The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight

by L. J. Smith

  Of course there should also have been the largest star ball in existence, full of eldritch Power, but Elena was hoping that the Guardians would overlook that.

  Hoping? She wondered and shook her head at nothing, causing Bonnie to squeeze her hand tightly. Not hoping. She didn’t dare hope. Not a breath yet.

  Another attendant, red-haired, flashing them a cold green-eyed look, picked up the plastic gallon bottle that said Sector 3 Water on the label. Sage rumbled as she left, “Qu’est-ce qui lui prend? I mean, what is her problem? I like the water in the vampire sector. I don’t like the pump water in the Nether World.”

  Elena had already figured out the color code for the Guardians. The blond ones were all business, impatient only with delays. The dark ones were the kindest—maybe there was less work for them to do in the Nether World. The green-eyed redheads were just plain bitchy. Unfortunately, the young woman on the central throne up there on the dais was a redhead.

  “Bonnie?” she whispered.

  Bonnie had to gulp and sniff before she could get out, “Yes?”

  “Have I ever told you how much I like your eyes?”

  Bonnie gave her a long brown-eyed gaze before beginning to shake with laughter. At least it started out like laughter, and then Bonnie burrowed her head into Elena’s shoulder and simply shook.

  Stefan squeezed Elena’s hand. “She’s been trying so hard—for you. She—she loved him too, you see. I didn’t even know that. I guess…I guess I’ve just been blind on all sides.”

  He ran his free hand through his already-tousled hair. He looked very young, like a little boy who had been suddenly punished for doing something he hadn’t been told was wrong. Elena remembered him in the backyard of the boardinghouse, dancing with her feet on his feet, and then in his attic room, kissing her hands, her knuckles bruised with hammering, the pulsing inside of her wrists. She wanted to tell him that everything was going to be all right, that the laughter would come back to his eyes, but she couldn’t stand the chance of lying to him.

  Suddenly Elena felt like a very, very old woman, who could hear and see only dimly, whose every movement caused her terrible pain, and who was cold inside. Her every joint and every bone was filled with ice.

  At last, when all the treasures, including a sparkling, diamond-set, golden Master Key, had been taken up for the young women on the thrones to handle, heft, examine, and discuss, a warm-eyed dark-skinned woman came to Elena’s group. “You may approach Their High Judgments now. And,” she added in a voice as soft as the stroke of a dragonfly’s wing, “they are very, very impressed. That doesn’t often happen. Speak meekly and keep your heads low and I think you shall have your hearts’ desires.”

  Something inside Elena gave a bound that would have sent her leaping to clutch at the retreating attendant’s robe, but fortunately Stefan had her in an embrace of iron. Bonnie’s head came off Elena’s shoulder, and Elena had to restrain her, in turn.

  They walked, the very portrait of meekness, to where four scarlet cushions blazed against the golden weave of the floor cloth. Once, Elena would have refused to abase herself. Now, she was thankful for a soft resting place for her knees.

  This close, she could see that the rulers each wore a circlet of some metal, from which a single stone hung on to her forehead.

  “We have considered your petition,” the dark one said, her white-gold circlet with its diamond pendant dazzling Elena with pinpricks of lilac and red and royal blue. “Oh, yes,” she added, laughing. “We know what you want. Even a Guardian on the street would have to be very bad at her job not to know. You want your town…renewed. The burned buildings rebuilt. The victims of the malach pestilence re-created, their souls swathed again in flesh, and their memories—”

  “But, first,” interrupted the fair one, waving a hand, “don’t we have business at hand? This girl—Elena Gilbert—may not be eligible to be a spokesman for her group. If she becomes a Guardian, she doesn’t belong with the petitioners.”

  The redhead tossed her head like an impatient filly, causing the rose gold of her circlet to flash, and its ruby to shimmer. “Oh, go on then, Ryannen. If your recruitment levels are so low—”

  The businesslike fair one ignored this, but bent forward, some of her hair held back from her face by her circlet of yellow gold with its sapphire pendant. “What about it, Elena? I know our first encounter was—unfortunate. You must believe that I am sorry for that. But you were well on your way to becoming a full Guardian when we had orders from Above to weave you into a new body so that you could take up your life as a human again.”

