by Smith, L. J.
Dr. Meggar peered at her and she could see the shine of tears in his short-sighted eyes. “It is—possible—just possible that if he has enough willpower, he could still be alive by then. But most likely…”
“Would it make any difference to your opinion if I said that he drank maybe a third of a bottle of Black Magic wine tonight?”
Both men stared at her. “Are you saying—”
“Is this just a plan you have now?”
“Please!” Forgetting about her cape, forgetting everything, Elena grasped Dr. Meggar’s hands. “I found a way to get him to drink about that much. Does it make a difference?” She squeezed the elderly hands until she could feel bone.
“It certainly should.” Dr. Meggar looked bewildered and afraid to hope. “If you really got that much into his system, he would be almost certain to live until the night of Bloddeuwedd’s party. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Elena sank back, unable to resist giving his hands a little kiss as she let go.
“And now let’s go tell Damon the good news,” she said.
In the carriage, Damon was sitting bolt upright, his profile outlined against a blood-red sky. Elena got in and shut the door behind her.
With no expression at all, he said, “Is it over?”
“Over?” Elena wasn’t really this dense, but she figured it was important that Damon be clear in his own mind as to what he was asking.
“Is he—dead?” Damon said wearily, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
Elena allowed the silence to go on for a few beats longer. Damon must know Stefan was not likely to actually die in the next half hour. Now that he wasn’t getting instant confirmation of this his head snapped up.
“Elena, tell me! What happened?” he demanded, urgency in his voice. “Is my brother dead?”
“No,” Elena said quietly. “But he’s likely to die in a few days. He was coherent this time, Damon. Why didn’t you speak to him?”
There was an almost palpable drawing-in on Damon’s part. “What do I have to say to him that matters?” he asked harshly. “‘Oh, I’m sorry I almost killed you’? ‘Oh, I hope you make it another few days’?”
“Things like that, maybe, if you lose the sarcasm.”
“When I die,” Damon said cuttingly, “I’m going to be standing on my own two feet and fighting.”
Elena slapped him across the mouth. There wasn’t room to get much leverage here, but she put as much Power behind the motion as she dared without risking breaking the carriage.
Afterward, there was a long silence. Damon was touching his bleeding lip, accelerating the healing, swallowing his own blood.
Finally he said, “It never even occurred to you that you are my slave, did it? That I’m your master?”
“If you’re going to retreat into fantasy, that’s your affair,” Elena said. “Myself, I have to deal with the real world. And, by the way, soon after you ran away, Stefan was not only standing but laughing.”
“Elena”—on a quick rising note. “You found a way to give him blood?” He grasped her arm so hard it hurt.
“Not blood. A little Black Magic. With two of us there, it would have gone twice as fast.”
“There were three of you there.”
“Sage and Dr. Meggar had to distract the guards.”
Damon took his hand away. “I see,” he said, expressionlessly. “So I failed him yet again.”
Elena looked at him with sympathy. “You’re completely inside the stone ball now, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The stone ball you stick anything that might hurt you inside. You even draw yourself inside it, although it must be very cramped in there. Katherine must be in there, I suppose, walled off in her own little chamber.” She remembered the night at the hotel. “And your mother, of course. I should say, Stefan’s mother. She was the mother you knew.”
“Don’t…my mother…” Damon couldn’t even form a coherent sentence.
Elena knew what he wanted. He wanted to be held and soothed and told it was all right—just the two of them, under her cloak with her warm arms holding him. But he wasn’t going to get it. This time she was saying no.
She had promised Stefan that this was for him, alone. And, she thought, she would keep to the spirit of that promise, if she hadn’t kept to the letter, forever.
As the week progressed, Elena was able to recover from the pain of seeing Stefan. Although none of them could speak about it except in choked, brief exclamations, they listened when Elena said that there was still a job to be done, and that if they managed to complete it well they would be able to go home soon—while if they did not complete it, Elena didn’t care whether she went home or stayed here in the Dark Dimension.
