All she wanted was sleep. Forever.
“Damn you, Shinichi!”
Damon had picked up the snow globe with the miniature forest when Shinichi found Elena’s smudged glow radiating from it. Inside it, dozens of spruce, hickory, pine, and other trees grew — all from a perfectly transparent inner membrane. A miniature person — given that someone could be miniaturized and placed into such a globe, would see trees ahead, trees behind, trees in every direction — and could walk a straight line and come back to their starting point no matter which way they went.
“It’s an amusement,” Shinichi had said sullenly, watching him intently from under his lashes. “A toy, for children, usually. A play-trap.”
“And you find this amusing?” Damon had smashed the globe against the driftwood coffee table in the exquisite cabin which was Shinichi’s secret hideout. That was when he had discovered why these were games for children — the globe was unbreakable.
After that Damon had taken a moment — just one moment — to get hold of himself. Elena had perhaps seconds to live. He needed to be precise with his words.
After that single moment, a long flow of words had spilled out from his lips, mostly in English, and mostly without unnecessary curses or even insults. He didn’t care about insulting Shinichi. He had simply threatened — no, he had sworn — to carry out on Shinichi the kind of violence that he had seen sometimes in a long life filled with humans and vampires with skewed imaginations. Eventually, it had gotten through to Shinichi that he was serious, and Damon had found himself inside the globe with a drenched Elena in front of him. She was lying at his feet, and she was worse off than his worst fears had allowed him to picture. She had a dislocated right arm with multiple fractures and a hideously shattered left tibia.
Horrified as he had been to imagine her staggering through the forest of the globe, blood streaming from her right arm from shoulder to elbow, left leg dragging behind her like a wounded animal’s, this was worse. Her hair had been soaking with sweat and mud, straggling over her face. And she’d been out of her mind, literally, delirious, talking to people who weren’t there.
And she was turning blue.
She had been able to snap exactly one creeper with all her effort. Damon clawed up huge armfuls of them, ripping them from the earth viciously if they tried to fight or wrap around his wrists. Elena gasped in one deep breath just as suffocation would have killed her, but she didn’t regain consciousness.
And she wasn’t the Elena he remembered. When he’d picked her up, he’d felt no resistance, no acceptance, nothing. She didn’t know him. She was delirious with fever, exhaustion, and pain, but in one moment of half- consciousness had kissed his hand through her damp, disheveled hair, whispering “Matt…Find…Matt.” She didn’t know who he was — she scarcely knew who she was, but her concern was for her friend. The kiss had gone through his hand and up his arm like the touch of a branding iron, and since then he’d been monitoring her mind, trying to divert the agony she was feeling away — away anywhere — into the night — into himself.
He turned back to Shinichi and, in a voice like an icy wind, said, “You’d better have a way to cure all her wounds — now.”
The charming cabin was surrounded by the same evergreens, hickory, and pines as grew in the snow globe. The fire burned violet and green as Shinichi poked it.
“This water is just about ready to boil. Make her drink tea made with this.” He handed Damon a blackened flagon — once beautiful chased silver; now a battered remnant of what it had been — and a teapot with some broken leaves and other unsavory-looking things at the bottom. “Make sure she drinks a good three quarters of a cup, and she’ll fall asleep and wake up almost as good as new.”
He dug an elbow into Damon’s ribs. “Or you can just let her have a few sips — heal her partway, and then let her know it’s in your power to give her more…or not. You know…depending on how cooperative she is…”
Damon remained silent and turned away. If I have to look at him, he thought, I’ll kill him. And I might need him again.
“And if you really want to accelerate the healing, add some of your blood. Some people like to do it that way,” Shinichi added, his voice picking up speed with excitement again. “See how much pain a human can take, you know, and then when they’re dying, you can just feed them tea and blood and start over…if they remember you from last time — which they hardly ever do; they’ll usually go through more pain just to get a chance to fight you…,” he giggled, and Damon thought he sounded not quite sane.
But when he had suddenly turned to Shinichi, he had to hold himself very still inside. Shinichi had become a blazing, glowing, outline of himself, with tongues of light lapping from his projection, rather like close-up solar flares. Damon was nearly blinded, and knew he was meant to be. He clutched the silver flagon as if he were holding on to his own sanity.
Maybe he was. He had a blank space in his mind — and then there were suddenly memories of trying to find Elena…or Shinichi. Because Elena had abruptly been absent from his company, and it could only be the fault of the kitsune.
“There’s a modern bathroom here?” Damon asked Shinichi.
“There’s whatever you want; just decide before you open a door and unlock it with this key. And now…” Shinichi stretched, his golden eyes half shut. He ran a languid hand through his shiny black hair tipped with flame. “Now, I think I’ll go sleep under a bush.”
“Is that all you ever do?” Damon made no attempt to keep the biting sarcasm out of his voice.
“And have fun with Misao. And fight. And go to the tournaments. They — well, you’ll have to come and see one for yourself.”
“I don’t care to go anywhere.” Damon didn’t want to know what this fox and his sister considered fun.
Shinichi reached out and took the miniature cauldron full of boiling water off the fire. He poured the boiling water over the collection of tree bark, leaves, and other detritus in the battered metal teapot.
“Why don’t you go find a bush now?” Damon said — and it wasn’t a suggestion. He’d had enough of the fox, who had served his purpose now anyway, and he didn’t care a bit about whatever mischief Shinichi might make for other people. All he wanted was to be alone — with Elena.
“Remember; get her to drink it all if you want to keep her for a while. She’s pretty much unsalvageable without it.” Shinichi poured through a fine sieve the infusion of dark green tea. “Better try before she wakes up.”
“Will you justget out of here?”
When Shinichi stepped through the dimensional crack, taking care to turn just the right way so as to reach the real world, and not some other globe, he was steaming. He wanted to go back and thrash Damon within an inch of his life. He wanted to activate the malach inside Damon and cause him to…well, of course, not quite kill sweet Elena. She was a blossom with nectar untasted, and Shinichi was in no hurry to see her buried underground.
But as for the rest of the idea…yes, he decided. Now he knew what he would do. It would be simply delicious to watch Damon and Elena make up, and then, during the Moonspire Festival tonight, to bring back the monster. He could let Damon go on believing they were “allies,” and then, in the middle of their little spree — let the possessed Damon loose. Show that he, Shinichi, had been in control all along.
He would punish Elena in ways she had never dreamed about and she would die in delicious agony…at Damon’s hand. Shinichi’s tails quivered a little ecstatically at the thought. But for now, let them laugh and joke together. Revenge only ripened with time, and Damon was really quite difficult to control when he was raging.
It hurt to admit that, just as his tail — the physical one in the center — hurt from Damon’s abominable cruelty to animals. When Damon was in a passion it took every ounce of Shinichi’s concentration to control him.
But at Moonspire Damon would be calm, would be placid. He’d be pleased with himself, as he and Elena would undoubtedly have laid some absurd plot to try to stop Shinichi.
That would be when the fun would begin.
Elena would make a beautiful slave while she lasted.
With the kitsune gone, Damon felt that he could behave more naturally. Keeping a firm grasp on Elena’s mind, he picked up the cup. He tried a sip of the mixture himself before trying it on her and found it tasted just slightly less nauseating than it smelled. However, Elena really had no choice, she could not do anything of her own volition, and little by little, the mixture went down.
And then a dose of his blood went down. Again, Elena was unconscious and had no choice in the