  “You did that? Of course you did.” Elena’s voice was soft and low and flattering. “You can do anything. But—our first encounter? I don’t remember—”

  “You were too young, and you saw just a flash of our air car as it passed your parents’ vehicle. It was meant to be a minor accident with one apparent casualty—you. But instead…”

  Bonnie’s hands flew to her mouth. She was clearly getting something Elena wasn’t. Her parents’ “vehicle”…? The last time she’d driven with her father and mother—and little Margaret—had been the day of the crash. The day she’d distracted her father, who’d been driving…

  “Look, Daddy! Look at the pretty—”

  And then had come the impact.

  Elena forgot about being meek and keeping her head low. In fact, she raised her head, and met gold-splattered blue eyes very much like hers. Her own gaze, she knew, was piercing and hard.

  “You…killed my parents?” she whispered.

  “No, no!” the dark one cried. “It was an operation gone sour. We only had to intersect with the Earth dimension for a few minutes. But, quite unexpectedly, your talent flared. You saw our air car. Instead of a crash with only one apparent casualty: you, your father turned to look and…” Slowly her voice trailed off as Elena’s turned unbelieving eyes on her.

  Bonnie was staring sightlessly into the distance, almost as if she were in trance. “Shinichi,” she breathed. “That weird riddle of his—or whatever it was. That one of us had murdered, and that it was nothing to do with being a vampire or a mercy killing…”

  “I’d always assumed it was me,” Stefan said quietly. “My mother never really recovered after my birth. She died.”

  “But that doesn’t make you a murderer!” Elena cried. “Not like me. Not like me!”

  “Well, that was why I was asking you now,” the businesslike blond woman said. “It was a flawed mission, but you understand that we were only trying to recruit you, yes? It’s the traditional method. Our genes have honed us to be the best at managing powerful, irrational demons, who don’t respond to traditional strength but require on-the-spot recalculation—”

  Elena choked back a scream. A scream of wrath—agony—disbelief—guilt—she didn’t know what. Her Plans. Her schemes. The way she had handled boisterous boys in the bad old days—it was all genetic. And…her parents…what had they died for?

  Stefan stood up. His jaw was hard, his green eyes were burning brilliantly. There was no gentleness in his face. He clasped Elena’s hand and she heard, If you want to fight, I’m in.

  Mais, non. Elena turned around and saw Sage. His telepathic voice was unmistakable. She was compelled to listen. We cannot fight them on their own territory and win. Even I cannot. What you can do is make them pay! Elena, my brave one, your parents’ spirits have undoubtedly found new homes. It would be cruel to drag them back. But let us demand of the Guardians anything you desire. For a year and a day in the past, demand whatever you wish! I think that we all will back you.

  Elena paused. She looked at the Guardians and she looked at the treasures. She looked at Bonnie and Stefan, who were waiting. There was permission in their eyes.

  Then she said slowly to the Guardians, “This is really going to cost you. And I don’t want to hear that any of it is impossible. For all your treasures back and the Master Key too…I want my old life. No, I want a new life, with my real old life behind
me. I want to be Elena Gilbert, exactly as if I’d graduated with my high school class, and I want to go to Dalcrest College. I want to wake up in my aunt Judith’s house in the morning and find that no one realizes I’ve been gone for almost ten months. And I want a 4.5 grade point average for my last year in high school—just in case of emergencies. And I want Stefan to have lived in the boardinghouse peacefully all that time, and to have everyone accept him as my boyfriend. And I want every single thing that Shinichi and Misao and whoever they were working for did undone and forgotten. I want the person they were working for dead. And I want everything that Klaus did in Fell’s Church undone as well. I want Sue Carson back! I want Vickie Bennett back! I want everyone back!”

  Bonnie said faintly, “Even Mr. Tanner?”

  Elena understood. If Mr. Tanner had not died—mysteriously drained of blood—then Alaric Saltzman would never have been called to Fell’s Church. Elena remembered Alaric from the out-of-body experience: sandy hair, laughing hazel eyes. She thought of Meredith and his almost-engagement to her.

