The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight

by L. J. Smith

  “We just won’t do anything for a little while,” she said. “You don’t have to be sad.” But she herself still felt very wrong. She hadn’t felt this wrong since she’d seen Stefan in prison and had thought that he would die at any moment.

  No…it was worse…because with Stefan there had been hope and Elena had the feeling that now hope was gone. Everything was gone. She was hollow: a girl who looked solid, but whose insides were missing.

  “I’m dying,” she whispered. “I know it…Are you all going to say good-bye now?”

  And with that Sage—Sage!—choked up and began to sob. Stefan, still looking so oddly mussed, with those traces of soot on his face and arms and his hair and clothes soaking wet, said, “Elena, you’re not going to die. Not unless you choose to.”

  She had never seen Stefan look like this before. Not even in prison. His flame, his inner fire that he showed to almost no one but Elena, had gone out.

  “Sage saved us,” he said, slowly carefully, as if it cost him great effort to speak. “The ash that was falling—you and Bonnie would have died if you’d had to breathe any more of it. But Sage put a door back to the Gatehouse right in front of us. I could barely see it; my eyes were so full of ashfall, and it’s only getting worse on that moon.”

  “Ashfall,” Elena whispered. There was something at the bottom of her mind, but once again her memory failed her. It was almost as if she’d been Influenced to not remember. But that was ridiculous.

  “Why were ashes falling?” she asked, realizing that her voice was husky, hoarse—as if she’d cheered too long at a football game.

  “You used Wings of Destruction,” Stefan said steadily, looking at her with his swollen eyes. “You saved our lives. But you killed the Tree—and the star ball disintegrated.”

  Wings of Destruction. She must have lost her temper. And she’d killed a world. She was a murderer.

  And now the star ball was lost. Fell’s Church. Oh, God. What would Damon say to her? Elena had done everything—everything wrong. Bonnie was sobbing now, her face turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” Elena said, knowing how inadequate this was. For the first time she looked around miserably. “Damon?” she whispered. “He won’t speak to me? Because of what I did?”

  Sage and Stefan looked at each other.

  Ice went down Elena’s spine.

  She started to get up, but her legs weren’t the legs she remembered. They wanted to unlock at the knees. She was staring down at herself, at her own wet and smudged clothes—and then something like mud came down her forehead. Mud or congealing blood.

  Bonnie made a sound. She was still sobbing, but she was speaking, too, in a new husky voice that made her sound much older. “Elena—we didn’t get the ashes out of the top of your hair. Sage had to give you an emergency transfusion.”

  “I’ll get the ashes out,” Elena said flatly. She let her knees bend. She fell onto them, jarring her body. Then, twisting, she leaned down to the little brook and let her head fall forward. Through the icy shock she could dimly hear exclamations from the people above water, and Stefan’s sharp, Elena, are you all right? in her head.

  No, she thought back. But I’m not drowning, either. I’m washing out my hair. Maybe Damon will at least see me if I’m presentable. Maybe he’ll come with us and fight for Fell’s Church.

  Let me help you up, Stefan sent quietly.

  Elena had come to the end of her air. She pulled her heavy head out of the water and flipped it, soaking but clean, so that it fell down her back. She stared at Stefan.

  “Why?” she said—and then, with a sudden panic—“Has he left already? Was he angry…with me?”

  “Stefan.” It was Sage, speaking tiredly. Stefan, who was staring out of his green eyes like a hunted animal, made some faint sound.

  “The Influence, it is not working,” Sage said. “She will remember on her own.”

  41

  Stefan didn’t move or speak for long moments. Elena’s heart swelled. Suddenly she was as afraid as he clearly was. She went to him and took both his hands, which were shaking.

  Darling, don’t cry, she sent. There must still be time to save Fell’s Church. There must. It can’t end this way. And besides, Shinichi is gone! We can get to the children; we can break the conditioning…” She stopped. It was as if the word “conditioning” echoed in her ears. Stefan’s green eyes were filling her vision. Her mind was getting…it was getting fuzzy. Everything was becoming unreal again. In a minute she wouldn’t be able to…

  She wrenched her eyes away, breathing hard.

