by L. J. Smith
And which had picked up Elena’s own fragrances from running through her body, because more than half her current volume of blood was from other people!
The shock of this realization did him good. He was able to straighten up and then bury his face in the tumbled glory of her hair, breathing in the delicious scents of her without wanting to deprive her of what she needed most to live.
I’m afraid you missed something, little brother, he was able to think almost sanely as he forced his fangs to retract. Elena defines kissing as “what you do before someone sinks their teeth into you.”
I do understand why you almost killed her, though,. She’s learned how vampires work and she knows every button to push, even if she doesn’t know she knows.
He lifted his head only to find that Elena was still arched, offering herself, innocent as a kitten in a lingerie drawer. He planted a few gentle kisses on the skin of her throat and then said, “Come back down here, angel,” while carefully tipping her chin so that she could look at him.
Her eyes were closed. She was in some dream that their minds had blended: and that answered his fevered question. That was the deepest part of her that he could touch: her soul. And he wanted it as much as she did. He remembered how easy it had been while they were looking for Stefan in the Dark Dimension, and he knew that he could initiate telepathy with her right now, without even an exchange of blood . . .
But he was supposed to be human. It was enough to drive anyone mad, and it had done just that. He’d been thinking mad thoughts a minute ago. He’d considered taking blood out of Elena. It didn’t matter if he’d wanted a single drop. She was in the thrice-damned hospital because Stefan had given in to her spell.
He wanted her as his princess of darkness, yes, but not right now. He needed to prepare her for the transition. He had to wait.
Damon hated waiting the way cats hate water.
Elena finally opened her eyes. She glanced at him and then glanced at the empty space on the hospital bed beside her.
“Don’t even think about it,” Damon warned grimly, hoping that she would override him, that she would seduce him again.
“You don’t want to get in trouble with the nurses again,” he added glumly.
Elena sighed. “Maybe I’ll go ahead and try to really sleep, then.” Damon knew that she hated waiting the way cats hate static electricity.
“But first I need . . . I need to . . .” Elena was in the thrall of her own special motor memory. Her tethered left hand held something invisible, while her right hand hovered over the invisibility with thumb tucked between first and middle fingers.
As if she were holding a phantom pen.
“My . . . my . . . book. No!” Elena was getting frustrated, but Stefan had clearly done a thorough job on this subject. He’d ablated even the word diary from her memory completely.
“Maybe do your homework?” Damon suggested quickly, and just when Elena was starting to shake her head, he produced the notes for Nonfiction and Memoir Writing.
“Oh,” Elena said. She frowned at the words at the top. “I guess I need to buy a . . .”
“A journal,”—smoothly.
“Yes, a journal. But this week’s assignment is just to write a short memoir about something that happened over the summer.” Her frown deepened. “It’s so strange. I can’t even remember very distinctly. I know we did all sorts of things, but every time I try to focus on one, it slips out of my mind.”
Damon wasn’t surprised. After all, what was she going to write? I was a ghost, and then a human returned from the afterlife, and then a goddess, and then a slave, and finally an angel of destruction, and then an ordinary girl again, and then, just to end the summer on a high note, I helped bring my boyfriend’s brother—who’s now my boyfriend—out of a death-coma.
He found himself chuckling. “Didn’t you—we—go to Warm Springs just a few weeks ago?”
Elena laughed and kept laughing. She ignored the question. “I like it when you smile,” she confided. “Especially when you’re happy.”
“One usually smiles because one is happy, doesn’t one?”
“I don’t know about one, but I know about you. And you smile for all sorts of reasons. You smile when you’re challenged or when you get—oh, moderately angry. You smile when something hurts you. You smile when you’re about to do something outrageous or when you’re doing your daft act. But I like it best when you’re happy—and I’ve hardly ever seen you so happy before.”
Damon blinked. She might think I’m human, but she certainly doesn’t think I’m Stefan, was all that he could come up with at first. She knows me—a little bit too well.
“How can you say I haven’t been happy?” he said, his lips still curved. “With you at my side for a whole year long?”
Elena reached for him with her right hand. “Oh, yes. And you smile when you’re flirting or just piling up the B.S.”
“All right,” Damon said, allowing himself to be reeled in to bend over her and speaking lightly but with a touch of thoughtful consideration. “If I smile when I am moderately angry, what do I do when I’m properly furious?”
“Oh, then you beam.”
He swooped down on her then. There was nothing else to do. She did know him too well, and he had no desire to change the state of her mind. He just needed an interruption.
A month or so ago, he would have said something—something outrageous, as she had pointed out—just to watch the blood leap and flame in her cheeks and to see what kind of riposte she would make. Now . . . well, he had no particular desire to outrage her. Not ten minutes ago she had offered him complete access to her soul. She was being meltingly tender as she had never been with him in her life. He understood that if he wanted to spar with her, he would have to find some subject beside Stefan on which they disagreed.
It was easiest just to tickle her—a very little, given that she was still in bondage to her machines.
“Don’t, don’t,” Elena ordered just as his fingers made contact with her vulnerable side, covered only by her cloth hospital gown. “No, please don’t! Look, I’m doing my homework, right? I have to do my homework before tomorrow! I’m writing about Warm Springs. You can help by reminding me of what happened on one of our picnics.”
