by L. J. Smith
“She hit you, too?” Jim said in dismay. Except that he didn’t say it. He whispered it.
You poor guy, Bonnie thought, finally satisfied that Meredith wasn’t perforated. What with Caroline and your sister Tami and your girlfriend, you don’t have the first idea of what’s going on. How could you?
And if we told you, you’d just think we were two more crazy girls.
“Jimmy, you have to call Dr. Alpert right away, and then I think they’re going to have to go to the hospital in Ridgemont. Isobel’s already done permanent damage to herself—God knows how much. All those piercings are almost certainly going to be infected. When did she start this?”
“Um, well…she first started acting weird after Caroline came to see her.”
“Caroline!” Bonnie blurted, confused. “Was she crawling?”
Jim gave her a look. “Huh?”
“Never mind Bonnie; she was joking,” Meredith said easily. “Jimmy, you don’t have to tell us about Caroline if you don’t want to. We—well, we know she was over at your house.”
“Does everybody know?” Jim asked miserably.
“No. Just Matt, and he only told us so that somebody could go check on your little sister.”
Jim looked guilty and stricken at once. The words poured out of him as if they’d been bottled up and now the cork was out of the bottle.
“I don’t know what’s going on anymore. All I can tell you is what happened. It was a couple days ago—late evening,” Jim said. “Caroline came over, and—I mean, I never even had a crush on her. It’s like, sure, she’s good-looking, and my parents were away and all, but I never thought I was the kind of guy…”
“Never mind that now. Just tell us about Caroline and Isobel.”
“Well, Caroline came over wearing this outfit that was—well, the top was practically transparent. And she just—she said, did I want to dance and it was, like, slow dancing and she—she, like, seduced me. That’s the truth. And the next morning she left—just about the time Matt came. That was the day before yesterday. And then I noticed Tami acting—crazy. Nothing I could do would stop her. And then I got a phone call from Isa-chan and—I’ve never heard her so hysterical. Caroline must have gone straight from my house to her house. Isa-chan said she was going to kill herself. And so I ran over here. I had to get away from Tami anyway because me being there at home just seemed to make it worse.”
Bonnie looked at Meredith and knew that they were both thinking the same thing: and somewhere in there, both Caroline and Tami propositioned Matt, too.
“Caroline must have told her everything.” Jim gulped. “Isa-chan and I haven’t—we were waiting, you know? But all Isa-chan would say to me was that I was going to be sorry. ‘You’ll be sorry; just wait and see,’ over and over and over. And, God, I am sorry.”
“Well, now you can stop being sorry and start calling the doctor. Right now, Jimmy.” Meredith gave him a swat on the behind. “And then you need to call your parents. Don’t give me those big brown puppy-dog eyes. You’re over eighteen; I don’t know what they can do to you for leaving Tami alone all this time.”
“But—”
“But me no buts. I mean it, Jimmy.”
Then she did what Bonnie knew she would, but was dreading. She approached Isobel again. Isobel’s head was down; she was pinching her navel with one hand. In the other, she held a long, shining nail.
Before Meredith could even speak, Isobel said, “So you’re in on it, too. I heard the way you called him ‘Jimmy.’ You’re all trying to take him away from me. All you bitches are trying to hurt me. Yurusenai! Zettai yurusenai!”
“Isobel! Don’t! Can’t you see that you’re hurting yourself?”
“I’m only hurting myself to take away the pain. You’re the one who’s really doing it, you know. You’re pricking me with needles inside.”
Bonnie jumped inside her own skin, but not just because Isobel suddenly gave a vicious thrust of the nail. She felt heat sweep up into her cheeks. Her heart began to pound even faster than it was already going.
Trying to keep one eye on Meredith, she pulled her mobile phone out of her back pocket where she’d stashed it after the visit to Caroline’s house.
Still with half her attention on Meredith, she went on the Internet and rapidly entered just two search words. Then, as she made a couple of selections from her hits, she realized that she could never absorb all the information in a week, much less a few minutes. But at least she had a start.
