by Smith, L. J.
“Gold,” Elena said instantly, surprising herself. When she reached to take the golden square from his hand a powerful, pleasurable feeling of electric current shot from her palm up her arm and seemed to skewer her straight through the heart. Damon clung to her fingers briefly as she took the square and Elena found she could still feel electricity pulsing from his fingertips.
The underside of her veil blew out white and sparkling as if set with diamonds. God, maybe they were diamonds, she thought. How could you tell with Damon?
“Your wedding veil, perhaps?” Damon murmured, lips close to her ear. The rope around Elena’s wrists had come very loose and she stroked the diaphanous fabric helplessly, feeling the tiny jewels on the white side cool to the touch of her fingers.
“How did you know you’d need all this stuff?” Elena asked, with bruising practicality. “You didn’t know everything, but you seemed to know enough.”
“Oh, I did research in bars and other places. I found a few people who’d been here and had managed to get out again—or who had gotten kicked out.” Damon’s wild grin grew even wilder. “At night while you were asleep. At a little hidden store, I got those.” He nodded at her veil, and added, “You don’t have to wear that over your face or anything. Press it to your hair and it will cling to it.”
Elena did so, wearing the gold side out. It fell to her heels. She fingered her veil, already able to see the flirtatious possibilities in it, as well as the dismissive ones. If only she could get this damned rope off her wrists…
After a moment, Damon retreated back into the persona of the imperturbable master and said, “For all our sakes, we ought to be strict about these things. The slum lords and nobility who run this abominable mess they call the Dark Dimension know that it’s only two days away from revolution at any time, and if we add anything to the balance they’re going to Make a Public Example of Us.”
“All right,” Elena said. “Here, hold my string and I’ll get on the litter.”
But there wasn’t much point in the rope, not once they were both sitting in the same litter. It was carried by four men—not big men, but wiry ones, and all of the same height, which made for a smooth ride.
If Elena had been a free citizen, she would never have allowed herself to be carried by four people whom (she assumed) were slaves. In fact, she would have made a big noisy fuss over it. But that talk she’d had with herself at the docks had sunk in. She was a slave, even if Damon hadn’t paid anyone to buy her. She didn’t have the right to make a big noisy fuss about anything. In this crimson, evil-smelling place she could imagine that her fuss might even make problems for the litter bearers themselves—make their owner or whoever ran the litter-bearing business punish them, as if it were their fault.
Best Plan A for now: Keep Mouth Shut.
There was plenty to see anyway, now that they had passed on a bridge over bad-smelling slums and alleys full of tumbledown houses. Shops began to appear, at first heavily barred and made of unpainted stone, then more respectable buildings, and then suddenly they were winding their way through a bazaar. But even here the stamp of poverty and weariness appeared on too many faces. Elena had expected, if anything, a cold, black, antiseptic city with emotionless vampires and fire-eyed demons walking the streets. Instead, everyone she saw looked human, and they were selling things—from medicines to food and drink—that vampires didn’t need.
Well, maybe the kitsune and the demons need them, Elena reasoned, shuddering at the idea of what a demon might want to eat. On the street corners were hard-faced, scantily clad girls and boys, and tattered, haggard people holding pathetic signs: A MEMORY FOR A MEAL.
“What do they mean?” Elena asked Damon, but he didn’t answer her immediately.
“This is how the free humans of the city spend most of their time,” he said. “So remember that, before you start going on one of your crusades—”
Elena wasn’t listening. She was staring at one of the holders of such a sign. The man was horribly thin, with a straggly beard and bad teeth, but worse was his look of vacant despair. Every so often he would hold out a trembling hand on which there was a small, clear ball, which he balanced on his palm, muttering, “A summer’s day when I was young. A summer’s day for a ten-geld piece.” As often as not there was no one near when he said this.
Elena slipped off a lapis ring Stefan had given her and held it toward him. She didn’t want to annoy Damon by getting out of the litter, and she had to say, “Come here, please,” while holding the ring toward the bearded man.
