by L. J. Smith
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night . . .” she mocked him. The cabernet camisole was rippling with her quick breathing. “What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
Damon made a supreme effort. Black Magic was spreading through his body, soothing him.
“Okay. We’re both smart; we’re both thieves like jackdaws; and we’re both fairly worked up. However—”
“You started it,” she cut him off. “But I’ll finish it. I don’t care if you’re the Devil himself. You still can’t sleep in my damn bed.”
“Stop it, now, Elena. You know exactly who I am. We’ve been together for almost a year—and you’re still a virgin, which ought to tell you something.”
“A year? Then why can’t I remember it? Why can’t I remember even one full day?” she demanded suddenly, half fiercely and half wailing.
Stefan, I am going to kill you. Damon didn’t dare send the message even on a tight beam in case Elena picked up on it. She was in a Mood, and he wouldn’t put random telepathy past her. Right now, she was a latent everything.
This is what happens when you take all the memories away from someone and don’t substitute some fantasy, he thought bitterly. Stefan, of course, would think of that as cheating. But—congratulations!—he was now close to driving a second young girl to insanity.
Elena was panting. The cabernet camisole was developing troughs and crests from wavelength interference. Damon recognized an imminent explosion when he saw one.
She was still harping on the Tyger, tyger theme, making her way toward some quite terrifying conclusion.
“When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?”
Oh, dear. She was serious, staring into his eyes as if his soul was perfectly accessible and she only needed to watch the sparkle of synapses to trace his thoughts. This wouldn’t have worried him so much if she hadn’t once been to Completely and Utterly Dead—a realm he had never visited. Almost completely and utterly dead he understood fairly well, and even that had given him the ability to see into other worlds.
When she’d come back from death she’d extemporaneously developed the ability to explode planets. The Guardians of the Celestial Court were certain that they’d taken that gift away from her by clipping her wings.
Damon wished he had more respect for the Guardians.
“All right,” he told her. “The answers to your questions are: first, I prefer to think so; and second, most probably not. I am trying not to bullshit you here.”
Elena closed her eyes, which was unfair on two counts. For one thing she could no longer see the wild and winsome smile he was holding steady in order to bullshit her. And for another, her eyelashes were as dark as her hair was bright and long enough to cast shadows on her cheek. Gross injustice, that was.
“Okay,” she breathed. “Now you tell me what you’ve done to me during the last year.”
No freaking way. He couldn’t even get out of it by saying “almost everything.” Elena was Elena; she’d want a list. She’d want a numbered list.
During the last calendar year he’d terrorized her and worshipped her; he’d owned her as a slave and acknowledged her as more of an equal than anyone he’d known before in his life. When she had been most vulnerable he had, for novelty’s sake, even tried being fair to her.
When she had saved his misspent life from almost utter and complete death he’d snapped at her like a wounded coyote in a trap. Before that, when she’d courted death by hypothermia, he’d burned every erg of his Power to warm her. Once, he’d given her his jacket for keeps, but she’d thrown it back at him from a third-story window for thrashing Stefan.
She had continually challenged him, and every time she did he’d kissed her, or tried to. He’d kissed her when he’d healed her wounds. He’d kissed her when he was hungry, and when he was lonely, and when they’d evaluated tactics together. All in all, there had been quite a lot of kissing.
Elena still had her eyes shut. She wasn’t weeping; she was weighing options. She didn’t have Meredith’s book smarts but she was the finest general since Charlemagne, and she was literate, which the old emperor hadn’t been. She thought in terms of enfilade and defilade quite naturally.
She could certainly outthink Damon. She’d started doing it the second time they’d met. Only overwhelming superior force or sheer serendipitous accident could defeat her.
Elena opened her eyes. She’d fallen into a stance that Meredith had undoubtedly taught her in the last weeks. Her expression was not confident, but it was stone-cold determined.
But she had no idea of his speed or strength or dexterity. Despite her accusations, she had only mortal creatures for comparison. Now, she’d finished her calculations and decided on a gambit. The truth was that he’d be hard put not to hurt her if she wanted to fight that way. She always fought as dirty as he did; often trying to force him to break her bones or cut her throat just to make a point.
“Well?” she asked. “J’accuse! Are you going to tell me? Or do you want me to start guessing?”
Switches flipped in Damon’s brain. The conversation had gone out of control when she’d started talking about God not making Tygers and he hadn’t called a mental health helpline. He no longer had a choice.