  “You were Influencing me,” she said. She could hear the anger in her own voice.

  “Yes,” Stefan whispered. “I’ve been Influencing you for half an hour.”

  How dare you? Elena thought, just for him.

  “I’m stopping it…now,” Stefan said quietly.

  “As am I,” Sage added, sounding exhausted.

  And the universe did a slow spin and Elena remembered what it was that they were all keeping from her.

  With a wild sob, she rose, scattering droplets, coming to her feet like an avenging goddess. She looked at Sage. She looked at Stefan.

  And Stefan proved how brave he was, how much he loved her. He told her what she already knew. “Damon is gone, Elena. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if…if I kept you from being with him as much as you wanted to. I’m sorry if I came between you. I didn’t understand—how much you loved each other. I do now.” And then he dropped his face into his hands.

  Elena wanted to go to him. To scold him, to hold him. To tell Stefan that she loved him just as much, drop for drop, grain for grain. But her body had gone numb, and the darkness was threatening again…all she could do was hold out her arms as she crumpled onto the grass. And then somehow Bonnie and Stefan were both there, the three of them all sobbing: Elena with the intensity of new discovery; Stefan with a lost sound that Elena had never heard before; and Bonnie with a dry, wrenching exhaustion that seemed to want to shatter her small body.

  Time lost all meaning. Elena wanted to grieve for every moment of Damon’s painful death, and for every moment of his life, too. So much had been lost. She couldn’t get her head around it, and she didn’t want to do anything but cry until the kind darkness took her mind again.

  That was when Sage broke.

  He grabbed Elena and pulled her up, and shook her by the shoulders. It snapped her head back and forth.

  “Your town is in ruins!” he shouted, as if this was her fault. “Midnight may or may not bring disaster. Oh, yes, I saw it all in your mind when I went in to Influence you. Little Fell’s Church is already devastated. And you won’t even fight for it!”

  Something blazed through Elena. It melted the numbness, the iciness. “Yes, I’ll fight for it!” she screamed. “I’ll fight for it with every breath in my body, until I stop the people who did it, or until they kill me!”

  “And how, puis-je savoir, will you get back in time? By the time you walk back the way you came, it will all be over!”

  Stefan was beside her, bracing her, shoulder to shoulder. “Then we’ll force you to send us some other way—so that we can get back in time!”

  Elena stared. No. No. Stefan couldn’t have said that. Stefan didn’t force his way—and she wouldn’t have him changing himself. She whirled back on Sage. “There’s no need to fight! I have a Master Key in my backpack, and magic works here inside the Gatehouse!” she cried.

  But Stefan and Sage were staring each other down, each fierce and intent. Elena wanted to go to Stefan but the world was doing another of its slow somersaults. She was afraid that Sage would attack Stefan, and that she couldn’t even fight for him.

  But instead, suddenly, Sage threw back his head and laughed wildly. Or perhaps it was something between thunderous laughing and crying. It was as eerie as the sound of a wolf baying, and Elena felt Bonnie’s small, trembling body hug her—to comfort both of them.

  “What the hell!” Sage bellowed, and now th
ere was a wild look in his eyes, too. “Mais oui, what the Hell?” He laughed again. “After all, I am the Gatekeeper, and I have already broken the rules by allowing you through two different doors.”

  Stefan was still breathing hard. Now he reached out and grabbed Sage by his broad shoulders and shook him with the strength of a vampire gone mad. “What are you talking about? There’s no time for talk!”

  “Ah, but there is, mon ami. My friend, there is. What you need is the firepower of the heavens to save Fell’s Church—and to undo the damage that has already been done. To wipe it out, to make it as if it had never happened. And,” Sage added deliberately, looking directly at Elena, “perhaps—just perhaps—to undo this day’s events, also.”

  Suddenly every inch of Elena’s skin was tingling. Her whole body was listening to Sage, leaning toward him, yearning, while her eyes widened with the only other question that mattered.