Home! It had the sound of a haven, even though Bonnie and Meredith knew firsthand what kind of hell was lurking in Fell’s Church for them. But somehow anything would be preferable to this land of bloody light.
With hope kindling interest in their surroundings, they were once again able to feel pleasure at the dresses Lady Ulma was having made for them. Designing was the one pursuit that the lady could still enjoy during her official bed rest, and Lady Ulma had been hard at work with her sketchbook. Since Bloddeuwedd’s party would be an indoor/outdoor affair, all three dresses had to be carefully designed to be attractive both under candlelight and under the giant red sun’s crimson rays.
Meredith’s gown was deep metallic blue, violet in the sunlight, and it showed an entirely different side of the girl from the siren in the skin-tight mermaid dress who had attended Fazina’s gala. It reminded Elena somehow of something an Egyptian princess would wear. Once again, it left Meredith’s arms and shoulders bare, but the modest narrow skirt that fell in straight lines to her sandals, and the delicacy of the sapphire beads that adorned the shoulder straps served to give Meredith an unassuming look. That look was emphasized by Meredith’s hair, which Lady Ulma dictated be worn down, and her face, which was bare of makeup except kohl around the eyes. At her throat, a necklace made of the very largest oval-cut sapphires formed an elaborate collar. She also had matching blue gems on her wrists and slender fingers.
Bonnie’s dress was a little clever invention: it was made of a silvery material which took on a pastel tinge of the color of the ambient lighting. Moonlight-colored indoors, it shone a soft shimmering pink, almost exactly the color of Bonnie’s strawberry hair, when she was outside. It sported a belt, necklace, bracelets, earrings, and rings all of matching cabochon-cut white opals. Bonnie’s curls were to be carefully pinned up and away from her face, in a daringly mussed-up mass, leaving her translucent skin to shine softly rose in the sunlight, and ethereally pale inside.
Once again, Elena’s dress was the simplest and the most striking. Her gown was scarlet, the same color under blood-red sun or indoor gas lamp. It was rather low cut, giving her creamy skin a chance to shine golden in the sunlight. Clinging close to her figure, it was slashed up one side to give her room to walk or dance. On the afternoon of the party Lady Ulma had Elena’s hair carefully brushed into a tangled cloud that shimmered Titian outdoors, golden indoors. Her jewelry ranged from an inset of diamonds at the bottom of the neckline, to diamonds on her fingers, wrists and one upper arm, plus a diamond choker that fit over Stefan’s necklace. All these would blaze as red as rubies in the sunlight, but would occasionally glint another startling color, like a burst of mini-fireworks. Onlookers, Lady Ulma promised, would be dazzled.
“But I can’t wear these,” Elena had protested to Lady Ulma. “I might not get to see you again before we get Stefan—and from that moment we’re on the run!”
“It’s the same for all of us,” Meredith had added quietly, looking at each of the girls in their “indoor” colors of silvery-blue, scarlet, and opal. “We’re all wearing the most jewelry we’ve ever worn indoors or out—but you might lose it all!”
“And you might need it all,” Lucen had said qu
ietly. “All the more reason for you each to have jewelry that you can trade for carriages, safety, food, whatever. It’s simply designed, too—you can wrench out a stone and use it as payment, and the jewels are not in an elaborate setting that might not be to some collector’s taste.”
“In addition to which, they are all of the highest quality,” Lady Ulma had added. “They are the most flawless examples of their kind we could get on such short notice.”
At that point, all three girls had reached their limit, and rushed the couple—Lady Ulma on her enormous bed, sketchbook always beside her, and Lucen standing nearby—and cried and kissed and generally undid the beautiful jobs that had been done on their faces.
“You’re like angels to us, do you know that?” Elena sobbed. “Just like fairy godparents or angels! I don’t know how I can say good-bye!”
