by Smith, L. J.
Elena, forgive me—oh, God, just give me one moment with her! Just a single moment! I can bear anything then, even the true death. Just one moment to touch her!
And perhaps God did look down for a moment in pity. Elena’s lips were hovering over, quivering over, Stefan’s, as if she could somehow steal a kiss like this as she used to when he was still asleep. But for just an instant it seemed to Elena that she felt warm flesh below hers and the flick of Stefan’s lashes against her eyelids as his eyes flew open in surprise.
Instantly they both froze, eyes wide open, neither of them foolish enough to move in the slightest. But Elena couldn’t help herself, as the flush of warmth from Stefan’s lips sent a flush of warmth through her entire body. She melted into the kiss, and, while keeping her body carefully in the same position, felt her gaze go unfocused and her eyelids close.
As her lashes swept against something with substance, the moment swept quietly to an end. Elena had two choices: she could shriek and rail telepathically at Il Signore for only giving them what Stefan had asked for, or she could gather her courage and smile and maybe comfort Stefan.
Her better nature won out and when Stefan opened his eyes, she was leaning over him, pretending to be resting on her elbows and his chest, and smiling at him as she tried to straighten out her hair.
Relieved, Stefan smiled back at her. It was as if he could bear anything, as long as she was unhurt.
“Now, Damon would have been practical,” she teased him. “He would have kept me crying, because in the end, his health would be the most important thing. And he’d have prayed for…” She paused and finally began laughing, which made Stefan smile. “I have no idea,” Elena said finally. “I don’t think Damon prays.”
“Probably not,” Stefan said. “When we were young—and human—the town priest walked with a cane that he seemed to enjoy using on young delinquent boys more than as a source of support.”
Elena thought of the delicate child chained to the huge and heavy boulder of secrets. Was religion one of the things locked away, put behind doors closed one after another in secret there, like a chambered nautilus until almost everything he cared about was inside?
She didn’t ask that of Stefan. Instead, she said, lowering her “voice” to the tiniest telepathic whisper, the barest disturbance of neurons in Stefan’s receptive brain: What other practical things can you think of that Damon might have thought of? Things relating to a jailbreak?
“Well…for a jailbreak? The first thing I can think of is for you to know your way around the city. I was brought here blindfolded but since they don’t have the power to take the curse off vampires and make them human, I still had all my senses. I’d say it’s a city about the size of New York and Los Angeles combined.”
“Big city,” Elena noted, taking notes in her head.
“But fortunately the only bits that would interest us are in the southwestern section. The city’s supposed to be ruled by the Guardians—but they’re from the Other Side and the demons and vampires here long ago realized that people were more afraid of them than the Guardians. It’s set up now with about twelve to fifteen feudal castles or estates, and each of those estates has control of a considerable amount of land outside the city. They grow their own unique products and sell them in deals made here. For instance, it’s the vampires who cultivate Clarion Loess Black Magic.”
“I see,” said Elena, who had no idea what he was talking about, except the Black Magic wine. “But all we really need to know is how to get to the Shi no Shi—your prison.”
“That’s true. Well, the easiest way would be to find the kitsune sector. The Shi no Shi is a cluster of buildings, with the largest one—the one without a top, although it’s curved, and you may not be able to tell from the ground—”
“The one that looks like a coliseum?” Elena interrupted eagerly. “I get a sort of bird’s-eye view of the city whenever I come here.”
“Well, the thing that looks like a coliseum is a coliseum.” Stefan smiled.
He really smiled; he’s feeling well enough to smile, now, Elena rejoiced, but silently.
“So to get you in and out, we just head from below the coliseum to the gate back to our world,” Elena said. “But to get you free there are—some things we need to collect—and those are probably going to be in different parts of the city.” She tried to remember if she had ever described the twin fox key to Stefan or not. It was probably better not to do it if she hadn’t already done it.