Just now, Meredith was backing away from Isobel. She put her mouth close to Bonnie’s ear and whispered, “I think we’re just antagonizing her. Did you get a good look at her aura?”
Bonnie nodded.
“Then we probably should leave the room, at least.”
Bonnie nodded again.
“Were you trying to call Matt and Elena?” Meredith was eyeing the mobile phone.
Bonnie shook her head and turned the phone so Meredith could see her two search words. Meredith stared, then lifted dark eyes to Bonnie’s in a kind of horrified recognition.
Salem witches.
21
“It actually makes a horrible kind of sense,” Meredith said. They were in Isobel’s family room, waiting for Dr. Alpert. Meredith was at a beautiful desk made of some black wood ornamented with designs in gilt, working at a computer that had been left on. “The Salem girls accused people of hurting them—witches, of course. They said they were pinching them and ‘pricking them with pins.’”
“Like Isobel blaming us,” Bonnie said, nodding.
“And they had seizures and contorted their bodies into ‘impossible positions.’”
“Caroline looked as if she were having seizures in Stefan’s room,” said Bonnie. “And if crawling like a lizard isn’t contorting your body into an impossible position…here, I’ll try it.” She got down on the Saitous’ floor and tried to stick her elbows and knees out the way Caroline had. She couldn’t do it.
“See?”
“Oh, my God!” It was Jim at the doorway of the kitchen, holding—almost dropping—a tray of food. The smell of miso soup was sharp in the air, and Bonnie wasn’t sure if it made her feel hungry or if she was too sick to ever be hungry again.
“It’s okay,” she told him hastily, standing up. “I was just…trying something out.”
Meredith stood up too. “Is that for Isobel?”
“No, it’s for Obaasan—I mean Isa-chan’s grandma—Grandma Saitou—”
“I told you to call everybody whatever comes out naturally. Obaasan is fine, just like Isa-chan,” Meredith said softly and firmly to him.
Jim relaxed a hair. “I tried to get Isa-chan to eat, but she just throws the trays at the wall. She says that she can’t eat; that somebody’s choking her.”
Meredith glanced significantly at Bonnie. Then she turned back to Jim. “Why don’t you let me take it? You’ve been through a lot. Where is she?”
“Upstairs, second door on the left. If—if she says anything weird, just ignore it.”
“All right. Stay near Bonnie.”
“Oh, no,” Bonnie said hastily. “Bonnie is going with.” She didn’t know if it was for her own protection or Meredith’s, but she was going to stick like glue.
Upstairs, Meredith turned the hall light on carefully with her elbow. Then they found the second door on the left, which turned out to have a doll-like old lady in it. She was in the exact center of the room, lying on the exact center of a futon. She sat up and smiled when they came in. The smile turned a wrinkled face almost into the face of a happy child.
“Megumi-chan, Beniko-chan, you came to see me!” she exclaimed, bowing where she sat.
“Yes,” Meredith said carefully. She put the tray down beside the old lady. “We came to see you—Ms. Saitou.”
“Don’t play games with me! It’s Inari-chan! Or are you mad at me?”
“All these chans. I thought ‘Chan’ was a Chinese name. Isn’t Isobel Japanese?” whispered Bonnie from behi
nd Meredith.
One thing, the doll-like old woman was not, was deaf. She burst into laughter, bringing up both hands to cover her mouth girlishly. “Oh, don’t tease me before I eat. Itadakimasu!” She picked up the bowl of miso soup and began to drink it.
“I think chan is something you put at the end of someone’s name when you’re friends, the way Jimmy was saying Isa-chan,” Meredith said aloud. “And Eeta-daki-mass-u is something you say when you start eating. And that’s all I know.”
Part of Bonnie’s mind noted that the “friends” Grandma Saitou had just happened to have names starting with M and B. Another part was calculating where this room was with relation to the rooms below it, Isobel’s room in particular.
It was directly above it.