“Like angels,” Lady Ulma had said then, wiping a tear from Elena’s cheek. Then she grasped Elena, saying “Look!” and gestured to herself comfortably in bed, with a couple of blooming, dewy-eyed young women ready to attend to her wishes. Lady Ulma had then nodded at the window, out of which a small mill stream could be seen, and some plum trees, with ripe fruit blazing like jewels on the branches, and then with a sweep of her hand indicated the gardens, orchards, fields, and forests on the estate.
Then she had taken Elena’s hand and smoothed it over her own softly curving abdomen. “You see?” she had spoken almost in a whisper. “Do you see all of this—and can you remember how you found me? Which of us is an angel now?”
At the words “how you found me” Elena’s hands had flown up to cover her face—as if she’d been unable to bear what memory showed her at that moment. Then she was hugging and kissing Lady Ulma again, and a whole new round of cosmetic-destroying embraces had begun.
“Master Damon was even kind enough to buy Lucen,” Lady Ulma had said, “and you may not be able to picture it, but”—here she had looked at the quiet, bearded jeweler with eyes full of tears—“I feel for him as you feel for your Stefan.” And then she had blushed and hidden her face in her hands.
“He’s freeing Lucen today,” Elena had said, dropping to her knees to rest her head against Lady Ulma’s pillow. “And giving the estate to you irrevocably. He’s had a lawyer—an advocate, you’d say—working on the papers all week with a Guardian. They’re done now, and even if that hideous general should come back, he couldn’t touch you. You have your home forever.”
More crying. More kissing. Sage, who had been innocently walking down the hallway, whistling, after a romp with his dog, Saber, had passed Lady Ulma’s room and had been drawn in. “We’ll all miss you, too!” Elena had wept. “Oh, thank you!”
Later that day, Damon had made good on all of Elena’s promises, besides giving a large bonus to each member of the staff. The air had been full of metallic confetti, rose petals, music, and cries of farewell as Damon, Elena, Bonnie, and Meredith had been carried to Bloddeuwedd’s party—and away forever.
“Come to think of it, why didn’t Damon free us?” Bonnie asked Meredith as they rode in litters toward Bloddeuwedd’s mansion. “I can understand that we needed to be slaves to get into this world, but we’re in now. Why not make honest girls of us?”
“Bonnie, we’re honest girls already,” Meredith reminded her. “And I think the point is that we were never real slaves at all.”
“Well, I meant: Why doesn’t he free us so that everyone knows we’re honest girls, Meredith, and you know it.”
“Because you can’t free somebody who’s free already, that’s why.”
“But he could have gone through the ceremony,” Bonnie persisted. “Or is it really hard to free a slave here?”
“I don’t know,” Meredith said, breaking at last under this tireless inquisition. “But I’ll tell you why I think he doesn’t do it. I think that it’s because this way he’s responsible for us. I mean, it’s not that slaves can’t be punished—we saw that with Elena.” Meredith paused while they both shuddered at the memory. “But, ultimately, it’s the slave owner that can lose their life over it. Remember, they wanted to stake Damon for what Elena did.”
“So he’s doing it for us? To protect us?”
“I don’t know. I…suppose so,” Meredith said slowly.
“Then—I guess we’ve been wrong about him in the past?” Bonnie generously said “we’ve” instead of “you’ve.” Meredith had always been the one of Elena’s group most resistant to Damon’s charm.
“I…suppose so,” Meredith said again. “Although it seems that everyone is forgetting that until recently Damon helped the kitsune twins to put Stefan here! And Stefan definitely hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”
“Well, of course that’s true,” Bonnie said, sounding relieved not to have been too wrong, and at the same time strangely wistful.
“All Stefan ever wanted from Damon was peace and quiet,” Meredith continued, as if on more steady ground there.
“And Elena,” Bonnie added automatically.
“Yes, yes—and Elena. But all Elena wanted was Stefan! I mean—all Elena wants…” Meredith’s voice trailed off. The sentence didn’t seem to work properly in the present tense anymore. She tried again. “All Elena wants now is…”
Bonnie just watched her speechlessly.