He heard, and came to the litter quickly enough. Elena saw something move in his beard—lice, perhaps—and she forced herself to stare at the ring as she said, “Take it. Quickly, please.”
The old man stared at the ring as if it were a banquet. “I don’t have change,” he moaned, bringing up his hand and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He seemed about to drop to the ground unconscious. “I don’t have change!”
“I don’t want change!” Elena said through the huge swelling that had formed in her throat. “Take the ring. Hurry or I’ll drop it.”
He snatched it from her fingers as the litter bearers started forward again. “May the Guardians bless you, lady,” he said, trying to keep up with the litter bearer’s trot. “Hear me who may! May They bless you!”
“You really shouldn’t,” Damon said to Elena when the voice had died away behind them. “He’s not going to get a meal with that, you know.”
“He was hungry,” Elena said softly. She couldn’t explain that he reminded her of Stefan, not just now. “It was my ring,” she added defensively. “I suppose you’re going to say he’ll spend it on alcohol or drugs.”
“No, but he won’t get a meal with it, either. He’ll get a banquet.”
“Well, so much the—”
“In his imagination. He’ll get a dusty orb with some old vampire’s memory of a Roman feast, or someone from the city’s memory of a modern one. Then he’ll play it over and over as he slowly starves to death.”
Elena was appalled. “Damon! Quick! I have to go back and find him—”
“You can’t, I’m afraid.” Lazily, Damon held up a hand. He had a firm grip on her rope. “Besides, he’s long gone.”
“How can he do that? How could anyone do that?”
“How can a lung cancer patient refuse to quit smoking? But I agree that those orbs can be the most addictive substances of all. Blame the kitsune for bringing their star balls here and making them the most popular form of obsession.”
“Star balls? Hoshi no tama?” Elena gasped.
Damon stared at her, looking equally surprised. “You know about them?”
“All I know is what Meredith researched. She said that kitsune were often portrayed with either keys”—she raised her eyebrows at him—“or with star balls. And that myths say they can put some or all of their power in the ball, so that if you find it, you can control the kitsune. She and Bonnie want to find Misao’s or Shinichi’s star balls and have control over them.”
“Be still, my unbeating heart,” Damon said dramatically, but the next second he was all business. “Remember what that old guy said? A summer’s day for a meal? He was talking about this.” Damon picked up the little marble that the old man had dropped on the litter and held it to Elena’s temple.
The world disappeared.
Damon was gone. The sights and sounds—yes, and the smells—of the bazaar were gone. She was sitting on green grass which rippled in a slight breeze and she was looking at a weeping willow that bent down to a stream that was copper and deep, deep green at once. There was some sweet scent in the air—honeysuckle, freesia? Something delicious that stirred Elena as she leaned back to gaze at picture-perfect white clouds rolling in a cerulean sky.
She felt—she didn’t know how to say it. She felt young, but somewhere in her mind she knew that she was actually younger than this alien personality that had taken hold of her. Still, she felt excited that it was springtime and every g
olden-green leaf, every springy little reed, every weightless white cloud seemed to be rejoicing with her.
Then suddenly her heart was pounding. She had just caught the sound of a footfall behind her. In one, springing joyous moment she was on her feet, arms held out in the extremity of her love, the wild devotion she felt for this…
…this young girl? Something inside the sphere user’s brain seemed to fall back in bewilderment. Most of it, though, was taken up with cataloguing the perfections of the girl who had crept up so lightly in the waving grass: the clustering dark curls at her neck, the flashing green eyes below arching brows, the smooth glowing skin of her cheeks as she laughed with her lover, pretending to run away on feet as light as any elf’s…!