I was dead—or mostly—while you were having picnics, he thought. Then, more leniently, well, you only had the one and that was to amuse Alaric Saltzman when he came into town to see Meredith.
Even as he settled back and began spinning a story of what might have happened at Warm Springs for Elena’s memoir, his mind dwelt lovingly on the happy days ahead when she would positively hate him . . . and still be unable to hold back her passionate response to his nearness.
* * *
Hours later, after Elena had finished her homework and been lulled to sleep, after Damon had wandered down a floor of the hospital in order to find fresh nurses, he came back to the ICU room and sat in the chair, holding Elena’s hand.
Eventually, he slept.
* * *
Damon dreamed.
He was back on the Nether World moon, with a stake through his body. Bad as that was, there was worse. He had used the last of the Power in his body in order to say goodbye to Elena, to Bonnie, to Stefan. They were gone now, certain that he was at rest. Instead, hideously, he was paralyzed but conscious. He had drifted into the darkness for a while, yes, but then he had found himself lying on his back while tiny flakes of ash and droplets of liquid fell on him, reviving him, and he had clenched his fist and known who he was.
But . . . ash? It didn’t make sense. And the liquid . . . somehow the liquid was refreshing and invigorating. On this moon, where the sky had been blocked by the magnificent canopy of the one Tree that inhabited it, he was lying in the open with bits of debris falling on him.
Uh oh, he thought—deliberately frivolous since the pain of the stake through his body and the woody fibers that extended along his capillaries was still agonizing—someone has been a very, ve
ry naughty girl indeed.
There was only one reason for ash to be precipitating out of the sky. There was only one reason for the sheltering Tree to be gone so that he could feel ash being precipitated out of the sky.
Some bad girl had blown the Tree up. The ash was the remnants of that towering giant’s trunk and branches and leaves.
Damon tried to flash a blinding, ferocious smile at nothing at all, but he couldn’t; he was paralyzed, except for one hand that feebly clutched at the ashes by his side.
He knew what had happened though. While he had been in the dark place, Elena had unleashed the ultimate forbidden spell. Wings of Destruction.
He hoped that she hadn’t blown herself and Bonnie and his little brother up, too. But since Damon’s own body seemed to be intact, if ravaged by wood, she had probably protected them. Damon certainly couldn’t smell blood in the soft rain that fell.
What was the liquid, then? What was it that soothed the pain as it worked its heavy way below the ash to soak his clothes and face and hair?
He spent what seemed an eternity just wondering, as more and more of the wet droplets, each infinitesimal, lulled the agony that gripped his body.
By the time the answer finally came he was exasperated with himself. There was only one possibility and he was an idiot not to have recognized it at once. The largest star ball in all the worlds had been resting in the fork of the Tree just above where Damon had been staked. Elena had blown it up when she loosed destruction on the entire moon.
And now the liquid inside it, which was pure Power in fluid form, was falling directly down on him.
I’m not going to die, Damon realized, with a tiny frisson of concern rippling over his skin. He was not going to die, but was he going to lie here for all eternity, paralyzed and staked, conscious of nothing but the dreadful pain of the wood against his every cell?
Maybe not. Maybe he could set the liquid Power falling on him to work, drop by drop. Maybe it could slowly repair his nervous system, give him back the power to move again.
First, though, he had to get rid of what was poisoning his heart, what would defy any attempt at recovery. He had to get the stake out.
Pulling it—even if he could do that much with only his left hand working—would have the unfortunate consequence of ripping chunks of his heart out, too.
Almost without thinking, his left hand clenched into a fist around ashes soaked in droplets from the star ball full of pure Power. He packed the Power-loaded ash around the stake, around his chest and left upper arm. Then he dropped the fist and grasped a new handful of soaking ashes and did it again. And over and over and over.
After what seemed like a very long time Damon did something with his mind. He encircled the stake with Power and then let the Power flare. There was a moment of greater agony but then the poison eating at his heart—a wooden stake six feet long and sunk four feet deep into the ground below him—simply disappeared.
Good, Damon thought, and he fell asleep for a while without dreaming, his body feeling cool and refreshed.
* * *
Stefan felt feverish.
He was finished with Fell’s Church at last. He had saved the very hardest residence for the end, and it had drained him of Power until he was limp as a rag.
It had taken an enormous amount of Power to carefully dissect the memories of Meredith’s parents. Mrs. Sulez, in particular, had hung to the knowledge that she had not just a daughter, but a son, Meredith’s twin, who was a vampire. She also knew that her daughter was a secret vampire hunter, who had taken up the family ironwood stave, a spear that was meant to kill any kind of supernatural creature.
This stave was what Stefan had taken from Meredith’s dorm room at Dalcrest and had hidden in the nearby woods, high in the trees, with a magical barrier around it making it invisible to humans and eldritch beings alike. He would have to go back and retrieve it to destroy it . . . but not now. Right now he was so tired . . .