“Well, whatever she wants,” Meredith concluded, rather shaken, “she wants Stefan to be a part of it. And she doesn’t want any of us to have to stay here—in this…this hellhole.”
In another litter just beside them things were very quiet. Bonnie and Meredith were so used by now to traveling in closed litters that they hadn’t even realized that another palanquin had drawn abreast of them and that their voices carried clearly in the hot, still afternoon air.
In the second litter, Damon and Elena both looked very hard at the silken curtains fluttering open.
Now, Elena, with an almost mad air of needing something to do, hurriedly unwound a cord and the curtains dropped into place.
It was a mistake. It closed Elena and Damon into a surreal glowing red oblong, in which only the words that they had just heard seemed to have validity.
Elena felt her breath coming too quickly. Her aura was slipping. Everything was slipping sideways.
They don’t believe that I only want to be with Stefan!
“Steady on,” Damon said. “This is the last night. By tomorrow—”
Elena held up a hand to keep him from saying it.
“By tomorrow we’ll have found the key and gotten Stefan and we’ll be out of here,” Damon said anyway.
Jinx, thought Elena. And sent up a prayer after it.
They rode in silence up toward Bloddeuwedd’s grand mansion. For a surprisingly long time Elena didn’t realize that Damon was trembling. It was a quick, involuntary shaken breath that alerted her.
“Damon! Dear—dear heaven!” Elena was stricken, at a loss, not for words, but for the right words. “Damon, look at me! Why?”
Why? Damon replied in the only voice he could trust not to tremble or crack or break. Because—do you ever think of what’s happening to Stefan while you’re going to a party wearing splendid clothes, being carried along, to drink the finest wine and to dance—while he—while he— The thought remained unfinished.
This is just what I needed right before being seen in public, Elena thought, as they reached the long driveway to Bloddeuwedd’s home. She tried to call on all of her resources before the curtains were drawn and they were free to step out at the location of the second half of the key.
34
I don’t think about those things, Elena answered in the same way Damon had spoken and for the same reason. I don’t think because if I do I’ll go insane. But if I go insane, what good will I be to Stefan? I couldn’t help him. Instead I block it all out with walls of iron and I keep it away at any cost.
“And you can manage that?” Damon asked, his voice shaking slightly.
“I can—because I have to. Remember in the beginning when
we were arguing about the ropes around our wrists? Meredith and Bonnie had doubts. But they knew that I would wear handcuffs and crawl after you if that was what it took.” Elena turned to look at Damon in the crimson darkness and added, “And you’ve given yourself away, time after time, you know.” She slipped arms around him to touch his healed back, so that he would have no doubt about what she meant.
“That was for you,” Damon said harshly.
“Not really,” Elena replied. “Think about it. If you hadn’t agreed to the Discipline, we might have run out of town, but we could never have helped Stefan after that. When you get down to it, everything, all you’ve done, you’ve done for Stefan.”
“When you get down to it, I was the one who put Stefan here in the first place,” Damon said tiredly. “I figure we’re just about even now.”
“How many times, Damon? You were possessed when you let Shinichi talk you into it,” Elena said, feeling exhausted herself. “Maybe you need to be possessed again—just a little—so you remember how it feels.”
Every cell in Damon’s body seemed to flinch away from this idea. But aloud he just said, “There’s something that everyone has missed, you know. About the archetypal story of how two brothers killed each other simultaneously, and became vampires because they’d dallied with the same girl.”
“What?” Elena said sharply, shocked out of her tiredness. “Damon, what do you mean?”
“What I said. There’s something you’ve all missed. Ha. Maybe even Stefan has missed it. The story gets told and retold, but nobody catches it.”
Damon had turned his face away. Elena moved closer to him, just a bit, so he could smell her perfume, which was attar of roses that night. “Damon, tell me. Tell me, please!”
Damon started to turn toward her—