“Then I’d hire a native guide,” Stefan said immediately. “I don’t really know anything about the city, except what the guards tell me—and I’m not sure if I would trust them. But the little people—the ordinary ones—will probably know the things you want to know.”
“That’s a good idea,” Elena said. She drew invisible designs with a transparent finger on his chest. “I think Damon really plans to do everything he can to help us.”
“I honor him for coming,” Stefan said, as if he were thinking things out. “He’s keeping his promise, isn’t he?”
Elena nodded. Deep, deep in her consciousness floated the thoughts: His word to me that he would take care of you. His word to you that he would take care of me. Damon always keeps his word.
“Stefan,” she said, again in the innermost recesses of his mind, where she could share information—she hoped—in secret, “you should have seen him, really. When I did Wings of Redemption and every bad thing that had hardened him or made him cruel came undone. And when I did Wings of Purification and all the stone covering his soul came away in chunks…. I don’t think you could imagine how he was. He was so perfect—and so new. And later when he cried…”
Elena could feel inside Stefan three layers of emotion succeed one another almost instantaneously. Disbelief that Damon could cry, despite all that Elena had been telling him. Then, belief and astonishment as he absorbed her pictures and her memories. And finally, the need to console her as she stared at a Damon forever trapped in penitence. A Damon that would never exist again.
“He saved you,” whispered Elena, “but he wouldn’t save himself. He wouldn’t even bargain with Shinichi and Misao. He just let them take all his memories of that time.”
“Maybe it hurt too much.”
“Yes,” said Elena, deliberately lowering her barriers so that Stefan could feel the hurt that the new and perfect creature she’d created had felt upon learning that he had committed acts of cruelty and treachery that—well, that would make the strongest soul flinch. “Stefan? I think he must feel very lonely.”
“Yes, angel. I think you’re right.”
This time Elena thought a good deal longer before venturing, “Stefan? I’m not sure he understands what it’s like to be loved.” And while he thought out his response, she was on tenterhooks.
Then he said very softly, very slowly again, “Yes, angel. I think you’re right.”
Oh, she did love him. He always understood. And he was always most brave and gallant and trusting just when she needed him to be.
“Stefan? Can I stay again tonight?”
“Is it nighttime, lovely love? You can stay—unless They come to take me somewhere.” All at once Stefan was very solemn, holding her gaze. “But if They come—you’ll promise me to leave then, won’t you?”
Elena looked straight into his green eyes and said, “If that’s what you want, I’ll promise.”
“Elena? Do you…do you keep your promises or not?” Suddenly, he sounded very sleepy, but the right kind of sleepy, not worn out, but someone who has been refreshed and is being lulled into a perfect slumber.
“I keep them close to me,” Elena whispered. But I keep you closer, she thought. If someone came to hurt him, they would find out what a bodiless opponent could do. For instance, what if she just reached inside their bodies and managed to make contact for an instant? Long enough to squeeze a heart between her pretty white fingers? That would be something.
“I love you, Elena. I’m so glad…we ki
ssed…”
“It’s not the last time! You’ll see! I swear it!” She dropped new healing tears down on him.
Stefan just smiled gently. And then he was asleep.
In the morning Elena woke up in her grand bedroom in Lady Ulma’s house, alone. But she had another memory, like a pressed rose, to put away in its own special place inside her.
And somewhere, deep in her heart, she knew that these memories might be all she had of Stefan someday. She could imagine that these sweet-scented, fragile mementoes would be something to hold on to and cherish—if Stefan never came home.
25
“Oh, I just want to take a little peek,” Bonnie moaned, looking at the forbidden sketchbook, the one in which Lady Ulma had drawn their high couture outfits for the first party, the one that would be held tonight. Beside it, just within reach, were some sample squares from bolts of fabric in shimmering satin, rippling silk, transparent muslin, and soft, rich velvet.
“You’ll get to try it on for the last fitting in an hour—this time with your eyes open!” Elena laughed. “But we can’t forget that tonight isn’t playtime. We’ll have to dance some dances, of course—”
“Of course!” Bonnie repeated ecstatically.
