by Smith, L. J.
She managed a shaky smile of her own at him. “That’s good.”
“I came to talk to you,” he said, “but…first—”
In another moment, somehow, Elena was in his arms.
“Damon—we can’t keep on…” She tried to pull away gently. “We really can’t keep doing this, you know.”
But Damon didn’t let go of her. There was something in the way he held her that half terrified her, and half made her want to cry with joy. She forced back the tears.
“It’s all right,” Damon said softly. “Go ahead and cry. We’ve got a situation on our hands.”
Something in his voice frightened Elena. Not in the half-joyful way she’d been fearful a minute ago, but entirely frightened.
It’s because he’s afraid, she thought suddenly in wonderment. She had seen Damon angry, wistful, cold, mocking, seductive—even subdued, ashamed—but she had never seen him afraid of anything. She could hardly get her mind around the concept. Damon…frightened…for her.
“It’s because of what I did yesterday, isn’t it?” she asked. “Are they going to kill me?” She was surprised at how calmly she said it. She felt nothing except a vague distress and the desire to make Damon not afraid anymore.
“No!” He held her at arm’s length, staring. “At least not without killing me and Sage—and all the people in this house, too, if I know them.” He stopped, seeming out of breath—which was impossible, Elena reminded herself. He’s playing for time, she thought.
“But that’s what they want to do,” she said. She didn’t know why she was so certain. Maybe she was picking up something telepathically.
“They have…made threats,” Damon said slowly. “It’s not the case of Old Drohzne really; I guess there are murders around here all the time and winner takes all. But apparently overnight word of what you did has been spreading. Slaves in nearby estates are refusing to obey their masters. This entire quarter of the slums is in turmoil—and they’re afraid of what will happen if other sectors hear about it. Something has to be done as soon as possible or the whole Dark Dimension may just explode like a bomb.”
Even as Damon spoke, Elena could hear the echoes of what he’d been told by the assembly who had come to Dr. Meggar’s door. They had been afraid, too.
Maybe this could be the start of something important, Elena thought, her mind soaring away from her own small problems. Even death wouldn’t be too high a price to pay to free these wretched people from their demonic masters.
“But that’s not what will happen!” Damon said, and Elena realized that she must be projecting her thoughts. There was genuine anguish in Damon’s voice. “If we had planned things, if there were leaders who could stay here and oversee a revolution—if we could even find leaders strong enough to do it—then there might be a chance. Instead, all the slaves are being punished, everywhere that the word has spread. They’re being tortured and killed on mere suspicion of sympathy with you. Their masters are making examples all over the city. And it’s only going to get worse.”
Elena’s heart, which had been soaring on a dream of actually making a difference, came crashing down to the ground and she stared, horrified, into Damon’s black eyes. “But we’ve got to stop that. Even if I have to die—”
Damon pulled her back in close to him. “You—and Bonnie and Meredith.” His voice sounded hoarse. “Plenty of people saw the three of you together. Plenty of people now see all three of you as the troublemakers.”
Elena’s heart went cold. Maybe the worst thing was that she could see from a slave economy’s point of view that if one incident of such insolence went unpunished and word of it spread…the tale would grow in the telling….
“We became famous overnight. We’ll be legends tomorrow,” she murmured, watching, in her mind, a domino toppling into another which hit another until a long string had fallen down spelling the word “Heroine.”
But she didn’t want to be a heroine. She had just come here to get Stefan back. And while she could have faced giving her life to stop slaves from being tortured and killed, she would herself kill anyone who tried to lay a hand on Bonnie or Meredith.
“They feel the same way,” Damon said. “They heard what the congregation had to say.” He held her arms hard as if trying to brace her. “A young girl named Helena was beaten and hung this morning because she had a similar name to yours. She was fifteen.”
Elena’s legs gave out, as so often they had done in Damon’s arms…but never for this reason. He went with her. This was a conversation you had sitting on bare floorboards. “It wasn’t your fault, Elena! You are what you are! People love you for what you are!”