Abruptly, the ground rushed up and struck Stefan a blow in the face. He had fallen, bruising his cheekbone and bloodying his nose.
Mrs. Flowers had been right, he thought, fumbling for the hipflask of Black Magic she had given him. Although several deep drafts were enough to heal the bruised place and his swelling nose, Stefan knew that he had burned all his natural Power away in dealing with the many minds he’d Influenced tonight.
He should have drunk human blood from some of the townsfolk he had used his neuro-virus on. If he had taken human blood then, it wouldn’t be such a great question now whether he was going to be able to walk out of Fell’s Church and into the Old Wood where he had hidden Elena’s diaries in his car.
Dawn was tinting the sky green and rose and cerulean in the east and Stefan automatically fumbled in his windbreaker pocket for sunglasses. Weak as he was right now, he needed all the light-protection he could get.
Put one foot ahead of the other. That was what he needed to do. In the Old Wood he could hunt and then rest and recover.
Just keep walking, he tried to encourage himself. It was only a couple of miles. There was no question but that he had to get away from direct sunlight, at least not if he wanted to live.
* * *
Elena woke up, yawning and stretching like a cat. Then she sneezed. Damon wondered if she was going to start grooming her fur, but instead she spotted him and smiled dreamily, which temporarily deprived him of the power to speak.
“Good morning,” she said finally, and breathed deeply. Damon, who was holding a cup from which the unmistakable fragrance of mocha latte wafted, offered it to her.
“Bless you—but didn’t you get something for yourself?”
“Drank it already, princess.” Although Damon was not tired of nurses, who came in all shapes and sizes, he was aware that he had to be very careful. The hospital was still trying to solve the mystery of how Elena had lost so much blood, and it wouldn’t do to have any of the medical staff keeling over from “anemia.”
Elena was trying to brush her hair and drink her latte at the same time, all the while hampered by the tether of her IV. “I’ve just decided,” she said in a determined, confidential voice. “Today you and I are busting out of this joint.”
“We are, are we?” Damon felt the kind of tenderness he usually felt for—well, weaker girls—watching Elena fumbling helplessly. “Here, I’ll handle the hair while you drink your caffeine,” he added.
“Relax,” he said. “I can handle this. You get impatient and split the ends when you yank it at the bottom.” He began to slowly work his way through her hair, gently teasing out the tangles.
“Split ends? You’re really going to get it,” Elena said, clearly trying to sound ominous and failing entirely as her body had become suddenly pliant. She really was very sensitive to having her hair handled, Damon reflected. “Nobody’s done that for me since my mother died,” she added abruptly, tilting her head as he required. “I never would let Aunt Judith help. I don’t know why I’m letting you do it.”
Damon knew, but all he said was, “Let’s talk about you getting released today, even if it’s against medical advice.”
Once they’d discussed their plans, Elena completed her toilette alone. The doctors’ morning rounds interrupted her as she sought to wreak the revenge of a thousand kisses upon Damon for his early impudence in brushing her hair.
Everything was relatively simple after that. The doctors, with only a slight push from Damon, decided that Elena was more of a nuisance to modern medicine than a conundrum.
Red tape held the release process stationary all that morning, but by late afternoon Elena was able to leave, traveling by wheelchair to the curb outside Mercy Havenwick’s doors. Damon had flown back to the seedy bar in Pine Grove and retrieved his Ferrari Spider the previous night. They departed for Dalcrest in high style and excellent spirits.
Back at the dorm, Bonnie and Meredith and Matt and Caroline had gotten together and fixed up Elena’s room so that it was truly a thing of beauty.
They had decorated one wall with a giant wooden letter E painted turquoise and gold, with pictures framed in lavender, turquoise and gold all around it. A whiteboard was hung on another wall with “Welcome Home Elena!” written in Meredith’s best calligraphic script.
They had gotten rid of Elena’s single bed and replaced it with a queen-sized one that sported lavender linen. It was topped with a thick comforter decorated with sprawling exotic flowers in lavender and turquoise. The study desk was neatly prepared with Elena’s desktop and laptop computers, a scanner-printer, and an organizer with cubby holes that held pens, pencils, a stapler, a small first aid kit, and other necessary things. Elena’s textbooks were stacked neatly against the wall below the cubbies.
A tiny fridge, a smaller microwave and a large HD TV hanging like a painting on the wall across from the bed provided Elena with true luxury, while a dresser in distressed white with freshly-painted lavender, gold and turquoise filigree accents held her clothes.
Battery operated pillar candles cast flickering, cheery light here and there, since burning real candles in dorm rooms was forbidden. The scent of lavender-vanilla potpourri filled the air.
“Oh, my God,” Elena said, choking up as she looked around. “All of you did this. How am I supposed to thank you?”
“By staying healthy,” Matt suggested.
“By keeping out of trouble,” Caroline added.
“Caroline, you come sit down right now,” Elena said, and the pregnant girl obeyed by taking the comfortable lounge chair in the corner. Bonnie perched on one side of the bed and Elena insisted on Meredith sitting at the desk, while she and the boys stood.
“It’s beautiful,” Elena continued, “and I’m going to think about you fondly whenever I see it. Bless you all.”