The tiny old woman had stopped eating and was watching her intently. “No, no, you’re not Beniko-chan and Megumi-chan. I know it. But they do visit me sometimes, and so does my dear Nobuhiro. Other things do, too, unpleasant things, but I was raised a shrine maiden—I know how to take care of them.” A brief look of knowing satisfaction passed over the innocent old face. “This house is possessed, you know.” She added, “Kore ni wa kitsune ga karande isou da ne.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Saitou—what was that?” Meredith asked.
“I said, there’s a kitsune involved in this somehow.”
“A kit-su-nay?” Meredith repeated, quiz-zically.
“A fox, silly girl,” the old woman said cheerfully. “They can turn into anything they like, don’t you know? Even humans. Why, one could turn into you and your best friend wouldn’t know the difference.”
“So—a sort of were-fox, then?” Meredith asked, but Grandma Saitou was rocking back and forth now, her gaze on the wall behind Bonnie. “We used to play a circle game,” she said. “All of us in a circle and one in the middle, blindfolded. And we would sing a song. Ushiro no shounen daare? Who is standing behind you? I taught it to my children, but I made up a little song in English to go with it.”
And she sang, in the voice of the very old or the very young, with her eyes fixed innocently on Bonnie all the while.
“Fox and turtle
Had a race.
Who’s that far behind you?
Whoever came in
Second place
Who’s that near behind you?
Would make a nice meal
For the winner.
Who’s that close behind you?
Lovely turtle soup
For dinner!
Who’s that right behind you?”
Bonnie felt hot breath on her neck. Gasping, she whirled around—and screamed. And screamed.
Isobel was there, dripping blood onto the mats that covered the floor. She had somehow managed to get past Jim and to sneak into the dim upstairs room without anyone seeing or hearing her. Now she stood there like some distorted goddess of piercing, or the hideous embodiment of every piercer’s nightmare. She was wearing only a pair of very brief bikini bottoms. Otherwise she was naked except for the blood and the different kinds of hoops and studs and needles she had put through the holes. She had pierced every area Bonnie had ever heard that you could pierce, and a few that Bonnie hadn’t dreamed of. And every hole was crooked and bleeding.
Her breath was warm and fetid and nauseating—like rotten eggs.
Isobel flicked her pink tongue. It wasn’t pierced. It was worse. With some kind of instrument she had cut the long muscle in two so that it was forked like a snake’s.
The forked, pink thing licked Bonnie’s forehead.
Bonnie fainted.
Matt drove slowly down the almost invisible lane. There was no street sign to identify it, he noticed. They went up a little hill and then down sharply into a small clearing.
“‘Keep away from faerie circles,’” Elena said softly, as if she were quoting. “‘And old oaks…’”
“What are you talking about?”
“Stop the car.” When he did, Elena stood in the center of the clearing. “Don’t you think it has a faerie sort of feeling?”
“I don’t know. Where’d the red thing go?”
“In here somewhere. I saw it!”
“Me, too—and did you see how it was bigger than a fox?”
“Yes, but not as big as a wolf.”
Matt let out a sigh of relief. “Bonnie just won’t believe me. And you saw how quickly it moved—”
“Too quickly to be something natural.”
“You’re saying we didn’t really see anything?” Matt said almost fiercely.
“I’m saying we saw something supernatural. Like the bug that attacked you. Like the trees, for that matter. Something that doesn’t follow the laws of this world.”
But search as they would, they couldn’t find the animal. The bushes and shrubs between the trees reached from the ground up in a dense circle. But there was no evidence of a hole or a hide or a break in the dense thicket.
And the sun was sliding down in the sky. The clearing was beautiful, but there was nothing of interest to them.
Matt had just turned to say so to Elena when he saw her stand up quickly, in alarm.
“What’s—?” He followed her gaze and stopped.
A yellow Ferrari blocked the way back to the road.
They hadn’t passed a yellow Ferrari on their way in. There was only room for one car on the one-lane road.
Yet there the Ferrari stood.
Branches broke behind Matt. He whirled.
“Damon!”
“Whom were you expecting?” The wraparound Ray-Bans concealed Damon’s eyes completely.