“No,” he said, and left her for a moment, doubtless wondering “No” to what? He drank the rest of the Black Magic and prepared to burn his life energy.
“I’ll guess. You are—”
“Princess, I’m sorry, but you need to forget this whole conversation.”
“Oh, don’t say sorry. You were doing really well until you said sorry.”
“You are now forgetting our entire conversation,” he repeated, expressionlessly because she was going to forget whatever he said and the way he said it. “You are forgetting everything that happened since I came in the door and Matt left. You’re remembering that we ate pizza together and watched TV and then we fell asleep. Both of us, lying on your bed with our clothes on.”
“Liar!”
Damon took the Power he’d worked up, coiled it, and cast a tendril of Influence around her like a cowboy roping a recalcitrant heifer. Except that, since the energy was still part of him, it hurt like hell. He ignored the pain. He couldn’t outsmart her, so he was going with the overwhelming force route.
“You’re forgetting right . . . now.” He pulled the tendril tight, and it held. It felt like restraining someone by using your own entrails.
“No! Stop it! What are you doing?”
“You’re forgetting that I told you to forget.”
“No,” she keened, drawing out the syllable. She tried one last stratagem: flirting. “Damon, please, no . . .”
“It’s for your own mental stability, princess. Besides, I owe you. There is—ah—blood red in my ledger.” He laughed a little. He was used to amusing himself alone around and about Fell’s Church while Stefan and Elena did whatever they liked together. He was a loner by disposition; a lover by necessity.
Elena was still fighting. “I can’t—I need to write down—”
He put himself in the way of her desk and whiteboard. “What would you write? You don’t keep a diary any longer, you know. We ate pizza; we watched some old movie on your new TV. We fell asleep on the bed.”
Elena shut her eyes and swayed. Damon locked his teeth and drew out another long filament of life-energy. He tossed it around her, pulled it taut. Simultaneously he held her still with both hands on her shoulders.
“We ate microwaved pizza and watched TV. What old movie did we watch?” He shut his own eyes, wincing, devoutly hoping he hadn’t just made a fatal mistake. She was perfectly capable of saying Dracula.
“We watched . . . Jurassic Park.”
“What was it about?”—suspiciously. He wasn’t some pervert who fondled girls in the darkness of movie theaters.
He liked to see his conquests clearly, and amplified soundtracks hurt his exquisite hearing.
“Dinosaurs, of course. What rock do you live under? But, A, the special effects were old-fashioned; and, Two, Michael Crichton’s misogyny spoiled it a bit. The T-Rex was quite nice, though.”
“Forget that I asked what it was about; also the ‘ what rock’ line. And . . . A and Two?” If her thinking was genuinely disordered he might have to start again from scratch. He didn’t know how he could live through that without biting her.
“A and Two? I already told—somebody—about that. You; it had to be. I’ve got déjà vu going on.”
“Okay. That’s fine. What did we do after the movie?”
“We . . . got tired.”
Damon shifted his grip to her upper arms. It was time for the ultimate inquisition. “And?”
“You said . . . you said, ‘Goodnight, princess.’”
As usual, Elena was dancing to the beat of her own self-selected orchestra.
Feeling chill and desiccated as the Dry Valleys in Antarctica, Damon was just deciding that he was going to have to Influence her again when she spoke in a whisper.
“You gave me a locket. You fastened it around my neck. I said, ‘It’s beautiful.’ And then we . . . got sleepy. I . . . fell . . .”
Elena fell.
Face turned up, eyes drifting shut, she collapsed toward him lips first. It was no particular trouble to guide her into a kiss.
Damon felt he deserved the kiss after everything he’d been through. He resisted his temptation to bite and enjoyed the warmth and sweetness that she seemed quite happy to share. For a born general, Elena was surprisingly cuddly.
When she fell asleep in the middle of the embrace, Damon automatically picked her up. Girls fell asleep all the time while he held them. Fangs were terrific tranquilizers.
He carried her to the lavender-sheeted bed and put her on it. He considered—just for a second—putting the rolled-up coverlet of Stefan’s beside her as a makeshift sword to separate them, but he hadn’t just put himself through hell to sleep without skin contact.
He draped the velvet coverlet over her instead. It clung to her every slim line and curve as if it adored her.