“But our purpose there is to find the key. The first half of the double fox key. I just wish there was a star ball that showed the inside of tonight’s house.”
“Well, we all know pretty much about it; we can talk about it and try to imagine it,” Meredith said.
Elena, who had been fiddling with the star ball from the other house, now put the slightly cloudy orb down and said, “All right. Let’s brainstorm.”
“May I storm, too?” a low, modulated voice asked from the doorway. The girls all turned, rising at the same time to greet a smiling Lady Ulma.
Before taking a chair, she gave Elena a particularly heartfelt hug and kiss on the cheek and Elena couldn’t help herself from comparing the woman as they had seen her at Dr. Meggar’s to the elegant lady she was now. Then, she had been hardly more than skin over bones, with the eyes of a timid wild creature under great strain, wearing a common housecoat, with men’s bedroom slippers. Now, she reminded Elena of a Roman matron, with her face tranquil and beginning to fill out under a crown of glossy dark braids held back by jeweled combs. Her body was filling out, too, especially her belly, although she retained her natural grace as she took a seat on a velvet couch. She was wearing a saffron-colored gown of raw silk, with an underskirt of fringed and shimmering apricot.
“We’re so excited about the fitting tonight,” Elena said, with a nod toward the sketchbook.
“I am as excited as a child, myself,” Lady Ulma admitted. “I only wish I could do for you a tenth of what you have done for me.”
“You have already,” Elena said. “And if we can find the fox keys—it will only be because you helped us so much. And that—I can’t tell you how much that means to me,” she finished almost in a whisper.
“But you never thought I could help you when you defied the law for a ravaged slave. You simply wanted to save me—and you have suffered much for it,” Ulma responded quietly.
Elena shifted uncomfortably. The cut running down her face had left only a thin white scar along the cheekbone. Once—when she had first returned to Earth from the afterlife—she would have been able to wave the scar away with a simple wash of Power. But now, although she could channel her Power through her body, and use it to enhance her senses, she couldn’t make it obey her will in any other way.
And once, she thought, imagining the Elena who had stood in Robert E. Lee High School’s parking lot and drooled over a Porsche, she would have considered the marring of her face the greatest calamity of her life. But with all the accolades she had received, with Damon calling it her “white wound of honor,” and her certainty that it would mean as little to Stefan as a scar on his cheekbone would mean to her, she had found she just couldn’t take it very seriously.
I am not the same person I once was, she thought. And I’m glad.
“Never mind,” she said, ignoring the pain down her leg that still throbbed at times. “Let’s talk about the Silver Nightingale and her gala.”
“Right,” Meredith said. “What do we know about her? How did the clue go again, Elena?”
“Misao said, ‘If I said that one of the halves was inside the silver nightingale’s instrument, would that even give you an idea?’—or something like that,” Elena repeated obediently. They all knew the words by heart but it was part of the ritual, every time they discussed it.
“And the ‘Silver Nightingale’ is the nickname for Lady Fazina Darley and everyone in the Dark Dimension knows it!” cried Bonnie, clapping her small hands in sheer delight.
“Indeed, that has long been her sobriquet, given to her when she first came here and began to sing and play on her harps strung with silver,” Lady Ulma put in gravely.
“And harp strings need to be tuned, and they’re tuned with keys,” Bonnie continued excitedly.
“Yes.” Meredith, in contrast, spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “But it’s not a harp-tuning key we’re looking for. They look like this.” She put down on a table beside her an object made of smooth pale maple that looked like a very short T or, if held on its side, like a gracefully waving tree with one short horizontal branch. “I got that from one of the minstrels Damon hired.”
Bonnie eyed the tuning key loftily. “It might be a harp-tuning key we’re looking for,” she insisted. “It might be used for both things, somehow.”
“I don’t see how,” Meredith said doggedly. “Unless somehow they change shape when the two halves come together.”