  But who was she to play God? To say, yes, this person can die because he was unlovely and unloved, but this one has to live because she was my friend.

  42

  “It’s not a problem,” the fair ruler, Ryannen, said unexpectedly. “We can make it so that your Mr. Tanner repelled an apparent vampire attack and the school called in Alaric Saltzman to take his place and investigate. All right, Idola?”—to the redhead, and to the dark one—“All right, Susurre?”

  Elena wasn’t all right. Despite the example she’d just had of turn-on-a-dime plotting and scheming, she was scarcely listening. All she knew was that her voice had gone husky and that tears blurred her eyes. “And…for the Master Key—I want—”

  Stefan squeezed her hand. Elena suddenly realized that they were all standing, all three of them, beside her. And the look on every face was the same. Dead resolve.

  “I want Damon back.” Elena hadn’t heard quite this note in her voice since the day she’d been told both her parents had died. If there had been a table, she would have put her clenched fists on it and did her best to loom over the women. As it was, she simply leaned toward them, speaking in a low and grating voice. “If you do that—bring him back, exactly as he was before he walked into the Gatehouse—then you get the Master Key and the treasures. You say no—and you lose everything. Everything. This is non-negotiable, get it?”

  She kept staring into Idola’s green eyes. She refused to see dark Susurre drop her forehead onto three fingertips and begin to rub it in small circles. She wouldn’t give a glance to blond Ryannen, who was looking at her steadily, having gone into people-management mode. She stared directly into those green eyes under their willful eyebrows. Idola gave a little huff and shook her gorgeous head.

  “Look, someone clearly has screwed up in preparing you for this interview.” A glance at Susurre. “The other things you’ve asked for—all together, it forms a very heavy ransom. Do you understand that? Do you understand that it involves changing the memories of all the people for miles around your town, and changing them for every day of ten months? That it means changing everything in print about Fell’s Church—and that there is a lot in print—not to mention other media outlets? It means begging for three human spirits and weaving flesh around them again. I’m not sure we even have the personnel for this—”

  Blond Ryannen put a hand on the redhead’s arm. “We have it. Susurre’s women have little to do in the Nether World. I can lend you perhaps thirty percent of mine—after all, we’re going to have to send up a petition to a higher Court for those spirits—”

  Idola the redhead interrupted. “All right. What I was saying is that we might just be able to manage—if you throw in the Key. However, your vampire companion—we can’t give life back to the lifeless. We can’t work with vampires. Once they’re gone—they’re gone.”

  “That’s what you tell us!” Stefan cried, trying to get in front of Elena. “But why are we so particularly damned, of all creatures? How do you know it’s impossible? Have you ever even tried?”

  Red-haired Idola was making a disgusted gesture, when Bonnie interrupted, her voice shaking. “It’s ridiculous! You can rebuild a town, you can kill the person who’s really behind all Shinichi and Misao did, but you can’t bring one little vampire back? You brought Elena back!”

  “Elena’s death as a vampire allowed her to become the Guardian she was originally meant to be. As for the person who gave orders to Shinichi and Misao: It was Inari Saitou—Obaasan Saitou, as you knew her—and she is already dead, thanks to your friends in Fell’s Church, who weakened her—and to you, who destroyed her star ball.”

  “Inari? You mean Isobel’s grandma? You’re saying it was her star ball in the Great Tree’s trunk? That’s impossible!” Bonnie cried.

  “No, it’s not. It’s the truth,” blond Ryannen said simply.

  “And she’s dead now?”

  “After a long battle which nearly killed your friends. Yes—but what actually killed her was having her star ball destroyed.”

  “So,” dark Susurre said quietly, “if you follow the curve…in a way your Damon did die to save Fell’s Church from another massacre like the one on that Japanese island. He kept saying that was what he’d come to the Nether World to do. Do you not think he would be…satisfied? At peace?”

  “At peace?” Stefan spat bitterly, and Sage growled.

