would be much too big — were…wrong somehow. When she touched the shirt she got pictures of hundreds of women in small rooms, all using sewing machines in bad light, all working frantically.
“From a sweat shop?” Stefan said, startled, when she showed him the picture in her mind.“These?” He dropped the clothes on the floor of the closet hastily.
“What about this one?” Stefan handed her a different shirt.
Elena studied it soberly, held it to her cheek. No sweating, frantically sewing women.
“Okay?” Stefan said. But Elena had frozen. She went to the window and peered out.
“What’s wrong?”
This time, she sent him only one picture. He recognized it immediately.
Damon.
Stefan felt a tightening in his chest. His older brother had been making Stefan’s existence as miserable as possible for nearly half a millennium. Every time that Stefan had managed to get away from him, Damon had tracked him down, looking for…what? Revenge? Some final satisfaction? They had killed each other at the same instant, back in Renaissance Italy. Their fencing swords had pierced each other’s hearts almost simultaneously, in a duel over a vampire girl. Things had only gone downhill from there.
But he’s saved your life a few times, too, Stefan thought, suddenly discomfited. And you promised you’d watch out for each other, take care of each other….
Stefan looked sharply at Elena.She was the one who’d made both of them take the same oath — when she was dying. Elena looked back with eyes that were limpid, deep blue pools of innocence.
In any case, he had to deal with Damon, who was now parking his Ferrari beside Stefan’s Porsche in front of the boardinghouse.
“Stay in here and — and keep away from the window.Please,” Stefan hastily told Elena. He dashed out of the room, shut the door, and almost ran down the steps.
He found Damon standing by the Ferrari, examining the dilapidated boardinghouse’s exterior — first with sunglasses on, then with them off. Damon’s expression said that it didn’t make a great deal of difference whichever way you looked at it.
But that wasn’t Stefan’s first concern. It was Damon’s aura and the variety of different scents lingering on him — which no human nose would ever be able to detect, much less untangle.
“What have you been doing?” Stefan said, too shocked for even a perfunctory greeting.
Damon gave him a 250-watt smile. “Antiquing,” he said, and sighed. “Oh, and I did some shopping.” He fingered a new leather belt, touched the pocket with the video camera, and pushed back his Ray-Bans. “Would you believe it, this little dust speck of a town has some pretty decent shopping. I like shopping.”
“You like stealing, you mean. And that doesn’t account for half of what I can smell on you. Are you dying or have you just gone crazy?” Sometimes, when a vampire had been poisoned or had succumbed to one of the few mysterious curses or illnesses that afflict their kind, they would feed feverishly, uncontrollably, on whatever — whomever — was at hand.
“Just hungry,” Damon replied urbanely, still surveying the boardinghouse. “And what happened to basic civility, by the way? I drive all the way out here and do I get a ‘Hello, Damon,’ or ‘Nice to see you, Damon’? No. Instead I hear ‘What have you been doing, Damon?’” He gave the imitation a whining, mocking twist. “I wonder what Signore Marino would think of that, little brother?”
“Signore Marino,” Stefan said through his teeth, wondering how Damon was able to get under his skin every time — today with a reference to their old tutor of etiquette and dancing—“has been dust for hundreds of years by now — as we should be, too. Which has nothing to do with this conversation,brother. I asked you what you were doing, and you know what I meant by it — you must have bled half the girls in town.”
“Girls and women,” Damon reproved, holding up a finger facetiously. “We must be politically correct, after all. And maybe you should be taking a closer look at your own diet. If you drank more, you might begin to fill out. Who knows?”
“If I drank more—?” There were a number of ways to finish this sentence, but no good ones. “What a pity,” he said instead to the short, slim, and compact Damon, “thatyou’ll never grow another millimeter taller however long you live. And now, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here, after leaving so many messes in town for me to clean up — if I know you.”
“I’m here because I want my leather jacket back,” Damon said flatly.
“Why not just steal anoth—?” Stefan broke off as he suddenly found himself flying briefly backward and then pinned against the groaning boards of the boardinghouse wall, with Damon right in his face.
“I didn’t steal these things,boy. I paid for them — in my own coin. Dreams, fantasies, and pleasure from beyond this world.” Damon said the last words with emphasis, since he knew they would infuriate Stefan the most.
Stefan was infuriated — and in a dilemma. He knew Damon was curious about Elena. That was bad enough. But right now he could also see a strange gleam in Damon’s eyes. As if the pupils had, for a moment, reflected a flame. And whatever Damon had been doing today was abnormal. Stefan didn’t know what was going on, but he knew just how Damon was going to finish this off.
“But a real vampire shouldn’t pay,” Damon was saying in his most taunting tones. “After all, we’re so wicked that we ought to be dust. Isn’t that right, little brother?” He held up the hand with the finger on which he wore the lapis lazuli ring that kept him from crumbling to dust in the golden afternoon sunlight. And then, as Stefan made a movement, Damon used that hand to pin Stefan’s wrist to the wall.
Stefan feinted to the left and then lunged right to break Damon’s hold on him. But Damon was fast as a snake — no, faster. Much faster than usual. Fast and strong with all the energy of the life force he’d absorbed.
“Damon, you…” Stefan was so angry that he briefly lost his hold on rational thought and tried to swipe Damon’s legs out from under him.
“Yes, it’s me, Damon,” Damon said with jubilant venom. “And I don’t pay if I don’t feel like it; I just take. I take what I want, and I give nothing in return.”
Stefan stared into those heated black-on-black eyes and again saw the tiny flicker of flame. He tried to think. Damon was always quick to attack, to take offense. But not like this. Stefan had known him long enough to know something was off; something was wrong. Damon seemed almost feverish. Stefan sent a small surge of Power toward his brother, like a radar sweep, trying to put his finger on what was different.
“Yes, I see you’ve got the idea, but you’ll never get anywhere that way,” Damon said wryly, and then suddenly Stefan’s insides, his entire body was on fire, was in agony, as Damon lashed out with a violent whip of his own Power.
And now, however bad the pain was, Stefan had to be coldly rational; he had to keep thinking, not just reacting. He made a small movement, twisting his neck to the side, looking toward the door of the boardinghouse. If only Elena would stay inside…
But it was hard to think with Damon still whiplashing him. He was breathing fast and hard.
“That’s right,” Damon said. “We vampires take — a lesson you need to learn.”
“Damon, we’re supposed to take care of each other — we promised—”
“Yes, and I’m going to take care of you right now.”
Then Damon bit him.
And Damon bled him.
It was even more painful than the lashings of Power, and Stefan held himself carefully still for it, refusing to put up a struggle. The razor-sharp teeth shouldn’t have hurt as they plunged into his carotid, but Damon was holding him at an angle — now by his hair — deliberately so that they did.
Then came the real pain. The agony of having blood drawn out against your will, against your resistance. That was a torture that humans compared with having their souls ripped out from their living bodies. They would do anything to avoid it. All Stefan knew was that it was one of the greatest physical anguishes that he had ever had to endure, and that at last tears formed in his eyes and rolled down his temples and down into his wavy dark hair.
Worse, for a vampire, was the humiliation of having another vampire treat you like a human, treat you like meat. Stefan’s heart was pounding in his ears as he writhed under the double carving knives of Damon’s canines, trying to bear the mortification of being used this way. At least — thank God — Elena had listened to him and
