The full moon, medium high, and white and pure as snow. And Elena floating in front of it, wearing an old- fashioned high-necked nightgown — and little if anything else. As long as he looked at her without the Power needed to discern her aura, he could examine her as a girl rather than as an angel in the midst of blinding incandescence.
Damon cocked his head to get a better view of the silhouette. Yes, that was definitely the right apparel for her, and she should always stand in front of brilliant lights. If he Slam.
He was flying backward and to the left. He hit a tree, trying to make sure that Bonnie didn’t hit it, too — she might break. Momentarily stunned, he floated — wafted really — down to the ground.
Stefan was on top of him.
“You,” said Damon somewhat indistinctly through the blood in his mouth, “have been a naughty boy, boy.”
“She made me. Literally. I thought she might die if I didn’t take some of her blood — her aura was that swollen. Now you tell me what’s wrong with Bonnie—”
“So you bled her despite your heroic unflagging resistance—” Slam.
This new tree smelled of resin. I never particularly wanted to get acquainted with the insides of trees, Damon thought as he spat out a mouthful of blood. Even as a crow I only use them when necessary.
Stefan had somehow snatched Bonnie out of the air while Damon was flying toward the tree. He was that fast now. He was very, very fast. Elena was a phenomenon.
“So now you have a secondhand idea what Elena’s blood is like.”And Stefan could hear Damon’s private thoughts. Normally, Damon was always up for a fight, but right now he could almost hear Elena’s weeping over her human friends, and something inside him felt tired. Very old — centuries old — and very tired.
But as for the question, well,yes. Elena was still bobbing aimlessly, sometimes spread-eagled and sometimes balled up like a kitten. Her blood was rocket fuel compared to the unleaded gasoline in most girls.
And Stefan wanted to fight. Wasn’t even trying to hide it. I was right, Damon thought. For vampires, the urge to squabble is stronger than any other urge, even the need to feed or, in Stefan’s case, the concern for his — what was the word? Oh, yes.Friends.
Now Damon was trying to elude a thrashing, trying to enumerate his assets, which weren’t many, because Stefan was still holding him down. Thought. Speech. A penchant for fighting dirty that Stefan just couldn’t seem to understand. Logic. An instinctive ability to find the chinks in his foe’s armor…
Hmmm…
“Meredith and”—damn! What was that boy’s name? — “her escort are dead by now, I think,” he said innocently. “We can stay here and brawl, if that’s what you want to call it, considering that I never laid a finger on you — or we can try to resuscitate them. Which will it be, I wonder?” He really did wonder about how much control Stefan had over himself right now.
As if Damon had zoomed out abruptly with a camera, Stefan seemed to become smaller. He had been floating a few feet above the ground; now he landed and looked about himself in astonishment, obviously unaware that he had been airborne.
Damon spoke in the pause while Stefan was most vulnerable. “I wasn’t the one who hurt them,” he added. “If you’ll look at Bonnie”—thank badness, he knew her name—“you’ll see that no vampire could do it. I think”—he added ingenuously, for shock value—“that the attackers were trees, controlled by malach.”
“Trees?”Stefan barely took time to glance at Bonnie’s pin-pricked arm. Then he said, “We need to get them indoors and into warm water. You take Elena—” Oh, gladly. In fact I’d give anything,anything —
“—and this car with Bonnie right back to the boardinghouse. Wake Mrs. Flowers. Do all you can for Bonnie. I’ll go on ahead and get Meredith and Matt—” That was it! Matt. Now if only he had a mnemonic“They’re just up the road, right? That was where your first strafe of Power seemed to come from.”
A strafe, was it? Why not be honest and just call it a feeble wash?
And while it was fresh in his mind…M for Mortal, A for Annoying, T for Thing. And there you had it. The pity was that it applied to all of them and yet not all of them were called MAT. Oh, damn — was there supposed to be another T at the end? Mortal, Annoying, Troublesome Thing? Annoying Terrible Thing?
“I said, is that all right?”
