The redheaded bird was crying again.
Well, do you want a change now or don’t you, little witch? Make up your mind. You have to ask nicely.
And then, of course, I have to decide what kind of change you get.
Bonnie couldn’t remember any more sophisticated prayer and so, like a tired child, she was saying an old one: “…I pray the Lord my soul to take….” She had used up all her energy calling for help and had gotten no response at all, just some feedback noise. She was so sleepy now. The pain had gone away and she was simply numb. The only thing bothering her was the cold. But then, that could be taken care of, too. She could just pull a blanket over herself, a thick, downy blanket, and she would warm up. She knew it without knowing how she knew.
The only thing that held her back from the blanket was the thought of her mother. Her mother would be sad if she stopped fighting. That was another thing she knew without knowing how she knew. If she could just get a message to her mother, explaining that she had fought as hard as she could, but that with the numbness and the cold, she couldn’t keep it up. And that she had known she was dying, but that it hadn’t hurt in the end, so there was no reason for Mom to cry. And next time she would learn from her mistakes, she promised…next time…
Damon’s entry was meant to be dramatic, coordinated with a flash of lightning just as his boots hit the car. Simultaneously, he sent out another vicious lash of Power, this time directed at the trees, the puppets who were being controlled by an unseen master. It was so strong that he felt a shocked response from Stefan all the way back at the boardinghouse. And the trees…melted backward into the darkness. They’d ripped the top off as if the car had been a giant sardine can, he mused, standing on the hood. Handy for him.
Then he turned his attention to the human Bonnie, the one with the curls, who ought by rights to have been embracing his feet by now, and gasping out “Thank you!”
She wasn’t. She was lying just as she had been in the embrace of the trees. Annoyed, Damon reached down to grab her hand, when he got a shock of his own. He sensed it before he touched it, smelled it before he felt it smear on his fingers. A hundred little pinpricks, each leaking blood. The evergreen’s needles must have done that, taking blood from her or — no, pumping some resinous substance in. Some anesthetic to keep her still as it took whatever was the next step in its consumption of prey — something quite unpleasant, to judge by the manners of the creature so far. An injection of digestive juices seemed most likely.
Or perhaps simply something to keep her alive, like antifreeze for a car, he thought, realizing with another nasty shock just how cold she was. Her wrist was like ice. He glanced at the two other humans, the dark-haired girl with the disturbing, logical eyes, and the fair-haired boy who was always trying to pick a fight. He might just have cut this one too fine. It certainly looked bad for the other two. But he was going to save this one. Because it was his whim. Because she had called for his help so piteously. Because those creatures, those malach, had tried to make him watch her death, eyes half-focused on it as they took his mind off the present with a glorious daydream.Malach — it was a general word indicating a creature of darkness: a sister or brother of the night. But Damon thought it now as if the word itself were something evil, a sound to be spat or hissed.
He had no intention of letting them win. He picked Bonnie up as if she were a bit of dandelion fluff and slung her over one shoulder. Then he took off from the car. Flying without changing shape first was a challenge. Damon liked challenges.
He decided to take her to the nearest source of warm water, and that was the boardinghouse. He needn’t disturb Stefan. There were half a dozen rooms in that warren that was making its genteel decline into the good Virginia mud. Unless Stefan was snoopy, he wouldn’t go walking in on other folks’ bathrooms.
As it turned out, Stefan was not only snoopy but fast. There was almost a collision: Damon and his burden came around a corner to find Stefan driving down the dark road with Elena, floating like Damon, bobbing behind the car as if she were a child’s balloon.
Their first exchange of words was neither brilliant nor witty.
“What the hell are you doing?” exclaimed Stefan.
“What the hell are you doing?” Damon said, or began to say, when he noticed the tremendous difference in Stefan — and the tremendous Power that was Elena. While most of his mind simply reeled in shock, a small part of it immediately began to analyze the situation, to figure out how Stefan had gone from a nothing to a — a Good grief. Oh, well, might as well put a brave face on it.
“I felt a fight,” Stefan said. “When did you become Peter Pan?”
“You should be glad you weren’t in the fight. And I can fly because I have the Power, boy.”
This was sheer bravado. In any case, it was perfectly correct, back when they were born, to address a younger relative asragazzo, or “boy.”
It wasn’t now. And meanwhile the part of his brain that hadn’t simply shut down was still analyzing. He could see, feel, do everything but touch Stefan’s aura. And it was…unimaginable. If Damon hadn’t been this close, hadn’t been experiencing it firsthand, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible for one person to have so much Power.
But he was looking at the situation with the same ability of cold and logical assessment that told him that his own Power — even after making himself drunk with the variety of women’s blood he had taken in the last few days — his Power was nothing to Stefan’s right now. And his cold and logical ability was also telling him that Stefan had been pulled out of bed for this, and that he hadn’t had time — or hadn’t been rational enough — to hide his aura.
“Well, now, look at you,” Damon said with all the sarcasm that he could call up — and that turned out to be quite a lot. “Is it a halo? Did you get canonized while I wasn’t looking? Am I addressing St. Stefan now?”
Stefan’s telepathic response was unprintable. “Where are Meredith and Matt?” he added fiercely.
“Or,” continued Damon, exactly as if Stefan hadn’t spoken, “could it be that you merit congratulation for having learned the art of deception at last?”
“And what are you doing with Bonnie?” Stefan demanded, ignoring Damon’s comments in turn.
“But you still don’t seem to have a grasp of polysyllabic English, so I’ll put this as simply as I can. You threw the fight.”
“I threw the fight,” Stefan said flatly, apparently seeing that Damon wasn’t going to answer any of his questions until he’d told the truth. “I just thanked God that you seemed to be too mad or drunk to be very observant. I wanted to keep you and the rest of the world from figuring out just exactly what Elena’s blood does. So you drove away without even trying to get a good look at her. And without suspecting that I could have shaken you off like a flea from the very beginning.”
“I never thought you had it in you.” Damon was reliving their little combat in all-too-vivid detail. It was true: he had never suspected that Stefan’s performance had been entirely that — a performance — and that he could have thrown Damon down at any time and done whatever he’d wanted.
“And there’s your benefactress.” Damon nodded up to where Elena was floating, secured by — yes, it was true — secured by clothesline to the clutch. “Just a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor,” he remarked, unable to help himself as he gazed up at her. Elena was, in fact, so bright that to look at her with Power channeled to the eyes was like trying to stare straight into the sun.
“She seems to have forgotten how to hide as well; she’s shining like a G0 star.”
“She doesn’t know how to lie, Damon.” It was clear that Stefan’s anger was steadily mounting. “Now tell me what’s going on and what you’ve done to Bonnie.”
The impulse to answer,Nothing. Why, do you think I should? was almost irresistible — almost. But Damon was facing a different Stefan than he’d ever seen before. This is not the little brother you know and love to trample into the ground, the voice of logic told him, and he heeded it.
“The other two huuu-mans,” Damon said, drawing the word out to its full obscene length, “are in their automobile. And”—suddenly virtuous—“I was taking Bonnie to your place.”
Stefan was standing by the car, at a perfect distance for examining Bonnie’s out flung arm. The pinpricks turned into a smear of blood when he touched them, and Stefan examined his own fingers with horror. He kept repeating the experiment. Soon Damon would be drooling, a highly undignified behavior that he wished to avoid.
Instead, he concentrated on a nearby astronomical phenomenon.
