water into the ancient, four-footed tub based on what his exquisitely tuned senses said was five degrees above her current icy temperature. He tried to explain to Elena what he was doing, but she seemed to have lost interest and was floating round and round Stefan’s bedroom, like a close-up of Tinkerbell caged. She kept bumping the closed window and then zooming over to the open door, looking out.
What a dilemma. Ask Elena to undress and bathe Bonnie, and risk her putting Bonnie in the tub wrong side up? Or ask Elena to do the job and watch over them both, but not touch — unless disaster struck? Plus, someone had to find Mrs. Flowers and get hot drinks going. Write a note and send Elena with it? There might be more casualties in here any moment now.
Then Damon caught Elena’s eye, and all petty and conventional concerns seemed to drop away. Words appeared in his brain without bothering to come through his ears.
Help her. Please!
He turned back to the bathroom, lay Bonnie on the thick rug there and shelled her like a shrimp. Off with the sweatshirt, off with the summer top that went under it. Off with the small bra — A cup, he noticed sadly, discarding it, trying not to look at Bonnie directly. But he couldn’t help but see that the prickling marks the tree had left were everywhere.
Off with the jeans, and then a small hitch because he had to sit and take each foot in his lap to get the tightly tied high-top sneakers off before the jeans would come past her ankles. Off with socks.
And that was all. Bonnie was left naked except for her own blood and her pink silky underwear. He picked her up and put her in the tub, soaking himself in the process. Vampires associated baths with virgin’s blood, but only the really crazy ones tried it.
The water in Bonnie’s bathtub turned pink when he put her in. He kept the tap running because the tub was so large, and then sat back to consider the situation. The tree had been pumping something into her with its needles. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. So it ought to come out. Most sensible solution was to suck it as if it were a snakebite, but he was hesitant to try that until he was sure Elena wouldn’t crush his skull if she found him methodically sucking Bonnie’s upper body.
He would have to settle for next best. The bloody water didn’t quite conceal Bonnie’s diminutive form, but it helped to blur the details. Damon supported Bonnie’s head against the edge of the tub with one hand, and with the other he began to squeeze and massage the poison out of one arm.
He knew he was doing the right thing when he smelled the resinous scent of pine. It was so thick and viscid itself that it hadn’t yet disappeared into Bonnie’s body. He was getting a small amount of it out this way, but was it enough?
Cautiously, watching the door and cranking his senses up to cover their broadest spectrum, Damon lifted Bonnie’s hand to his lips as if he were going to kiss it. Instead, he took her wrist in his mouth and, suppressing every urge he had to bite, instead simply sucked.
He spat almost immediately. His mouth was full of resin. The massage wasn’t enough by far. Even suction, if he could get a couple of dozen vampires and attach them all over Bonnie’s little body like leeches, wouldn’t be enough.
He sat back on his heels and looked at her, this fatally poisoned woman-child he’d as good as given his word to save. For the first time, he became aware that he was soaked to the waist. He gave an irritated glance toward the heavens and then shrugged out of his black bomber jacket.
What could he do? Bonnie needed medicine, but he had no idea what specific medicine she needed, and there was no witch he knew of to appeal to. Was Mrs. Flowers acquainted with arcane knowledge? Would she give it to him if she were? Or was she just a batty old lady? What was a generic medicine — for a human? He could give her over to her own people and let them try their bungling sciences — take her to a hospital — but they would be working with a girl who’d been poisoned by the Other Side, by the dark places they would never be allowed to see or understand.
Absently, he had been rubbing a towel over his arms and hands and black shirt. Now, he looked at the towel and decided that Bonnie deserved at least a sop to modesty, especially since he could think of no more work to be done on her. He soaked the towel and then spread it out and pushed it underwater to cover Bonnie from throat to feet. It floated in some places, sank in others, but generally did the job.
He turned the water temperature up again, but it made no difference. Bonnie was stiffening into the true death, young as she was. His peers in old Italy had had it right, he thought, a female like this was a maiden, no longer girl, not yet woman. It was especially apposite since any vampire could tell that she was a maiden in both senses.
And it had all been done under his nose. The lure, the pack-attack, the marvelous technique and synchronization — they had killed this maiden while he sat and watched. He’d applauded it.
Slowly, inside, Damon could feel something growing. It had sparked when he thought of the audacity of the malach, hunting his humans right under his nose. It didn’t ask the question of when the group in the car had become his humans — he supposed it was because they had been so close lately that it seemed they were his to dispose of, to say whether they lived or died, or whether they became what he was. The growing thing surged when he’d thought of the way the malach had manipulated his thoughts, drawing him into a blissful contemplation of death in general terms, while death in very specific terms was going on right at his feet. And now it was reaching incendiary levels because he had been shown up too many times today. It really was unbearable….
…and it was Bonnie….
Bonnie, who had never hurt a — a harmless thing for malice. Bonnie, who was like a kitten, making airy pounces at no prey at all. Bonnie, with her hair that was called something strawberry, but that looked simply as if it was on fire. Bonnie of the translucent skin, with the delicate violet fjords and estuaries of veins all over her throat and inner arms. Bonnie, who had lately taken to looking at him sideways with her large childlike eyes, big and brown, under lashes like stars….
His jaws and canines were aching, and his mouth felt as if it were on fire from the poisonous resin. But all that could be ignored, because he was consumed with one other thought.
Bonnie had called for his help for nearly half an hour before succumbing to the darkness.
That was what needed to be said. Needed to be examined. Bonnie had called for Stefan — who had been too far away and too busy with his angel — but she had called for Damon, too, and she had pleaded for his help.
And he had ignored it. With three of Elena’s friends at his feet, he had ignored their agonies, had ignored Bonnie’s frenzied pleas not to let them die.
Usually, this sort of thing would only make him take off for some other town. But somehow he was still here and still tasting the bitter consequences of his act.
Damon leaned back with his eyes closed, trying to shut out the overwhelming smell of blood and the musty scent of…something.
He frowned and looked around. The little room was clean even to its corners. Nothing musty here. But the odor wouldn’t go away.
And then he remembered.
It came back to him, all of it: the cramped aisles and the tiny windows and the musty smell of old books. He had been in Belgium some fifty years ago, and had been surprised to find an English-language book on such a subject still in existence. But there it was, its cover worn to a solid burnished rust, with nothing of the writing remaining, if there ever had been any. Pages were missing inside, so no one would ever know the author or the title, if either had ever been printed there. Every “receipt”—recipe, or charm, or spell — inside involved forbidden knowledge.
Damon could easily remember the simplest spell of all: “Ye Bloode of ye Samphire or Vampyre i?fair goode a?a general physic for all Maladie ?or mischief Done by those who Dance in the Woode?at Moonspire.”
These malach had certainly been doing mischief in the woods, and it was the month of Moonspire, the month of the “summer solstice” in the Old Tongue. Damon didn’t want to leave Bonnie, and he certainly didn’t want Elena to see what he was going to do next. Still supporting Bonnie’s head above the warm pinkish water, he opened his shirt. There was a knife of ironwood in a sheath at his hip. He removed it and, in one quick motion, cut himself at the base of his throat.
Plenty of blood now. The problem was how to get her to drink. Sheathing the dagger, he lifted her out of the