Elena’s pulse was hammering frantically. It was all so bad…but she had made it worse. By not thinking. By imagining that her life was the only one at stake. By acting before evaluating the consequences.
But in the same situation she would do it again. Or…with shame, she thought, I would do something like it. If I knew that I would put everyone I loved in danger I would have begged Damon to bargain with that slave-owner worm. Buy her for some outrageous price…if we had the money. If he would have listened…If another stroke of the whip hadn’t killed Lady Ulma…
Suddenly her brain went hard and cold.
That is the past.
This is the present.
Deal with it.
“What can we do?” She tried to pull free and shake Damon; she was that frantic. “There must be something we can do now! They can’t kill Bonnie and Meredith—and Stefan will die if we don’t find him!”
Damon just held her more tightly. He was keeping his mind shielded from hers, Elena realized. This could either be good or bad. It might be that there was a solution he was reluctant to put to her. Or it could mean that the death of all three of the “rebel slaves” was the only thing the city leaders would accept.
“Damon.” He was holding her much too tightly to get free, so Elena couldn’t look him in the face. But she could visualize it, and she could also try to address him squarely, mind to mind.
Damon, if there’s anything—even any way we can save Bonnie and Meredith—you have to tell me. You have to. I order you to!
Neither of them were in a mood to find that amusing or even to notice the “slave” giving orders to the “master.” But at last Elena heard Damon’s telepathic voice.
They say that if I take you back to Young Drohzne now and you apologize, that you can be let off with just six strokes of this. From somewhere Damon produced a pliant cane made of some pale wood. Ash, probably, Elena thought, surprised at how calm she was. It’s the one substance equally effective on everyone: even on vampires—even on Old Ones, which they undoubtedly have around here.
But it has to be in public so that they can get the rumors started the other way. They think then that the turmoil will stop, if you—the one who started the disobedience—will admit your slave status.
Damon’s thoughts were heavy, and so was Elena’s heart. How many of her principles would she be betraying if she did this? How many slaves would she be condemning to lives of servitude?
Suddenly Damon’s mental voice was angry. We didn’t come here to reform the Dark Dimension, he reminded her, in tones that made Elena wince away. Damon shook her slightly. We came to get Stefan, remember? Needless to say, we’ll never have a chance to do that if we try to play Spartacus. If we start a war that we know we can’t win. Even the Guardians can’t win it.
A light went on in Elena’s mind.
“Of course,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”
“Think of what before?” Damon said desperately.
“We don’t fight the war—now. I haven’t even mastered my basic Powers, much less my Wings Powers. And this way they won’t even wonder about them.”
“Elena?”
“We come back,” Elena explained to him excitedly. “When I can control all my Powers. And we bring allies with us—strong allies we’ll find in the human world. It may take year
s and years but someday we come back and finish what we started.”
Damon was staring at her as if she’d gone mad, but that didn’t matter. Elena could feel Power coursing through her. This was one promise, she thought, that she would keep if it killed her.
Damon swallowed. “Can we talk about—about the present now?” he asked.
It was as if he had hit a bull’s-eye.
The present. Now.
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Elena looked at the ash cane contemptuously. “Of course, I’ll do it, Damon. I don’t want anyone else hurt because of me before I’m ready to fight. Dr. Meggar is a good healer. If they allow me to come back to him.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Damon said, holding her gaze. “But I do know one thing. You won’t feel a single blow, I promise you that,” he said quickly and earnestly, his dark eyes very big. “I’ll take care of that; it’ll all be channeled away. And you won’t even see a trace of a mark by morning. But,” he finished much more slowly, “you’ll have to kneel to apologize to me, your owner, and to that filthy, scrofulous, abominable old—” Damon’s imprecations carried him away for a moment so that he lapsed into Italian.
“To who?”
“To the leader of the slums, and possibly to Old Drohzne’s brother, Young Drohzne, as well.”
