by L. J. Smith
No, Matt decided, examining the earth carefully. There was only one set of footprints here, and it was Elena’s. Elena had gotten up here—only to fall down again, probably from injury. And then she’d managed to get up again, but the marks were weird, a normal footprint on one side and a deep but small indentation on the other.
A crutch. She found herself a crutch. Yeah, and that dragging mark was the mark of her bad foot. She walked up to this tree, and then around it—or hopped, actually, that’s what it looked like. And then she’d headed for the Dunstans’.
Smart girl. She was probably unrecognizable by now, and anyway, who cared if they noticed the resemblance between her and the late, great Elena Gilbert? She could be Elena’s cousin from Philadelphia.
So she’d gone, one, two, three…eight steps—and there was the Dunstan house. Matt could see lights. Matt could smell horses. Excitedly, he ran the rest of the way—taking a few falls that didn’t do his aching body any good, but still heading straight for the back porch light. The Dunstans weren’t front porch people.
When he got to the door, he pounded on it almost frenziedly. He’d found her. He’d found Elena!
It seemed a long time before the door opened a crack. Matt automatically wedged his foot in the crack while thinking, Yes, good, you’re cautious people. Not the type to let a vampire in after you’d just seen a girl covered in blood.
“Yes? What do you want?”
“It’s me, Matt Honeycutt,” he said to the eye that he could see peering out of the slit of open door. “I’ve come for El—for the girl.”
“What girl are you talking about?” the voice said gruffly.
“Look, you don’t have to worry. It’s me—Jake knows me from school. And Kristin knows me, too. I’ve come to help.”
Something in the sincerity of his voice seemed to strike a chord in the person behind the door. It was opened to reveal a large, dark-haired man who was wearing an under-shirt and needed a shave. Behind him, in the living room was a tall, thin, almost gaunt woman. She looked as if she had been crying. Behind both of them was Jake, who’d been a year senior to Matt at Robert E. Lee High.
“Jake,” Matt said. But he got no answer back except a dull look of anguish.
“What’s wrong?” Matt demanded, terrified. “A girl came by here a while ago—she was hurt—but—but—you let her in, right?”
“No girl’s come by here,” said Mr. Dunstan flatly.
“She had to have. I followed her trail—she left a trail in blood, do you understand, almost up to your door.” Matt wasn’t letting himself think. Somehow, if he kept telling the facts loudly enough, they would produce Elena.
“More trouble,” Jake said, but in a dull voice that went with his expression.
Mrs. Dunstan seemed the most sympathetic. “We heard a voice out in the night, but when we looked, there was no one there. And we have troubles of our own.”
It was then, right on cue, that Kristin burst into the room. Matt stared at her with a feeling of déjà vu. She was dressed up something like Tami Bryce. She had cut off the bottoms of her jeans shorts until they were practically nonexistent. On top she was wearing a bikini top, but with—Matt hastily turned his eyes away—two big round holes cut just where Tami had had round pieces of cardboard. And she’d decorated herself with glitter glue.
God! She’s only, what, twelve? Thirteen? How could she possibly be acting this way?
But the next moment, his whole body was vibrating in shock. Kristin had pasted herself against him and was cooing, “Matt Honey-butt! You came to see me!”
Matt breathed carefully to get over his shock. Matt Honey-butt. She couldn’t know that. She didn’t even go to the same school as Tami did. Why would Tami have called her and—told her something like that?
He shook his head, as if to clear it. Then he looked at Mrs. Dunstan, who had seemed kindest. “Can I use your phone?” he asked. “I need—I really need to make a couple of calls.”
“The phone’s been down since yesterday,” Mr. Dunstan said harshly. He didn’t try to move Kristin away from Matt, which was odd because he was clearly angry. “Probably a fallen tree. And you know mobile phones don’t work out here.”
“But—” Matt’s mind spun into overdrive. “You really mean that no teenage girl came up to your house asking for help? A girl with blond hair and blue eyes? I swear, I’m not the one who hurt her. I swear I want to help her.”