Damon fished the rose locket out again and carefully fastened it around her beautiful, exquisitely blue-veined neck. He took half the cold pizza out of the last of the square boxes and put it on a paper plate in the hallway. Eventually someone would come along and throw it away, or possibly eat it.
Finally, he dragged the lavender and turquoise bedspread over to his side of the bed. He had just enough strength to lie down and shake the flowered spread over both of them. Then, turning toward Elena, he slowly reached out and took her hand. She didn’t stir.
He’d won. Hoorah for him. He was so tired he couldn’t even think about being hungry.
He fell asleep.
* * *
Stefan was walking in Dyer Wood. He didn’t go too far in. He wanted to stay where he could watch Elena’s aura, which was easy right at the moment, but would become harder as his Power level dropped. He probed the forest automatically as he went, but found nothing of interest, not even a single malach. Certainly there were werewolves slinking around, but that was only natural, and they could be safely ignored.
No sign of anything like a baobhan sith.
He paused for a moment, wishing he’d pressed on and explained to Damon that the exotic name simply referred to a faery woman in Scottish folklore. It was something he’d come across deep in Bonnie’s memories, and which he’d promptly erased. The faery was supposed to have green eyes and a green dress, and to use her long fingernails to draw blood from her victims.
Damon had been in no frame of mind to listen in any case, he thought.
Satisfied that there was no danger in the wood as a whole, Stefan set out to find a tree. He inspected sturdy specimens of oak, black walnut, hickory, and elm. Almost none of the trees in the wood had yet begun to flare into their fall colors. They were all as green as the conifers, with only a straggling sapling here and there giving any promise of the conflagration to come.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Stefan thought as he stopped before an enormous oak and considered it. After several minutes of evaluation he began to climb the forest giant like a cat, looking for a flat and comfortable branch.
I’m actually sleeping in a tree, when there’s a perfectly decent mattress in my dorm room.
This was Damon’s bailiwick, or at least it had been when Damon had visited Fell’s Church. Damon had always enjoyed being on his own: lurking silently in the shadows; only emerging when prodigious danger threatened those he cared about, or when he thought he could stun the resident humans with some clever bit of flamboyance. Damon liked being invisible most of the time and wouldn’t tolerate simply walking through ordinary life when nothing much was happening.
Damon was a diva.
Stefan, on the other hand, had always preferred his simple but comfortable room in Mrs. Flowers’ boardinghouse. There he had stayed safely out of the elements—and later, had stayed with the reborn Elena.
I gave all that away, Stefan thought numbly. Damon has it now. He’s sleeping in Elena’s bed. Elena’s friends—my friends—think they’re his friends. And I did it all to myself, with the power of my own mind. There’s no one else to blame.
He could hear Mrs. Flowers reciting the words Mama had given her from Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus:
“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?”
I tasted the eternal joys of heaven with Elena. If God exists, He was behind her return from the dead. I used to be so happy, and I didn’t even appreciate it properly. Now I’m like someone who’s lost an arm or leg, but can still feel it, and it hurts. My phantom heart is eternally caught in an agonizing, muscle-clenched position.
I gave it all to Damon, everything that was best about my life. I did it of my own will. Worse, I’m the devil in Mrs. Flowers’ prophecy. I’m thoroughly damned. When I let my thirst for Elena’s blood take over, I committed an unforgiveable sin and lost my right to Paradise.
Of course, after that all he could think about were lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
For Elena:
Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye,
in every gesture dignity and love.
For what they had had together:
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.
And for his prospects now:
Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells:
Hail, horrors, hail.
Hail, horrors, hail! The words kept echoing inside Stefan’s head, like a cheap special effect. He realized that however awful he felt right now, there was worse in store.
Once I regained my senses I didn’t have a choice. I did what I had to do, he tried to tell himself sternly. Damon’s the only one who can protect her as she needs to be protected. And he gave me his solemn word . . .
Thinking about that, about what it meant for Elena, Stefan leaned his head back against the oak’s trunk. He could have groaned out loud, but there was no one to hear but the mice and other nocturnal creatures that scuttled on the ground and all about him.
He forced his body to relax, limb by reluctant limb. He was hoping to find some peace in the black oblivion of sleep.
His mind kept echoing the words, refusing to let go.
Hail, horrors, hail.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make
a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…”
― John Milton
To be continued in
Evensong
Part Two:
The War of Roses
ire Diaries: Evensong: Paradise Lost