  “Woman,” he said, “you obviously have never met Damon Salvatore before.” The tone in his voice—more resonant, more threatening somehow—made Elena finally break off her staredown with the red-haired Idola. She turned and looked—

  —and saw the enormous room filled with Sage’s out-spread wings.

  They weren’t like any of her ephemeral Wings Powers. They were clearly part of Sage. They were velvety and reptilian, and, unfurled like this, they stretched from distant wall to wall, and touched the grand, golden ceiling. They also demonstrated why Sage didn’t usually wear shirts.

  He was beautiful this way, bronze skin and hair against those giant, leathery soft-looking arches. But Elena, after one look at him, knew that the time had come to play the ace up her sleeve. She turned around to meet Idola’s green gaze squarely.

  “All this time we’ve been bargaining for a Gatehouse full of treasures,” she said, “and—one Master Key.”

  “A Master Key, stolen by the kitsune ages upon ages ago,” Susurre explained quietly, lifting her dark eyes.

  “And you’ve said that it’s not enough for you to bring Damon back.” Elena forced her voice not to waver.

  “Not even if it were your only request.” Ryannen tossed a golden lock of hair over her shoulder.

  “So you say. But…what if I throw into the pot…another Master Key?”

  There was a pause, and Elena’s heart began to pound in sick terror. Because it was the wrong kind of pause. There were no shocked gasps. No astonished glances from one Guardian ruler to another. No looks of disbelief.

  After another moment Idola said smugly, “If you mean the other stolen key that your friends had on Earth—it was confiscated as soon as they hid it. It was stolen property. It belonged to us.”

  She’s been here too long, in the Dark Dimensions, Elena thought with one part of her mind. She’s enjoying herself.

  Idola leaned toward her, as if to confirm Elena’s guess. “It—simply—is not—possible,” she said emphatically.

  “Really, it isn’t,” the fair Ryannen added briskly. “We don’t know what happens to vampires. But they don’t pass through our purview. We never see them after death. The simplest explanation is that they just—go out.” She snapped her fingers.

  “I don’t believe that!” Elena was aware that her voice had risen in volume. “I don’t believe that for one moment!”

  Voices, not attached to anyone in particular, burst into a clamor of argument around Elena, forming a sort of poem:

  Not possible. It’s simply not possible!
(But please…) No! Damon is gone, and to ask where is like asking where a candle flame goes when it’s blown out. (But shouldn’t you try to bring him back, at the least?) Whatever has happened to gratitude? You four should be grateful that the other things you asked for can be done. (But in exchange for both Master Keys—) No Power we can command could bring Damon back! Elena must try to reconcile herself to reality. She has been pampered too much already! (But what harm can it do to try again?) All right! If you must know, Susurre has already forced us to try. And nothing came of it! Damon…is…gone! His spirit was nowhere to be found in the ether! That is what happens to vampires, and everyone knows it!

  Elena found herself looking down at her own hands, which were very clean but with broken nails and every knuckle bleeding. The outside world had become unreal again. She was inside herself, struggling with her grief, struggling with the knowledge that Idola, the central ruler of Guardians, hadn’t even mentioned before that they had looked for Damon’s spirit. And that it was…gone.

  Suddenly, the room was pressing in on her. There wasn’t enough air. There were only these women: these powerful, magical Guardian women; who still did not have enough power or magic to save Damon—or at least didn’t even care enough to try twice.

  She wasn’t sure what was happening to her. Her throat felt puffed out, her chest was both huge and tight. Each heartbeat sounded through her as if trying to shake her to death.

  To death. In her mind’s eye, she saw a hand hold up a glass of Clarion Loess Black Magic.

  And then, Elena knew that she had to stand a certain way, and hold her arms a certain way, and whisper certain words in her own mind. But the last, the naming of the spell, had only to be said aloud at the end.

  At the end—when things slowed. When green-eyed Idola—what a perfect name for someone who idolized herself, Elena thought—and fair businesslike Ryannen and nurturing Susurre—all stared at her with open mouths, too shocked to move even a finger as, quietly and calmly, Elena said, “Wings of Destruction—”