“Matt Honey-butt? I’m making a tattoo, just for you.” Still pressed up behind him, Kristin extended her left arm. Matt stared at it, horrified. She had obviously used needles or a pin to prick holes in her left forearm, and then opened a fountain pen’s cartridge of ink to supply the dark blue color. It was your basic prison-type tattoo, done by a child. The straggling letters M A T were already visible, along with a smudge of ink that was probably going to be another T.
No wonder they weren’t thrilled about letting me in, Matt thought, dazed. Now Kristin had both arms around his waist, making it hard to breathe. She was on tiptoe, talking to him, whispering rapidly some of the obscene things Tami had said.
He stared at Mrs. Dunstan. “Honest, I haven’t even seen Kristin for—it must be nearly a year. We had an end of the year carnival, and Kristin helped with the pony rides, but…”
Mrs. Dunstan was nodding slowly. “It’s not your fault. She’s been acting the same way with Jake. Her own brother. And with—with her father. But I’m telling you the truth; we haven’t seen any other girl. No one but you has come to the door today.”
“Okay.” Matt’s eyes were watering. His brain, attuned first of all to his own survival, was telling him to save his breath, not to argue. Telling him to say, “Kristin—I really can’t breathe—”
“But I love you, Matt Honey-butt. I don’t want you to ever leave me. Especially for that old whore. That old whore with worms in her eye-sockets…”
Again Matt felt the sense of the world rocking. But he couldn’t gasp. He didn’t have the air. Pop-eyed, he turned helplessly toward Mr. Dunstan, who was closest.
“Can’t—breathe—”
How could a thirteen-year-old be so strong? It was taking both Mr. Dunstan and Jake to pry her off him. No, even that wasn’t working. He was beginning to see a gray network pulsating before his eyes. He needed air.
There was a sharp crack that ended with a meaty sound. And then another. Suddenly he could breathe again.
“No, Jacob! No more!” Mrs. Dunstan cried. “She let him go—don’t hit her anymore!”
When Matt’s vision cleared, Mr. Dunstan was doing up his belt. Kristin was wailing, “Just you waaa-hate! Just you waa-haate! You’ll be sor-ry!” Then she rushed from the room.
“I don’t know if this helps or makes it worse,” Matt said when he’d gotten his breath back, “but Kristin isn’t the only girl acting this way. There’s at least one other one in the town—”
“All I care about is my Kristin,” Mrs. Dunstan said. “And that…thing isn’t her.”
Matt nodded. But there was something he needed to do now. He had to find Elena.
“If a blond girl does come to the door and asks for help, will you please let her in?” he asked Mrs. Dunstan. “Please? But don’t let any guys in—not even me if you don’t want,” he blurted.
For a moment his eyes and Mrs. Dunstan’s eyes met, and he felt a connection. Then she nodded and hastened to get him out of the house.
All right, Matt thought. Elena was headed for here, but she didn’t quite get here. So look at the signs.
He looked. And what the signs showed him was that, within a few feet of the Dunstan property, she had inexplicably turned sharply right, deeply into the forest.
Why? Had something scared her? Or had she—Matt felt sick to his stomach—somehow been tricked into hobbling on and on, until at last she left all human help behind?
All he could do was to follow her into the woods.
29
“Elena!”
Something was
bothering her.
“Elena!”
Please, no more pain. She couldn’t feel it right now, but she could remember…oh, no more fighting for air…
“Elena!”
No…just let it be. Mentally, Elena pushed away the thing that bothered her ears and her head.
“Elena, please…”
All she wanted was sleep. Forever.
“Damn you, Shinichi!”
Damon had picked up the snow globe with the miniature forest when Shinichi found Elena’s smudged glow radiating from it. Inside it, dozens of spruce, hickory, pine, and other trees grew—all from a perfectly transparent inner membrane. A miniature person—given that someone could be miniaturized and placed into such a globe, would see trees ahead, trees behind, trees in every direction—and could walk a straight line and come back to their starting point no matter which way they went.
