taste. And now…
Elena had a “grape juice” mustache. Damon wanted very much to kiss it away.
“Well, someday you can tell people you drank two glasses of Black Magic in under a minute, and impress them,” he said.
But she was doing the tap-tap-tapping again under her chin.
“Elena, do you want to have some of your blood drawn?”
“Yes!” She said it in the ringing-bell tones of someone who has finally been asked the right question.
She was drunk.
She flung both arms backward, draping them against the bench, which conformed to accept her body’s every new motion. It had become a black suede couch with a high back: a divan, and just now, Elena’s slender neck was resting on the highest point of that back, her throat exposed to the air. Damon turned away with a little moan. He wanted to get Elena to civilization. He was worried about her health, mildly concerned about…Mutt’s; and now…he couldn’t have anything he wanted. He could hardly bleed her when she was drunk.
Elena made a different sort of sound that might have been his name. “D’m’n?” she mumbled. Her eyes had filled with tears.
Just about anything that a nurse might have to do for a patient, Damon had done for Elena. But it seemed she didn’t want to unswallow two glasses of Black Magic in front of him.
“‘M’shick,” Elena got out, with a dangerous hiccup at the end. She gripped Damon’s wrist.
“Yes, this is not the kind of wine to guzzle. Wait, just sit up straight and let me try…” And maybe because he said the words without thinking, without thinking of being rude, without thinking of manipulating her one way or another, it was all right. Elena obeyed him and he put two fingers on either side of her temples and pressed slightly. For a split second there was a near disaster, and then Elena was breathing slowly and calmly. She was still affected by the wine, but she wasn’t drunk any longer.
And the time was now. He had to tell her the truth at last.
But first, he needed to wake up.
“A triple espresso, please,” he said, holding out his hand. It appeared instantly, aromatic and black as his soul. “Shinichi says espresso alone is an excuse for the human race.”
“Whoever Shinichi is, I agree with him or her. A triple espresso, please,” Elena said to the magic that was this forest, this snowflake globe, this universe. Nothing happened.
“Maybe it’s only attuned to my voice right now,” Damon said, flashing her a reassuring smile, and then he fetched her espresso with a wave.
To his surprise, Elena was frowning.
“You said ‘Shinichi.’ Who’s that?
Damon wanted nothing less than for Elena to get involved with the kitsune, but if he was really going to tell all she was going to have to. “He’s akitsune, a fox spirit,” he said. “And the person who gave me that Web address that sent Stefan running.”
Elena’s expression froze over.
“Actually,” Damon said, “I find that I would rather get you home before taking the next step.”
Elena lifted exasperated eyes to the sky, but let him pick her up and carry her back to the car.
He had just realized where the best place to tell her was.
It was just as well that they didn’t urgently need to get to any place that was out of the Old Wood right now. They didn’t find any road that did not lead to dead ends, little clearings, or trees. Elena seemed so unsurprised at finding the little lane that led to their small but perfectly appointed house that he said nothing as they entered and he took new inventory of what they had.
They had one bedroom with one large, luxurious bed. They had a kitchen. And a living area. But any of these rooms could become any kind of room you chose simply by thinking of it before opening the door. Moreover, there were the keys — left behind by what Damon was realizing was a seriously shaken Shinichi — that allowed the doors to do more. Insert a key in a door and announce what you wanted and there you were — even, it seemed, if it should be outside Shinichi’s territory in space time. In other words, they seemed to link to the real outside world, but Damon wasn’t entirely sure about that.Was it the real world or just another of Shinichi’s play-traps?
What they had right now was a long spiraling stairway to an open-air observatory with a widow’s walk around it, just like the roof of the boardinghouse. There was even a room just like Stefan’s, Damon noted as he carried Elena up the stairs.
“We’re going all the way up?” Elena sounded bewildered.
“All the way.”
“And what are we doing up here?” Elena asked, when he had her settled in a chair with a footstool and a light blanket on the roof.
Damon sat down on a rocker, rocking a little, his arms wrapped around one knee, his face tilted to the clouded sky.
He rocked once more, stopped, and turned to face her. “I suppose we’re here,” he said, in the light self- mocking tone that meant he was very serious, “so that I can tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“Who is it?” a voice was saying from the forest darkness. “Who’s out there?”
Bonnie had seldom been as grateful to anyone as she was to Matt for holding on to her. She needed people contact. If she could only bury herself deep enough in other people, she would be safe somehow. She just barely managed not to scream as the dimming flashlight swung onto a surrealistic scene.
“Isobel!”
Yes, it really was Isobel, not at the Ridgemont hospital at all, but here in the Old Wood. She was standing at bay, almost naked except for blood and mud. Right here, against this background, she looked like both prey and a sort of forest goddess, a goddess of vengeance, and of hunted things, and of punishment for any being who stood in her way. She was winded, breathing hard, with bubbles of saliva coming out of her mouth, but she wasn’t broken. You only had to see her eyes, shining red, to see that.
Behind her, stepping on branches and letting loose the occasional grunt or curse, were two other figures, one tall and thin but bulbous on top, and one shorter and stouter. They looked like gnomes trying to follow a wood nymph.
“Dr. Alpert!”Meredith seemed just barely able to sound like her ordinary controlled self.
At the same time, Bonnie saw that Isobel’s piercings were much worse. She’d lost most of her studs and hoops and needles, but there was blood and, already, pus, coming out of the holes where they had been.
“Don’t scare her,” Jim’s voice whispered out of the shadows. “We’ve been tracking her since we had to stop.” Bonnie could feel Matt, who had drawn in air to shout, suddenly choke it off. She could also see why Jim looked so top-heavy. He was carrying Obaasan, Japanese-style, on his back, with her arms around his neck. Like a backpack, Bonnie thought.
“What happened to you?” Meredith whispered. “We thought you’d gone to the hospital.”
“Somehow, a tree fell across the road while we were letting you off, and we couldn’t get around it to get to the hospital, or anywhere else. Not only that, but it was a tree with a hornet’s nest or something inside it. Isobel woke up like that ”—the doctor snapped her fingers—“and when she heard the hornets she scrambled out and ran from them. We ran after her. I don’t mind saying I would have done the same if I’d been alone.”
“Did anybody see these hornets?” Matt asked, after a moment.
“No, it had just turned dark. But we heard them all right. Weirdest thing I ever heard. Sounded like hornet a foot long,” Jim said.
Meredith was now squeezing Bonnie’s arm from the other side. Whether to keep her silent or to encourage her to speak, Bonnie had no idea. And what could she say? “Fallen trees here only stay fallen until the police make the decision to look for them?” “Oh, and watch out for the hellish streams of bugs as long as your arm?” “And by the way, there’s probably one inside Isobel right now?”That would really freak Jim out.
“If I knew the way back to the boardinghouse, I would drop these three off there,” Mrs. Flowers was saying. “They’re not part of this.”