Damon returned to the present. “No, it’s not all right. The other car’s wrecked. It won’t drive.”
“I’ll float it behind me.” Stefan wasn’t bragging, just making a statement of fact.
“It’s not even in one piece.”
“I’ll bind the pieces. Come on, Damon. I’m sorry I strafed you; I had a completely wrong idea about what was going on. But Matt and Meredith may really be dying, and even with all my new Power, and all of Elena’s, we may not be able to save them. I’ve raised Bonnie’s core temperature a few degrees but I don’t dare to stay and bring it up slowly enough.Please, Damon.” He was putting Bonnie in the passenger seat.
Well, that sounded like the old Stefan, but coming from this powerhouse, the new Stefan, it had rather different undertones. Still, as long as Stefan thought he was a mouse, he was a mouse. End of discussion.
Earlier Damon had felt like Mount Vesuvius exploding. Now he suddenly felt as if he were standing near Vesuvius, and the mountain was rumbling. Ye gods! He actually felt seared just being this close to Stefan.
He called on all his considerable resources, mentally packing himself in ice, and hoped that at least a breath of coolness underlay his answer. “I’ll go. See you later — hope the humans aren’t dead yet.”
As they parted, Stefan sent him a powerful message of disapproval — not strafing him with sheer elemental pain, as he had before when throwing Damon against the tree, but making sure that his opinion of his brother was stamped across every word.
Damon sent Stefan a last message as he went.I don’t understand, he thought innocently toward the disappearing Stefan.What’s wrong with saying that I hope the humans are still alive? I’ve been in greeting card shops, you know— he didn’t mention that it wasn’t for the cards but for the young cashiers — and they had sections like “Hope you get well” and “Sympathy,” which I suppose means that the previous card’s spell wasn’t strong enough. So what’s wrong with saying “I hope they’re not dead”?
Stefan didn’t even bother to answer. But Damon flashed a quick and brilliant smile anyway, as he turned the Porsche around and set off for the boardinghouse.
He tugged on the clothesline that kept Elena bobbing above him. She floated — nightgown billowing — above Bonnie’s head — or rather where Bonnie’s head should have been. Bonnie had always been small, and this freezing illness had her crumpled into the fetal position. Elena could practically sit on her.
“Hello, princess. Looking gorgeous, as always. And you’re not too bad yourself.”
It was one of the worst opening lines of his life, he thought dejectedly. But he wasn’t feeling quite himself. Stefan’s transformation had startled him — that must be what’s wrong, he decided.
“Da…mon.”
Damon started. Elena’s voice was slow and hesitant…and absolutely beautiful: molasses dripping sweetness, honey falling straight from the comb. It was lower in pitch, he was sure, than it had been before her transformation, and it had become a true Southern drawl. To a vampire it resembled the sweet drip-drip of a newly opened human vein.
“Yes, angel. Have I called you ‘angel’ before? If not, it was purely an oversight.”
And as he said this, he realized that that was another component to her voice, one he’d missed before: purity. The lancing purity of a seraph of seraphim. That should have put him off, but instead it just reminded him that Elena was someone to take seriously, never lightly.
I’d take you seriously or lightly or any way you prefer, Damon thought, if you weren’t so stuck on my idiot younger brother.
Twin violet suns turned on him: Elena’s eyes. She’d heard him.
For the first time in his life, Damon was surrounded by people more powerful than he was. And to a vampire, Power was everything: material goods, community position, trophy mate, comfort, sex, cash, candy.
It was an odd feeling. Not entirely unpleasant in regards to Elena. He liked strong women. He’d been looking for one strong enough for centuries.
But Elena’s glance very effectively brought his thoughts back to their situation. He parked askew outside the boardinghouse, snatched up the stiffening Bonnie, and floated up the twisting, narrowing staircase towards Stefan’s room. It was the only place he knew there was a bathtub.
There was barely room for three inside the tiny bathroom, and Damon was the one carrying Bonnie. He ran