“We weren’t expecting anyone,” Matt said aggressively. “We just turned in here.” The last time he’d seen Damon, when Damon had been banished like a whipped dog from Stefan’s room, he’d wanted to punch Damon in the mouth very much, Elena knew. She could feel that he wanted it again now.
But Damon wasn’t the same as he’d been when he’d left that room. Elena could see danger rising off him like heat waves.
“Oh, I see. This is—your private area for—private explorations,” Damon translated, and there was a note of complicity in his voice that Elena disliked.
“No!” Matt snarled. Elena realized she was going to have to keep him under control. It was dangerous to antagonize Damon in this mood. “How can you even say that?” Matt went on. “Elena belongs to Stefan.”
“Well—we belong to each other,” Elena temporized.
“Of course you do,” said Damon. “One body, one heart, one soul.” For a moment there was something there—an expression inside the Ray-Bans, she thought, that was murderous.
Instantly, though, Damon’s tone changed to an expressionless murmur. “But then, why are you two here?” His head, turning to follow Matt’s movement, moved like a predator tracking prey. There was something more disquieting than usual about his attitude.
“We saw something red,” Matt said before Elena could stop him. “Something like what I saw when I had that accident.”
Prickles were now running up and down Elena’s arms. Somehow she wished Matt hadn’t said that. In this dim, quiet clearing in the evergreen grove, she was suddenly very much afraid.
Stretching her new senses to their utmost—until she could feel them distending like a gossamer garment pushed thin all around her, she felt the wrongness there, too, and felt it pass out of the reach of her mind. At the same time she felt birds go quiet all that long distance away.
What was most disturbing was to turn just then, just as the birdsong stopped, and find Damon turning at the same instant to look at her. The sunglasses kept her from knowing what he was thinking. The rest of his face was a mask.
Stefan, she thought helplessly, longingly.
How could he have left her—with this? With no warning, no idea of his destination, no way of ever contacting him again…It might have made sense to him, with his desperate desire not to make her into something he loathed in himself. But to leave her with Damon in this mood, and all of her
previous powers gone—
Your own fault, she thought, cutting short the flood of self-pity. You were the one who harped on brotherhood. You were the one who convinced him Damon was to be trusted. Now you deal with the consequences.
“Damon,” she said, “I’ve been looking for you. I wanted to ask you—about Stefan. You do know that he’s left me.”
“Of course. I believe the saying goes, for your own good. He left me to be your bodyguard.”
“Then you saw him two nights ago?”
“Of course.”
And—of course—you didn’t try to stop him. Things couldn’t have turned out better for you, Elena thought. She had never wished more for the abilities she’d had as a spirit, not even when she’d realized Stefan was really gone and beyond her all-too-human reach.
“Well, I’m not just letting him leave me,” she said flatly, “for my own good or for any other reason. I’m going to follow him—but first I need to know where he might have gone.”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes. Please. Damon, I have to find him. I need him. I—” She was starting to choke up, and she had to be stern with herself.
But just then she realized that Matt was whispering very softly to her. “Elena, stop. I think we’re just making him mad. Look at the sky.”
Elena felt it herself. The circle of trees seemed to be leaning in all around them, darker than before, menacing. Elena tilted her chin slowly, looking up. Directly above them, gray clouds were pooling, piling in on themselves, cirrus overwhelmed by cumulus, turning to thunderheads—centered exactly over the spot where they stood.
On the ground, small whirlwinds began to form, lifting handfuls of pine needles and fresh green summer leaves off saplings. She had never seen anything like it before, and it filled the clearing with a sweet but sensuous smell, redolent of exotic oils and long, dark winter nights.
Looking at Damon, then, as the whirlwinds lifted higher and the sweet scent encircled her, resinous and aromatic, closing in until she knew it was soaking into her clothes and being impressed into her very flesh, she knew she had overstepped herself.
She couldn’t protect Matt.
Stefan told me to trust Damon in his note in my diary. Stefan knows more about him than I do, she thought desperately. But we both know what Damon wants, ultimately. What he’s always wanted. Me. My blood…