“Not my style,” Elena said, quickly tucking it under some other robes.
Not your style around me, Damon thought, amused. And a wise little lass you are, too. You don’t want to tempt me into doing anything you might be sorry for tomorrow.
“All right — and then you can get a good night’s sleep—” He broke off, for she was suddenly looking at him with astonishment and distress.
“Matt! Damon, we were looking for Matt! I just remembered. We were looking for him and I–I don’t know. I got hurt. I remember falling and then I was here.”
Because I carried you here, Damon thought. Because this house is just a thought in Shinichi’s mind. Because the only permanent things inside it are we two.
Damon took in a deep breath of air.
Let us at least have the dignity of walking out of your trap on our own feet — or should I say, using your own key?Damon thought to Shinichi. To Elena, he said, “Yes, we’re looking for what’s-his-face. But you took a bad fall. I wish — I would like to ask you — that you stay here and recuperate while I go look for him.”
“You think you know where Matt is?” That was the entire sentence distilled for her. That was all she heard.
“Yes.”
“Can we go now?”
“Won’t you let me go alone?”
“No,” Elena said simply. “I have to find him. I wouldn’t sleep at all if you went out alone. Please, can’t we go now?”
Damon sighed. “All right. There were some”—(there will be now)—“clothes that will fit you in the closet. Jeans and things. I’ll get them,” he said. “As long as I really, really can’t convince you to lie down and rest while I look for him.”
“I can make it,” Elena promised. “And if you go without me, I’ll just jump out a window and follow you.”
She was serious. He went and got the promised pile of clothes and then turned his back while Elena put on an identical version of the jeans and Pendleton shirt she had been wearing, whole and un-bloodstained. Then they left the house, Elena brushing her hair vigorously, but glancing back every step or so.
“What are you doing?” Damon asked, just when he had decided to carry her.
“Waiting for the house to disappear.” And when he gave her his best what’re you talking about? look, she said, “Armani jeans, just my size? La Perla camisoles, same? Pendleton shirts, two sizes too big, just like the one I was wearing? That place is either a warehouse or it’s magic. My bet’s on magic.”
Damon picked her up as a way to shut her up, and walked to the passenger’s door of the Ferrari. He wondered if they were in the real world now or in another of Shinichi’s globes.
“Did it disappear?” he asked.
“Yup.”
What a pity, he thought. He’d have liked to keep it.
He could try to renegotiate the bargain with Shinichi, but there were other, more important things to think of. He gave Elena a slight squeeze, thinking, other,much, much more important things.
In the car he made sure of three small facts. First, that click which his brain automatically registered as passenger buckled up really did mean that Elena had her seat buckle properly fastened. Second, that the doors were locked — from his master control. And third, that he drove quite slowly. He didn’t think that anyone in Elena’s shape would be throwing themselves out of cars again in the near future, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
He had no idea how long this spell was going to work. Elena must eventually come out of her amnesia. It was only logical, since he seemed to be, and he’d been awake much longer than she had. Pretty soon she would remember…what? That he’d taken her in the Ferrari against her will (bad but forgivable — he couldn’t know she’d launch herself out)? That he’d been teasing Mike or Mitch or whoever and her in the clearing? He himself had a vague picture of this — or was it another dream.
He wished he knew what the truth was. When would he remember everything? He’d be in a much stronger bargaining position once he did.
And it was hardly possible that Mac was getting hypothermia in a midsummer snowstorm even if he were still in that clearing right now. It was a chilly night, but the worst the boy could expect was a twinge of rheumatism when he was around eighty.
The vital thing was that they didn’t find him. He might have some unpleasant truths to tell.
Damon noticed Elena making the same gesture again. A touch to her throat, a grimace, a deep breath.
“Are you carsick?”
“No, I’m…” In the moonlight he could see her blush come and go; could sense her heat with detectors in his face. She flushed deeply. “I explained,” she said, “about feeling…too full. That’s what it is now.”
What was a vampire to do?
Say,I’m sorry — I’ve given it up for Moonspire?
Say, I’m sorry — you’ll hate me in the morning?
Say,To hell with the morning; this seat reclines two inches?
But what if they got to the clearing and found that something really had happened to Mutt — Gnat — the boy? Damon would regret it for the rest of the remaining twenty seconds of his life. Elena would call battalions of sky spirits down on his head. Even if no one else believed in her, Damon did.
He found himself saying, as smoothly as ever he’d spoken to a Page or a Damaris, “Will you trust me?”
“What?”
“Will you trust me for another fifteen or twenty minutes, to go to a certain place I think what’s his name might be?”If he is — my bet is that you remember everything and you never want to see me again in your life — then you’ll be spared a long search. If he isn’t — and the car isn’t either; it’s my lucky day and Mutt wins the prize of a lifetime — and then we go on looking.
Elena was watching him intently. “Damon, do you know where Matt is?”
“No.” Well, that was true enough. But she was a bright little trinket, a pretty little pink, and more than all that, she was clever…. Damon broke off his polyrhythmic contemplations on Elena’s intelligence. Why was he thinking in poetry? Was he really going crazy? He’d wondered that before — hadn’t he? Didn’t it prove you weren’t crazy if you wondered if you were? The truly insane never doubted their sanity, right? Right. Or did they? And surely all this talking to himself couldn’t be good for anyone.
Merda.
“All right, then. I’ll trust you.”
Damon let out a breath he didn’t need and headed the car toward the clearing.
It was one of the more exciting gambles of his life. On one hand, there was his life — Elena would find some way or other of killing him if he’d killed Mark, he was certain. And on the other hand…a taste of paradise. With a willing Elena, an eager Elena, an open Elena…he swallowed. He found himself doing the thing closest to praying that he’d done in half a millennium.
As they rounded the corner on the road to the little lane, he kept himself in hyper-alertness, the engine a bare hum, the night air bringing all kinds of information to vampire senses. He was thoroughly aware that an ambush could have been set up for him. But the lane was deserted. And as he suddenly hit the accelerator to reveal the little clearing, he found it blessedly, bleakly, blankly empty of either cars or of college-aged young men whose names started with “M.”
He relaxed against the seat back.
Elena had been watching him.
“You thought he might be here.”
“Yes.” And now was the time for the real question. Without asking her this, the whole thing was a sham, a fraud. “Do you remember this place?”
She glanced around. “No. Should I?”
Damon smiled.
But he took the precaution of driving on up another three hundred yards, into a different clearing, just in case