“Okay. Tell them I’ll apologize to as many Drohznes as they want. Tell them quick, in case we lose our chance.”
Elena could see the look he gave her, but her mind was turned inward. Would she let Meredith or Bonnie do this? No. Would she allow it to happen to Caroline if by any means she could stop it? Again, no. No, no, no. Elena’s feelings about brutality toward girls and women had always been exceedingly strong. Her feelings about the worldwide second-class citizenship of females had become remarkably clear since her return from the afterlife. If she had been returned to the world for any purpose, she had decided, helping to free girls and women from the slavery that many of them could not even see, was part of it.
But this wasn’t just about a vicious slaveholder and faceless oppressed women and men. It was about Lady Ulma, and keeping her and her baby safe…and it was about Stefan. If she gave in, she would be just an impudent slave who caused a small ruckus in the road, but was firmly put back into her place by authorities.
Otherwise, if their party was scrutinized…if someone realized that they were here to release Stefan…if Elena was the one who caused the order to come: “Move him into stricter security—get rid of that silly kitsune-key thing….”
Her mind was ablaze with images of ways that Stefan could be punished, could be taken away, could be lost if this incident in the slums took on undue proportions.
No. She would not abandon Stefan now to fight a war that could not be won. But she wouldn’t forget, either.
I’ll come back for all of you, she promised. And then the story will have a different ending.
She realized that Damon still hadn’t left. He was watching her with eyes as keen as a falcon’s. “They sent me to bring you,” he said quietly. “They never thought of a no for an answer.” Elena could briefly feel the fierce rage of his fury at them and she took his hand and squeezed it.
“I’m coming back with you in the future, for the slaves,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” said Elena, and her quick kiss became a longer kiss. She hadn’t really absorbed what Damon had said about channeling away the pain. She felt she was due just one kiss for what she was about to endure, and then Damon stroked her hair and time meant nothing until Meredith knocked at the door.
The bloody-red dawn had taken on a bizarre, almost dreamlike quality by the time Elena was led to an open-air structure where the slumlords in charge of this area were seated on piles of once fine, now threadbare cushions. They were passing back and forth bottles and jeweled leather flasks filled with Black Magic, the only wine vampires could really enjoy, smoking hookahs and occasionally spitting into the darker shadows. This was regardless of the huge audience of street people dizzily attracted by word of a beautiful young human’s public punishment.
Elena had been rehearsed in her lines. She was marched, gagged, hands manacled, before the hawking and spitting authorities. Young Drohzne was sitting in somewhat uncomfortable glory on a golden couch, and Damon was standing between him and the authorities, looking tense. Elena had never been so tempted to improvise a part since her junior play, when she had thrown a flowerpot at Petruchio and brought down the house in the last scene of The Taming of the Shrew.
But this was deadly serious business. Stefan’s freedom, Bonnie’s and Meredith’s lives might depend upon it. Elena moved her tongue around inside her mouth, which was bone dry.
And, oddly, she found Damon’s eyes, the man with the stick, uplifting her. He seemed to be telling her courage and indifference without using telepathy at all. Elena wondered if he himself had ever been in a similar situation.
She was kicked by one of her escorts and remembered where she was. She’d been loaned an “appropriate” costume from the discarded wardrobe of Dr. Meggar’s married daughter. It was pearl-colored indoors, which meant it was mauve in the everlasting crimson sunlight. Most important, worn without its silken undershirt, its back plunged to below Elena’s waistline, leaving Elena’s own back completely bare. Now, in accordance with custom, she knelt in front of the elders, and bowed until her forehead rested on an ornate and very dirty carpet at the feet of the elders, but several steps lower. One of them spat on her.
There was excited, appreciative chattering, and ribaldry, and thrown missiles, mostly in the form of garbage. Fruit was too precious here to think of wasting. Dried excrement, however, was not, and Elena found the first tears coming to her eyes as she realized what she was being pelted with.
Courage and indifference, she told herself, not even daring to sneak a look up at Damon.