“It’s an amusement,” Shinichi had said sullenly, watching him intently from under his lashes. “A toy, for children, usually. A play-trap.”
“And you find this amusing?” Damon had smashed the globe against the driftwood coffee table in the exquisite cabin which was Shinichi’s secret hideout. That was when he had discovered why these were games for children—the globe was unbreakable.
After that Damon had taken a moment—just one moment—to get hold of himself. Elena had perhaps seconds to live. He needed to be precise with his words.
After that single moment, a long flow of words had spilled out from his lips, mostly in English, and mostly without unnecessary curses or even insults. He didn’t care about insulting Shinichi. He had simply threatened—no, he had sworn—to carry out on Shinichi the kind of violence that he had seen sometimes in a long life filled with humans and vampires with skewed imaginations. Eventually, it had gotten through to Shinichi that he was serious, and Damon had found himself inside the globe with a drenched Elena in front of him. She was lying at his feet, and she was worse off than his worst fears had allowed him to picture. She had a dislocated right arm with multiple fractures and a hideously shattered left tibia.
Horrified as he had been to imagine her staggering through the forest of the globe, blood streaming from her right arm from shoulder to elbow, left leg dragging behind her like a wounded animal’s, this was worse. Her hair had been soaking with sweat and mud, straggling over her face. And she’d been out of her mind, literally, delirious, talking to people who weren’t there.
And she was turning blue.
She had been able to snap exactly one creeper with all her effort. Damon clawed up huge armfuls of them, ripping them from the earth viciously if they tried to fight or wrap around his wrists. Elena gasped in one deep breath just as suffocation would have killed her, but she didn’t regain consciousness.
And she wasn’t the Elena he remembered. When he’d picked her up, he’d felt no resistance, no acceptance, nothing. She didn’t know him. She was delirious with fever, exhaustion, and pain, but in one moment of half-consciousness had kissed his hand through her damp, disheveled hair, whispering “Matt…Find…Matt.” She didn’t know who he was—she scarcely knew who she was, but her concern was for her friend. The kiss had gone through his hand and up his arm like the touch of a branding iron, and since then he’d been monitoring her mind, trying to divert the agony she was feeling away—away anywhere—into the night—into himself.
He turned back to Shinichi and, in a voice like an icy wind, said, “You’d better have a way to cure all her wounds—now.”
The charming cabin was surrounded by the same evergreens, hickory, and pines as grew in the snow globe. The fire burned violet and green as Shinichi poked it.
“This water is just about ready to boil. Make her drink tea made with this.” He handed Damon a blackened flagon—once beautiful chased silver; now a battered remnant of what it had been—and a teapot with some broken leaves and other unsavory-looking things at the bottom. “Make sure she drinks a good three quarters of a cup, and she’ll fall asleep and wake up almost as good as new.”
He dug an elbow into Damon’s ribs. “Or you can just let her have a few sips—heal her partway, and then let her know it’s in your power to give her more…or not. You know…depending on how cooperative she is…”
Damon remained silent and turned away. If I have to look at him, he thought, I’ll kill him. And I might need him again.
“And if you really want to accelerate the healing, add some of your blood. Some people like to do it that way,” Shinichi added, his voice picking up speed with excitement again. “See how much pain a human can take, you know, and then when they’re dying, you can just feed them tea and blood and start over…if they remember you from last time—which they hardly ever do; they’ll usually go through more pain just to get a chance to fight you…,” he giggled, and Damon thought he sounded not quite sane.
But when he had suddenly turned to Shinichi, he had to hold himself very still inside. Shinichi had become a blazing, glowing, outline of himself, with tongues of light lapping from his projection, rather like close-up solar flares. Damon was nearly blinded, and knew he was meant to be. He clutched the silver flagon as if he were holding on to his own sanity.
Maybe he was. He had a blank space in his mind—and then there were suddenly memories of trying to find Elena…or Shinichi. Because Elena had abruptly been absent from his company, and it could only be the fault of the kitsune.