  Sage said, very softly, very triumphantly, “Yes. They can bestow life upon the dead. They have that Power. They can bring back mon petit tyran Damon—as they brought you back.”

  Stefan and Bonnie were holding Elena up. She couldn’t stand on her own.

  “But why would they help?” she whispered painfully. She wouldn’t allow herself even a breath of hope, not until she understood everything.

  “In exchange for what was stolen from them millennia ago,” Sage replied. “You are in a fortress of Hell, you know. That is what the Gatehouse is. The Guardians cannot enter here. They cannot storm the gate and demand back what is inside…the seven—pardon, now six—kitsune treasures.”

  Not a breath of hope. Not a breath. But Elena heard herself give a wild laugh.

  “How do we give them a park? Or a field of black roses?”

  “We give them the rights to the land that the park and the field of roses lie upon.”

  Not a breath, even though the bodies on either side of Elena were shaking now. “And how do we offer them the Fountain of Eternal Youth and Life?”

  “We do not. However, I have here various containers, waiting to be collected as garbage. The threat of a gallon bottle of La Fontaine randomly spread all over your Earth…that would devastate them. And, of course,” Sage added, “I know the kinds of gems with enchantments already upon them that they would most desire. Here, let me open the doors all at once! We take all we can—the rooms, strip them bare!”

  His enthusiasm was contagious. Elena half-turned, breath held, eyes widened to catch the first glowing of a door’s light.

  “Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your—your father—going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed this?”

  “He will not kill me,” Sage said brusquely, the wild tone back in his voice. “He may even find it as amusant as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.”

  “And if he doesn’t find it amusing? Sage, I don’t think…Damon wouldn’t have wanted—”

  Sage whirled around and for the first time since she had met him, Elena could believe with her whole soul that he was the son of his father. His eyes had even seemed to change color, to the yellow of a flame, with diamond pupils like a cat’s. His voice was like steel splintering, harder even than Stefan’s. “What is between my father and me is my own business—mine! Stay here if you want. He never bothers himself about vampires, anyway—he says they’re cursed already. But I am going to do everything I can to bring mon chéri Damon back.”

  “Whatever the cost to you?”

  “The hell with the cost!”

  To Elena’s surprise, Stefan gripped Sage’s shoulders for a moment and then simply hugged as much of him as he could hold.

  “I just wanted to make sure,” he said quietly. “Thank you, Sage. Thank you.” Then he turned and strode over to the Royal Radhika plant, and with one yank, pulled it out of its bower.

  Elena, heart beating in her lips and throat and fingertips, ran to gather the empty containers and bottles Sage was tossing out of a ninth doorway that had appeared in between the mine shaft and the field of black roses. She snatched up a gallon container and an Evian water bottle, both with secure caps intact. They were made of plastic, which was good, because she dropped them both just going across the room to the bubbling fountain. Her hands were shaking that badly; and all the time she was sending up a monotonous prayer, Oh, please. Oh, please. Oh, please!

  She got water into both containers at the Fountain and capped them. And then she realized that Bonnie was still standing in the middle of the Gatehouse. She looked bewildered, frightened.

  “Bonnie?”

  “Sage?” Bonnie said. “How do we get these things to the Celestial Court to bargain with them?”

  “Have no worries,” Sage said kindly. “I am certain that Guardians will be waiting just outside to arrest us. They will take us to the Court.”

  Bonnie didn’t stop trembling, but she nodded and hurried to help Sage get bottles of Black Magic—and break them. “A symbol,” he said. “Un signe of what we will do to this area if the Celestials don’t agree. Be careful not to cut your pretty hands.”

  Elena thought she heard Bonnie’s husky voice then, and that it was not a happy tone. But Sage’s rumbling murmur was reassuring. And Elena would neither allow herself to hope nor despair. She had a task in hand, a scheme. She was making private Plans for the Celestial Court.

  When she and Bonnie had all the plunder they could carry, and their backpacks were full as well, when Stefan had two narrow black boxes that held deeds, and when Sage looked like a cross between Santa Claus and a bronzed, gorgeous, long-haired Hercules, as he carried two sacks made of pillowcases, they gave one last look around at the ravaged Gatehouse.

