Be careful now. Make sure you’re going straight and not tilting off at an angle. Pick your next target in your straight line of sight.
The problem was that by now it was too dark to see much of anything. She could just make out deeply grooved bark straight ahead. A red oak probably. All right, go to it. Hop — oh, it hurts — hop — the tears washing down her cheeks — hop — just a little farther — hop — you can make it — hop. She put her hand out on shaggy bark. All right. Now, look straight in front of you. Ah. Something gray and rough and massive ahead — maybe a white oak. Hop to it — agony — hop — somebody help me — hop — how long will it take? — hop — not that far now — hop.There. She put her hand on the wide rough bark.
And then she did it again.
And again.
And again. And again. And again.
“What is it?” Damon demanded. He’d been forced to let Shinichi lead once they were out of the car again, but he still kept the kekkai loosely around him and he still watched every move the fox made. He didn’t trust him as far as — well, the fact was, he didn’t trust him at all. “What’s behind the barrier?” he said again, more roughly, tightening the noose around the kitsune’s neck.
“Our little cabin — Misao’s and mine.”
“And it wouldn’t possibly be a trap, would it?”
“If you think so, fine! I’ll go in alone….” Shinichi had finally changed into a half-fox, half-human form: black hair to his waist, with ruby-colored flames licking up from the ends, one silky tail with the same coloration behind him waving behind him, and two silky, crimson-tipped twitching ears on top of his head.
Damon approved aesthetically, but more important, he now had a ready-made handle. He caught Shinichi by the tail and twisted.
“Stop that!”
“I’ll stop it when I get Elena — unless you waylaid her deliberately. If she’s hurt, I’m going to take whoever harmed her and cut him into slivers. His life is forfeit.”
“No matter who it was?”
“No matter who.”
Shinichi was quivering slightly.
“Are you cold?”
“…just…admiring your resolve.” More inadvertent quivering. Almost shaking his entire body.Laughter?
“At Elena’s discretion, I would keep them alive. But in agony.” Damon twisted the tail harder. “Move!”
Shinichi took another step and a charming country cabin came into view, with a gravel path leading up between wild creepers that loaded the porch and hung down like pendants.
It was exquisite.
Even as the pain grew, Elena began to have hope. No matter how turned around she was, she had to come out of the forest at some point. She had to make it. The ground was solid — no sign of mushiness or slanting downward. She wasn’t headed for the creek. She was headed for the road. She could tell.
She fixed her sights on a distant, smooth-barked tree. Then she hopped to it, the pain almost forgotten in her new feeling of certainty.
She fell against the massive, peeling, ash-gray tree. She was resting against it when something bothered her. Her dangling leg. Why wasn’t it bumping painfully against the trunk? It had knocked continually against all the other trees when she turned to rest. She pulled back from the tree, and, as if she knew it were important, gathered all her Power and let it go in a burst of white light.
The tree with the huge hole in it, the tree she had started from, was in front of her.
For a moment Elena stood completely still, wasting Power, holding the light. Maybe it was some different…
No. She was on the other side of the tree, but it was the same one. That washer hair caught in the peeling gray bark. That dried blood washer handprint. Below it was where her bloody leg had left a mark — fresh.
She’d walked straight out and come straight back to this tree.
“Noooooooooooooo!”
It was the first vocalized sound she’d made since she’d fallen out of the Ferrari. She’d endured all that pain in silence, with little gasps or sharp breaths, but she’d never cursed and screamed. Now she wanted to do both.
Maybe it wasn’t the same tree Nooooooo, nooooooo, noooooooooooo!
Maybe her Power would come back and she’d see that she’d only hallucinated No, no, no, no, no, no!
It just wasn’t possible Nooooooo!
Her crutch slipped from under her arm. It had dug into her armpit so deeply that the pain there rivaled the other pains. Everything hurt. But worst was her mind. She had a picture in her mind of a sphere like the Christmas snow globes you shook to make snow or glitter fall through liquid. But this sphere had trees all over the inside. From top to bottom, side to side, all trees, all pointing toward the middle. And herself, wandering inside this lonely sphere…no matter where she went, she’d find more trees, because that was all there were in this world she’d stumbled into.
It was a nightmare, but something like it was real.
The trees were intelligent, too, she realized. The little creeping vines, the vegetation; even now it was pulling her crutch away from her. The crutch was moving as if being passed from hand to hand by very small people. She reached out and just barely grabbed the end of it.
She didn’t remember having fallen to the ground, but here she was. And there was a smell, a sweet, earthy, resinous aroma. And here were creepers, testing her, tasting her. With delicate little touches, they wound into her hair so that she couldn’t pick her head up. Then she could feel them tasting her body, her shoulder, her bloody knee. Nothing about it mattered.
She squeezed her eyes shut, her body heaving with sobs. The creepers were pulling at her wounded leg now, and instinctively she jerked away. For a moment the pain woke her up and she thought,I’ve got to get to Matt, but the next moment that thought was dulled, too. The sweet, resinous smell remained. The creepers felt their way across her moving chest, across her breasts. They encircled her stomach.
And then they began to tighten.
By the time Elena realized the danger, they were restricting her breathing. She couldn’t expand her chest. As she let out her breath, they only tightened again, working together: all the little creepers like one giant anaconda.
She couldn’t tear them away. They were tough and springy and her nails couldn’t cut through them. Working her fingers under a handful, she pulled as hard as she could, scraping with her nails and twisting. Finally one fiber sprang loose with the sound of a harp’s string breaking and a wild whipping in the air.
The rest of the creepers pulled tighter.
She was having to fight to get air now, fight not to contract her chest. Creepers were delicately touching her lips, swaying over her face like so many thin cobras, then suddenly striking and going taut around her cheek and head.
I’m going to die.
She felt a deep regret. She had been given the chance of a second lifetime — a third, if you counted her life as a vampire — and she hadn’t done anything with it. Nothing but pursue her own pleasure. And now Fell’s Church was in peril and Matt was in immediate danger, and not only was she not going to help them, she was going to give up and die right here.
What would be the right thing to do? The spiritual thing? Cooperate with evil now, and hope she’d have the chance to destroy it later? Maybe. Maybe all she needed to do was to ask for help.
The feeling of breathlessness was leaving her light-headed. She would never have believed it of Damon, that he would put her through all this, that he would allow her to be killed. Just days ago she had been defending him to Stefan.
Damon and the malach. Maybe she was his offering to them. They certainly demanded a lot.
Or maybe it was just that he wanted her to beg for help. He might be waiting in the darkness quite close, his mind centered on hers, waiting for a whispered please.
She tried to spark the last of her Power. It was almost depleted, but like a match, with repeated striking she managed to get a tiny white flame.