Pursued and pursuer both fell down together on the soft carpet of long grass…and then things quickly got so steamy that Elena, the distant mind in the background, began wondering how on earth you made one of these things stop. Every time she put her hand to her temple, groping, she was caught and kissed breathless by…Allegra…that was the girl, Allegra. And Allegra was certainly beautiful, especially through this particular viewer’s eyes. The creamy soft skin of her…
And then, with a shock just as great as she’d felt when the bazaar disappeared, it appeared again. She was Elena; she was riding on the litter with Damon; there was a cacophony of sounds around her—and a thousand different smells, too. But she was breathing hard and part of her was still resounding with John—that had been his name—with John’s love for Allegra.
“But I still don’t understand,” she almost keened.
“It’s simple,” Damon said. “You put a blank star ball of the size you like to your temple and you think back to the time you want to record. The star ball does the rest.” He waved off her attempted interruption and leaned forward with mischief in those fathomless black eyes of his. “Perhaps you got an especially warm summer day?” he said, adding suggestively, “These litters do have curtains you can draw closed.”
“Don’t be silly, Damon,” Elena said, but John’s feelings had sparked her own, like flint and tinder. She didn’t want to kiss Damon, she told herself sternly. She wanted to kiss Stefan. But since a moment ago she had been kissing Allegra, it didn’t seem as strong an argument as it could be.
“I don’t think,” she began, still breathless, as Damon reached for her, “that this is a very good…”
With a smooth flick of the rope, Damon untied her hands completely. He would have pulled it off both wrists, but Elena immediately half-turned, supporting herself with that hand. She needed the support.
In the circumstances, though, there was nothing more meaningful—or more…exciting…than what Damon had done.
He hadn’t drawn the curtains, but Bonnie and Meredith were behind them on their own litter, out of sight. Certainly out of Elena’s mind. She felt warm arms around her, and instinctively nestled into them. She felt a surge of pure love and appreciation for Damon, for his understanding that she could never do this as a slave with a master.
We’re both of us unmastered, she heard in her head, and she remembered that when cooling down most of her psychic abilities she had forgotten to set the volume on low for this one. Oh, well, it might just come in handy….
But we both enjoy worship, she replied telepathically, and felt his laughter on her lips as he admitted the truth of it. There was nothing sweeter in her life these days than Damon’s kisses. She could drift like this forever, forgetting the outside world. And that was a good thing, because she had the feeling that there was much depression in the outside and not too much happiness. But if she could always come back to this, this welcome, this sweetness, this ecstasy…
Elena jerked in the litter, throwing her weight back so fast that the men carrying it almost fell in a heap.
“You bastard,” she whispered venomously. They were still psychically entangled, and she was glad to see that through Damon’s eyes she was like a vengeful Aphrodite: her golden hair lifting and whipping behind her like a thunderstorm, her eyes shining violet in her elemental fury.
And now, worst of all, this goddess turned her face away from him. “Not one day,” she said. “You couldn’t even keep your promise for a single day!”
“I didn’t! I didn’t Influence you, Elena!”
“Don’t call me that. We have a professional relationship now. I call you ‘Master.’ You can call me ‘Slave’ or ‘Dog’ or whatever you want.”
“If we have the professional relationship of master and slave,” Damon said, his eyes dangerous, “then I can just order you to—”
“Try it!” Elena lifted her lips in what really wasn’t a smile. “Why don’t you do that, and see just what happens?”
16
Damon clearly decided to throw himself on the mercy of the court, and looked piteous and a little unbalanced, which he could easily do whenever he wanted. “I really didn’t try to Influence you,” he repeated, but then hastily added, “Maybe I can just change the subject for a while—tell you more about the star balls.”
“That,” Elena said in her most frosty voice, “might be a rather good idea.”
“Well, the balls make recordings directly from your neurons, you see? Your neurons in your brain. Everything you’ve ever experienced is there in your mind somewhere, and the ball just draws it out.”
“So you can always remember it and watch it over and over like a movie, too?” Elena said, twiddling with her veil to shade her face from him, and thinking that she would give a star ball to Alaric and Meredith before their wedding.