“There’s a modern bathroom here?” Damon asked Shinichi.
“There’s whatever you want; just decide before you open a door and unlock it with this key. And now…” Shinichi stretched, his golden eyes half shut. He ran a languid hand through his shiny black hair tipped with flame. “Now, I think I’ll go sleep under a bush.”
“Is that all you ever do?” Damon made no attempt to keep the biting sarcasm out of his voice.
“And have fun with Misao. And fight. And go to the tournaments. They—well, you’ll have to come and see one for yourself.”
“I don’t care to go anywhere.” Damon didn’t want to know what this fox and his sister considered fun.
Shinichi reached out and took the miniature cauldron full of boiling water off the fire. He poured the boiling water over the collection of tree bark, leaves, and other detritus in the battered metal teapot.
“Why don’t you go find a bush now?” Damon said—and it wasn’t a suggestion. He’d had enough of the fox, who had served his purpose now anyway, and he didn’t care a bit about whatever mischief Shinichi might make for other people. All he wanted was to be alone—with Elena.
“Remember; get her to drink it all if you want to keep her for a while. She’s pretty much unsalvageable without it.” Shinichi poured through a fine sieve the infusion of dark green tea. “Better try before she wakes up.”
“Will you just get out of here?”
When Shinichi stepped through the dimensional crack, taking care to turn just the right way so as to reach the real world, and not some other globe, he was steaming. He wanted to go back and thrash Damon within an inch of his life. He wanted to activate the malach inside Damon and cause him to…well, of course, not quite kill sweet Elena. She was a blossom with nectar untasted, and Shinichi was in no hurry to see her buried underground.
But as for the rest of the idea…yes, he decided. Now he knew what he would do. It would be simply delicious to watch Damon and Elena make up, and then, during the Moonspire Festival tonight, to bring back the monster. He could let Damon go on believing they were “allies,” and then, in the middle of their little spree—let the possessed Damon loose. Show that he, Shinichi, had been in control all along.
He would punish Elena in ways she had never dreamed about and she would die in delicious agony…at Damon’s hand. Shinichi’s tails quivered a little ecstatically at the thought. But for now, let them laugh and joke together. Revenge only ripened with time, and Damon was really quite difficult to control when he was raging.
It hurt to admit that, just as his tail—the ph
ysical one in the center—hurt from Damon’s abominable cruelty to animals. When Damon was in a passion it took every ounce of Shinichi’s concentration to control him.
But at Moonspire Damon would be calm, would be placid. He’d be pleased with himself, as he and Elena would undoubtedly have laid some absurd plot to try to stop Shinichi.
That would be when the fun would begin.
Elena would make a beautiful slave while she lasted.
With the kitsune gone, Damon felt that he could behave more naturally. Keeping a firm grasp on Elena’s mind, he picked up the cup. He tried a sip of the mixture himself before trying it on her and found it tasted just slightly less nauseating than it smelled. However, Elena really had no choice, she could not do anything of her own volition, and little by little, the mixture went down.
And then a dose of his blood went down. Again, Elena was unconscious and had no choice in the matter.
And then she’d gone to sleep by herself.
Damon paced restlessly. He had a memory that was more like a dream floating around in his head. It was of Elena trying to throw herself out of a Ferrari going about 100 kilometers an hour, to get away from—what?
Him?
Why?
Not, in any case, the best of beginnings.
But that was all he could remember! Damn it! Whatever came right before it was a total blank. Had he hurt Stefan? No, Stefan was gone. It had been the other boy with her, Mutt. What had happened?
Damn it to hell! He had to figure out what had happened so he could explain it all to Elena when she woke up. He wanted her to believe him, to trust him. He didn’t want Elena as a one-night bleeder. He wanted her to choose him. He wanted her to see how much better suited she was to him than to his mousy, milksop brother.
His princess of darkness. That was what she was meant to be. With him as king, consort, whatever she wished. When she saw things more clearly, she would understand that it didn’t matter. That nothing mattered except them being together.