“Oh, my, yes,” Lady Ulma said, as if Meredith had just made an obvious proposition. “If they are magical halves of a single key they will almost certainly change when the two halves come together.”
“You see?” Bonnie said.
“But if they can be any sort of shape, then how the hell will we even know when we’ve found them?” Elena asked impatiently. All she cared about was finding what it took to save Stefan.
Lady Ulma fell silent, and Elena felt badly. She hated to use harsh language or even appear distressed in front of the woman who had lived a life of such subjection and horror since her early teens. Elena wanted Lady Ulma to feel safe, to be happy.
“Anyway,” she said quickly, “we know one thing. It’s in the Silver Nightingale’s instrument. So whatever is inside Lady Fazina’s harp, that has to be it.”
“Oh, but—” Lady Ulma began, and then she stopped herself almost before the words were out.
“What is it?” Elena asked gently.
“Oh, nothing at all,” Lady Ulma said hastily. “I mean, would you like to see your dresses now? This last fitting is really just to make sure every stitch is perfect.”
“Oh, we’d love to!” Bonnie cried, at the same time making a dive for the sketchbook, while Meredith rung a bell pull that brought a servant hurrying in and hurrying away again to the sewing room.
“I only wish Master Damon and Lord Sage had agreed to let me create something for them to wear,” Lady Ulma said mournfully to Elena.
“Oh, Sage is not going. And I’m sure Damon wouldn’t have minded—as long as you designed him a black leather jacket, a black shirt, black jeans, and black boots all exactly like the ones he wears every day. He’d have been happy to wear it then.”
Lady Ulma laughed. “I see. Well, there will be enough fantastical styles worn tonight that he may change his mind for the future. Now let’s draw the curtains on the windows all around. This gala is to be indoors, with gaslight only, so colors will show true.”
“I wondered why it said ‘indoors’ on the invitations,” Bonnie said. “I thought maybe it was because of rain.”
“It’s because of the sun,” Lady Ulma said soberly. “That hateful crimson light, changing every blue to purple, every yellow to brown. You see, no one would wear aqua or green to an outdoor soiree—no, not even you, with that
strawberry hair that cries out for it.”
“I get it. I can see how having that sun hanging there every day would really get you down after a while.”
“I wonder if you can,” murmured Lady Ulma, and then she added hastily, “While we wait shall I show you what I have created for your tall friend who doubts me?”
“Oh, please, yes!” Bonnie held out the sketchbook.
Lady Ulma thumbed through it until she came to a page that seemed to please her. She took up pens and coloring pencils like a child eager to play with beloved toys again. “Here it is,” she said, using the colored pencils to add a line here and a curve there, but holding the book so that the three girls could see the design.
“Oh, my God!” cried Bonnie in genuine astonishment, and even Elena felt her eyes widening.
The girl in the sketch was definitely Meredith, with her hair half up and half down, but wearing a dress—such a dress! Black as ebony, strapless, it clung to the long slim figure perfectly sketched in the picture, emphasizing the curves, enhancing them on top by what Elena learned was called a “sweetheart” neckline: one that made Meredith’s front look like a Valentine’s Day heart. It kept close to the body all the way to the knees where it suddenly flared out again, dramatically wide. “A ‘mermaid’ dress,” Lady Ulma explained, satisfied with her sketch at last. “And here it is,” she added as several sewing women entered, reverently holding the miraculous gown between them. Now the girls could see that the material was of plush black velvet dotted with tiny rectangular metallic golden flecks. It looked like midnight back home, Elena thought, with a thousand falling stars in the sky.
“And with it, you will wear these very large black onyx and gold earrings, these black onyx and gold combs to hold your hair up, and some lovely matching bracelets and rings Lucen has made just for this outfit,” Lady Ulma continued. Elena realized that sometime in the last minutes Lucen must have entered the room. She smiled at him, and then her eyes dropped to the three-tiered tray he held. On the top tray, against an ivory background, were two black onyx and diamond bracelets, as well as a ring with a diamond in it that almost made her swoon.