“No,” Damon said, rather grimly. “Not like that. For one thing, the memory is gone from you—these are kitsune toys we’re talking about, remember? Once the star ball has taken it from your neurons, you don’t remember a thing about the event. Second, the ‘recording’ on the star ball gradually fades—with use, with time, with some other factors nobody understands. But the ball gets cloudier, and the sensations weaker, until finally it’s just an empty crystal sphere.”
“But—that poor man was selling a day of his life. A wonderful day! I should think he would want to keep it.”
“You saw him.”
“Yes.” Once again Elena saw the louse-ridden, haggard, gray-faced old man. She felt something like ice down her spine at the thought that he had once been the laughing, joyous, young John that she had experienced. “Oh, how sad,” she said, and she wasn’t talking about memory.
But, for once, Damon hadn’t followed her thoughts. “Yes,” he said. “There are a lot of the poor and the old here. They worked themselves free of slavery, or had a generous owner die…and then this is where they end up.”
“But the star balls? Are they just made for poor people? The rich ones can just travel to Earth and see a real summer day for themselves, right?”
Damon laughed without much humor. “Oh, no, they can’t. Most of them are bound here.”
He said bound oddly. Elena ventured, “Too busy to go on vacation?”
“Too busy, too powerful to get through the wards protecting Earth from them, too worried about what their enemies will do while they’re gone, too physically decrepit, too notorious, too dead.”
“Dead?” The horror of the tunnel and the corpse-smelling fog seemed ready to envelope Elena.
Damon flashed one of his evil smiles. “Forgot that your boyfriend is de mortius? Not to mention your honorable master? Most people, when they die, go to another level than this—much higher or much lower. This is the place for the bad ones, but it’s the upper level. Farther down—well, nobody wants to go there.”
“Like Hell?” Elena breathed. “We’re in Hell?”
“More like Limbo, at least where we are. Then there’s the Other Side.” He nodded toward the horizon where the lowering sun still sat. “The other city, which may have been where you went on your ‘vacation’ to the afterlife. Here they just call it ‘The Other Side.’ But I can tell you two rumors I heard from my informants. There, they call it the Celesti
al Court. And there, the sky is crystal blue and the sun is always rising.”
“The Celestial Court…” Elena forgot that she was speaking aloud. She knew instinctively that it was the queens-and-knights-and-sorceresses kind of court, not a court of law. It would be like Camelot. Just saying the words brought up an aching nostalgia, and—not memories, but the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that memories were locked right behind a door. It was a door, however, that was securely locked, and all Elena could see through the keyhole were ranks of more women like the Guardians, tall, golden-haired, and blue-eyed, and one—child-sized among the grown women—who glanced up, and, piercingly, from a long way off, met Elena’s gaze directly.
The litter was moving out of the bazaar into more slums, which Elena took in with darting quick glances on either side of her, hiding in her veil. They seemed like any earthly slums, barrios, or favella—only worse. Children, their hair turned red by the sun, crowded around Elena’s litter, their hands held out in a gesture with universal meaning.
Elena felt a tearing at her insides that she had nothing of real value to give them. She wanted to build houses here, make sure these children had food and clean water, and education, and a future to look forward to. Since she had no idea how to give them any of these things, she watched them dash off with treasures such as her Juicy Fruit gum, her comb, her minibrush, her lip gloss, her water bottle, and her earrings.
Damon shook his head, but didn’t stop her until she began fumbling with a lapis and diamond pendant Stefan had given her. She was crying as she tried to disengage the clasp when suddenly the last bit of the rope around her wrist came up short.
“No more,” Damon said. “You don’t understand anything. We haven’t even entered the city proper yet. Why don’t you have a look at the architecture instead of worrying about useless brats who’re likely to die anyway?”
“That’s cold,” Elena said, but she couldn’t think of any way to make him understand, and she was too angry with him to try.