Presently, when the crowd was felt to have had its due playtime, one of the hookah-smoking civic elders stood up. He read words Elena couldn’t understand from a creased scroll. It seemed to go on forever. Elena, on her knees, with her forehead against the dusty carpet, felt as if she were smothering.
At last the scroll was put away and Young Drohzne leaped up and described in a high, almost hysterical voice, and flamboyant language, the story of a slave who attacked her own master (Damon, Elena noted mentally) to tear herself free of his supervision, and then attacked the head of his family (Old Drohzne, Elena thought) and his poor means of living, his cart, and his hopeless, impudent, slothful slave, and how all this had resulted in the death of his brother. To Elena’s ears, at first, he seemed to be blaming Lady Ulma for the entire incident because she had fallen under her load.
“You all know the kind of slave I mean—she wouldn’t bother to wave away a fly walking across her eye,” he shrieked, appealing to the crowd, which responded with fresh insults and a renewed pelting upon Elena, since Lady Ulma wasn’t there to punish.
At last, Young Drohzne finished recounting how this bold-faced hussy (Elena) who, wearing trousers like a man, had caught up his brother’s own ne’er-do-well slave (Ulma) and had carried away this valuable property bodily away (all by myself? Elena wondered ironically) and had taken her to the home of a highly suspicious healer (Dr. Meggar), who now refused to give her, the original slave, back.
“I knew when I heard this that I would never see my brother or his slave again,” he cried, in the shrieking wail that he had somehow been able to maintain throughout the entire narrative.
“If the slave was so lazy, you should have been glad,” a joker in the crowd called out.
“Nevertheless,” said a very fat man whose voice reminded Elena irresistibly of Alfred Hitchcock’s: the lugubrious delivery and the same pauses before important words, which served to make the mood more grim and entire business even more serious than anyone had heretofore thought. This was a man with power, Elena realized. The ribaldry, the pelting, even the hawking and spitting had fallen silent. The lar
ge man was undoubtedly the local equivalent of a “godfather” to these painfully poor residents of the slums. His word would be that which determined Elena’s fate.
“And since then,” he was saying slowly, crunching with every few words some irregularly shaped, golden-colored sweetmeat from a bowl reserved for himself, “the young vampire Damien has made reparation—and most generously, too—for all the property damage.” Here there was a long pause as he stared at Young Drohzne. “Therefore, his slave, Aliana, who started all this mischief will not be seized and put up for public auction, but will make her humble obeisance and surrender, here, and of her own will, receive the punishment she knows is her due.”
Elena found herself dazed. She didn’t know whether it was from all the smoke that had floated down to her level before curling away, but the words “put up for public auction” had sent a shock through her that almost led her to black out. She had had no idea that that could happen—and the pictures it brought to mind were extremely unpleasant. She also noticed her new alias, and Damon’s. It was actually quite fortunate, she thought since it would be nice if Shinichi and Misao never heard about this little adventure.
“Bring the slave to us,” the fat man concluded, and sat back down on a great pile of cushions.
Elena was lifted off her feet and roughly marched upward until she could see the man’s gilded sandals, and remarkably clean feet, as she kept her eyes down in the manner of an obedient slave.
“Have you heard these proceedings?” The Godfather-type was still munching on his delicacies and a waft of breeze brought a heavenly smell to Elena’s nose, and suddenly all the saliva she could ask for flooded to her dry lips.
“Yes, sir,” she said, not knowing what title to give him.
“You address me as Your Excellence. And do you have anything to add in your defense?” the man asked, to Elena’s astonishment. Her automatic response of: “Why ask me, since it’s all been fixed up beforehand?” was stilled on her lips. This man was somehow—more—than any of the others she had met in the Dark Dimension—in fact, in her entire life. He listened to people. He would listen to me if I told him all about Stefan, Elena thought suddenly. But then, she thought, regaining her normal level-headedness, what could he do about it? Nothing, unless he could do some good and turn a profit out of it—or gain some power, or take down an enemy.