  “All right,” Sage said then. “Time to face the Guardians.” He smiled reassuringly at Bonnie.

  As usual, Sage was right. The moment they came out with their booty, Guardians from two different dimensions were ready for them. The first type were the ones who looked vaguely like Elena: blond hair, dark blue eyes, slender. The Guardians of the Nether World seemed senior to these, and were lithe women with skin so dark it was almost ebony, and hair that curled tightly in a cap over their heads. Behind them were brilliant golden air cars.

  “You are under arrest,” one of the dark ones said, not looking as if she enjoyed her job, “for removing treasures that rightfully belong to the Celestial Court out of the sanctuary where it was agreed that they would be kept, under the laws of both our dimensions.”

  And then it was only a matter of hanging on to the golden air cars while hanging on at the same time to their unlawful booty.

  The Celestial Court was…celestial. Pearly white with a faint hint of blue. Minarets. It was a long distance from the heavily guarded gate—where Elena had seen a third type of Guardian, one with short red hair and slanted, piercing green eyes—to the actual palace, which seemed to encompass a city.

  But it was when Elena’s group was guided to the throne room that the real culture shock hit. It was far larger and far more glorious than any room Elena had ever imagined. No ball or gala in the Dark Dimensions could have prepared her in the least for it. The cathedral ceiling seemed to be made entirely of gold, as were the double line of stately columns that marched vertically across the floor. The floor itself was of intricately patterned malachite and gold-threaded lapis lazuli, with gold seemingly used as grouting—and with a heavy hand at that. The three golden fountains in the middle of the room (the central one was the largest and most elaborate) threw into the air not water, but delicately perfumed flower petals that sparkled like diamonds in turning at their apex and then floated down again. Stained-glass windows in brilliant colors that Elena couldn’t remember ever having seen before threw rainbow light like a benediction from high on every wall, giving warmth to the otherwise cool engraved gold.

  Sage and Elena and Stefan and Bonnie were seated in small comfortable chairs just a few feet back from a great dais, dr
aped with a fantastically woven golden cloth. The treasures were spread out in front of them, as attendants dressed in flowing blue and gold took the objects one by one up to the current ruling triumvirate in back.

  The rulers comprised one each of the groups of Guardians—fair, dark, redheaded. Their seats on the dais ensured that they were far from—and high above—their petitioners. But with Power sent to her eyes, Elena could see perfectly well that they each sat on an exquisitely jeweled golden throne. They were speaking softly together, admiring the Royal Radhika flower—blue delphiniums at the moment. Then the dark one smiled and sent one of her attendants running for a pot with soil for the plant to survive in.

  Elena stared sightlessly at the other treasures. A gallon of water from the Fountain of Eternal Youth and Life. Six bottles of unbroken Black Magic wine, and the shards of at least that many around them. A blazing rainbow to rival the stained-glass windows in fist-sized gems, some raw, some already faceted and polished, but most of them not only faceted, but also hand-carved with mysterious gold or silver inscriptions. Two long, black, velvet-lined boxes with yellowing cylinders of papyrus or paper inside them, one with a pure black rose lying next to it, and the other with a simple spray of light springtime-green leaves. Elena knew what the yellowed documents with their cracked waxen seals were. The deeds to the field of black roses and the kitsune paradise.

  When you saw all the treasures together like this, it almost seemed too much, Elena thought. Any one object from any one of the Seven—no, now Six—kitsune Treasures was enough to trade worlds for. One sprig of the Royal Radhika, which was even now being returned, (pink larkspur changing to a white orchid) properly potted again, was immeasurably precious. So was a single velvety black rose, with its power to hold the most powerful of magics. One jewel from the hoard in the mining cavern, maybe a double-fist-sized diamond that put the Star of Africa and the Golden Jubilee to shame. One day in the kitsune paradise, where a day could seem like a perfect lifetime. One sip of that effervescent water that could make a human live as long as the oldest Old One…