Speak of the devil," he murmured. Elena smiled at him and squeezed his hand before taking another ball.

"This one seems to be some kind of legal stuff. I don't understand it. A slave must be taking it because I can see all of them." Elena felt her facial muscles tighten with hatred at the sight - even in a sort of dream - of Shinichi, the kitsune who had done so much harm. His hair was black, except for an irregular fringe around the edges, which made it look as if it had been dipped in red-hot lava.

And then, of course, Misao. Shinichi's sister - allegedly. This star ball must have been made by a slave, because she could see both of the twins and a lawyerly-looking man.

Misao, Elena thought. Delicate, deferential, demure...demonic. Her hair was the same as Shinichi's, but it was held up and back in a ponytail. You could see the demonic part if she raised her eyes. They were effervescent, golden, laughing eyes, just like her brother's; eyes that had never had a regret - except perhaps for not exacting enough revenge. They took no responsibility. They found anguish funny.

And then something odd happened. All three of the figures in the room suddenly turned around and looked straight at her. Straight at whoever had made the sphere, Elena corrected herself, but it still was disconcerting.

It was even more disconcerting when they continued to advance. Who am I? Elena thought, feeling half-frantic with anxiety. Then she tried something she had never done before, or seen or heard of being done. She carefully extended her Power into the Self around the orb. She was Werty, a sort of lawyer's secretary. She/he took notes when important deals were done.

And Werty definitely didn't like the way things were going right now. The two clients and his boss closing in on him like this, in a way they never had before.

Elena pulled herself out of the clerk and put the ball down to one side. She shivered, feeling as if she'd been plunged into ice-cold water.

And then the roof crashed in.

Bloddeuwedd.

Even with her crippled beak, the huge owl tore off quite a bit of the roof of the carriage.

Everyone was screaming and no one was giving much good advice. Saber and Damon had both damaged her: Saber by raising right off the three soft laps he was sitting on and lunging straight up for Bloddeuwedd's feet. He had torn and shaken one before letting go to fall back into the carriage, where he almost slid off the back. Elena, Bonnie, and Meredith grabbed at whatever portions of canine anatomy they could reach, and hauled the huge animal into the backseat again.

"Scoot over! Give him his own seat," wailed Bonnie, looking at the shreds of her pearl-colored dress where Saber had taken off and ripped right through the gauzy material. He'd left red welts in his path.

"Well," Meredith said, "next time we'll request steel petticoats. But I really hope there isn't going to be a next time, anyway!"

Elena prayed fervently that she was right. Bloddeuwedd was skimming in from a lower angle now, undoubtedly hoping to snap off a few heads.

"Everybody grab wood. And spheres! Throw the spheres at her as she comes close to us." Elena was hoping that the sight of star globes - Bloddeuwedd's obsession - might slow her down.

At the same time Sage shouted, "Don't waste the star balls! Throw anything else! Besides, we're almost there. Hard left, then straightaway!"

The words gave Elena new hope. I have the key, she thought. The ring is the key. All I have to do now is get Stefan - and get all of us to the door with the keyhole. All in one building. I'm practically home.

The next sweep came in even lower. Bloddeuwedd, blind in one eye, with blood filling the other one, and her olfactory senses blocked by her own dried blood, was trying to ram the carriage and knock it over.

If she manages it, we'll be dead, Elena thought. And any who're still writhing like worms on the ground, she can pick off.

"DUCK!" She screamed the word both vocally and telepathically.

And then something like an airplane flew so close to her that she felt tufts of hair being pulled out, caught in its claws.

Elena heard a cry of pain from the front seat but didn't raise her head to see what it was. And that was good, for while the carriage suddenly slammed to a halt, the next instant a whirling, screaming, bird of death came searing out on the same course. Now Elena needed all of her attention, all her faculties, to avoid this monster that was buzzing them even lower.

"The carriage, she is finished! Get out! Run!" Sage's voice came rumbling to her.

"The horses," screamed Elena.

"Finished! Get out, damn you!"

Elena had never heard Sage swear before. She dropped the subject.

Elena never knew how she and Meredith did get out, tumbling over each other, trying to help and only getting in each other's way. Bonnie was already out, by virtue of the coach having hit a pole and sending her flying. Fortunately, it had sent her into a square of ugly but springy red clover, and she wasn't seriously injured.

"Ahhh, my bracelet - no, there it is," she cried, grabbing something glittering out of the clover. She cast a cautious look upward into the crimson night. "Now what do we do?"

"We run!" came Damon's voice. He came around the wreckage of the corner where they had fallen in a heap. There was blood on his mouth, on the previously immaculate white at his throat. It reminded Elena of those people who drank cow's blood as well as milk for nutrition. But Damon only drank from humans. He would never stoop to equine blood...

The horses will still be here and so will Bloddeuwedd, a harsh voice explained in her head. She would play with them; there would be pain. This way was quick. It was...a whim.

Elena reached for his hands, gasping. "Damon! I'm sorry!"

"GET OUT OF HERE," Sage was roaring.

"We have to get to Stefan," Elena said, and grabbed Bonnie with her other hand. "Help guide me, please. I can't see the ring very well." Meredith, she trusted, would get to the Shi no Shi building on her own resources.

And then there was a nightmare of running and flinching and false alarms by a shaken Bonnie. Twice the horror from above came skimming straight toward them only to crash just in front of them, or a little to the side, breaking wood and tile road alike, throwing up clouds of dust. Elena didn't know about all owls, but Bloddeuwedd swooped down at an angle on her prey, then opened her wings and dropped at the last moment. Part of the worst thing about the giant owl was her silence.

There was no rustling to warn them of where she might be. Something in her own feathers muffled the sound, so that they never knew when she was going to drop next.

In the end they had to crawl through all sorts of rubbish, going as fast as they could, holding wood, glass, anything sharp over their heads, as Bloddeuwedd made another pass.

And all the time Elena was trying to use her Power. It was not a Power she had used before, but she could feel its name shaping her lips. What she could not feel, could not force, was a connection between the words and the Power.

I'm useless as a heroine, she thought. I'm pathetic. They should have given these Powers to someone who already knew how to control such things. Or, no, they should have given them to someone and then given the someone a course on how to use them. Or - no -

"Elena!" Rubbish was flying in front of her, but then she was cutting left and somehow getting around it. And then she was on the ground and looking up at Damon, who had protected her with his body.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"Come on!"

"I'm sorry," she whispered and held out her right hand, with the ring on it, for him to take.

And then she doubled up, heaving with sobs. She could hear the flapping of Bloddeuwedd right above her.