“Yes.” Damon’s voice was light and indifferent suddenly, as if he found it amusing. “I suppose I did hurt him. I used psychic pain on him, and that’s stopped a lot of hearts from beating. But your Mutt’s tough. I like that. I made him suffer more and more, and yet he still went on living because he was afraid to leave you alone.”
“Damon!” Elena wrenched herself back, only to find that it did no good. He was far, far stronger than she was. “How could you do that to him?”
“I told you; he was a rival.” Damon laughed suddenly. “You really don’t remember, do you? I made him abase himself for you. I made him eat dirt, literally, for you.”
“Damon — are you crazy?”
“No. I’m just now finding my sanity. I don’t need to convince you that you belong to me. I can take you.”
“No, Damon. I won’t be your princess of darkness or — or anything else of yours without asking. At the most you’ll have a dead body to play with.”
“Maybe I’d like that. But you forget; I can enter your mind. And you still have friends — at home, getting ready for supper or bed, you hope. Don’t you? Friends with all their limbs; who’ve never known real pain.”
It took Elena a long time to speak. Then she said quietly, “I take back every decent thing I ever said about you. You’re a monster, do you hear that? You’re an abomin—” Her voice wound slowly down. “They’re making you do this, aren’t they?” she said finally, flatly. “Shinichi and Misao. A nice little show for them. Just like they made you hurt Matt and me before.”
“No, I do only what I want to.” Was that a flash of red Elena saw in his eyes? The briefest flaring of a flame…“Do you know how beautiful you are when you’re crying? You’re more beautiful than ever. The gold in your eyes seems to rise to the surface and spill down in tears of diamond. I would love to have a sculptor carve a bust of you weeping.”
“Damon, I know you’re not really saying this. I know that the thing they put inside you is the one saying it.”
“Elena, I assure you, it’s all me. I quite enjoyed it when I made him hurt you. I liked to hear the way you cried out. I made him tear your clothes — I had to hurt him a lot to get him to do it. But didn’t you notice that your camisole had been torn, and that you were barefooted? That was all Mutt.”
Elena forced her mind back to the moment she had come to herself leaping out of the Ferrari. Yes, then, and in the time afterward she had been barefooted and bare-armed, wearing only a camisole. Quite a bit of the fabric of her jeans had been left on the roadside after that, and in the surrounding vegetation. But it had never occurred to her to wonder what had happened to her boots and socks, or how her camisole had been torn in strips at the bottom. She’d simply been so grateful for help…to the one who had hurt her in her first place.
Oh, Damon must have thought that ironic. She suddenly realized she herself was thinking of Damon and not of the possessor. Not of Shinichi and Misao.But they weren’t the same, she told herself. I’ve got to remember that!
“Yes, I enjoyed making him hurt you, and I enjoyed hurting you. I made him bring me a willow rod, just the right thickness, and then whipped you with it. You enjoyed that, too, I promise you. Don’t bother to look for marks because they’ve all gone like the others. But all three of us enjoyed hearing your cries. You…and me…and Mutt, too. In fact, of all of us, he may have enjoyed it most.”
“Damon, shut up! I won’t listen to you talk about Matt that way!”
“I wouldn’t let him see you without your clothes on, though,” Damon confided, as if he hadn’t heard a word. “That was when I had him — dismissed. Put into another snow globe. I wanted to hunt you as you tried to get away from me, in an empty globe that you could never get out of. I wanted to see that special look in your eyes that you get when you fight with everything you have — and I wanted to see it defeated. You’re no fighter, Elena.” Damon laughed suddenly, an ugly sound, and to Elena’s shock his arm shot out and he punched through the wall of the widow’s walk.
“Damon…” She was sobbing by now.
“And then I wanted to do this.” With no warning, Damon’s fist forced her chin up, jerking her head back. His other hand tangled in her hair, bringing her neck back to the exact position he wanted her to be in. And then Elena felt him strike, quick as a cobra, and felt the two tearing wounds in the side of her neck, and her own blood spurting out of them.
Ages later, Elena woke up sluggishly. Damon was still enjoying himself, clearly lost in the experience of having Elena Gilbert. And there was no time to make different plans.
Her body simply took over by itself, startling her almost as much as it startled Damon. Even as he lifted his head, her hand plucked the magical house key off his finger. Then she gripped, twisted, lifted her knees as high as she could, and kicked outward, sending Damon smashing through the splintered, rotted wood that formed the outside railing of the widow’s walk.
Elena had once fallen off that balcony and Stefan had jumped and caught her before she could hit the ground. A human falling from that height would be dead on impact. A vampire in full possession of his or her reflexes would simply twist in the air like a cat and land lightly on their feet. But one in Damon’s particular circumstances tonight…
From the sound of it, he had tried to twist, but had only ended up landing on his side and breaking bones. Elena deduced the latter from his cursing. She didn’t wait to listen for more specifics. She was off like a rabbit, down to the level of Stefan’s room — where instantaneously and almost unconsciously, she sent out a wordless plea — and then down the stairs. The cabin had turned completely into a perfect duplicate of the boardinghouse. Elena didn’t know why, but instinctively she ran to the side of the house that Damon would know the least: the old servant’s quarters. She got that far before she dared whispering things to the house, asking for them rather than demanding them, and praying that the house would obey her as it had obeyed Damon.
“Aunt Judith’s house,” she whispered, thrusting the key into a door — it went in like a hot knife into butter and turned almost of its own volition, and then suddenly she was there again, in what had been her home for sixteen years, up until her first death.
She was in the hallway, with her little sister Margaret’s open door showing her lying on the floor of her bedroom, staring with wide-open eyes over a coloring book.
“It’s tag, sweetie!” she announced as if ghosts appeared every day in the Gilbert household and Margaret was supposed to know how to deal with it. “You go running to your friend Barbara’s and then she has to be It. Don’t stop running until you get there, and then go see Barbara’s mom. But first you give me three kisses.” And she lifted Margaret and hugged her tightly and then almost threw her at the door.
“But Elena — you’re back—”
“I know, darling, and I promise to see you again another day. But now — run, baby—”
“I told them you would come back. You did before.”
“Margaret!Run!”
Choking on tears, but maybe recognizing in her childlike way the seriousness of the situation, Margaret ran. And Elena followed, but zagging toward a different staircase when Margaret zigged.
And then she found herself confronted by a smirking Damon.
“You take too long to talk to people,” he said as Elena frantically counted her options. Go over the balcony into the entry way? No. Damon’s bones might still hurt a little but if Elena jumped even one story, she would probably break her neck. What else? Think!
And then she was opening the door into the china closet, at the same time shouting out, “Great-aunt Tilda’s house,” unsure if the magic would still work. And then she was slamming the door in Damon’s face.
And she was in her Aunt Tilda’s house, but the Aunt Tilda’s house of the past. No wonder they accused poor Auntie Tilda of seeing strange things, Elena thought, as she saw the woman turning while holding a large glass casserole dish full of something that smelled mushroomy, and screaming, and dropping the dish.
“Elena!” she cried. “What — it can’t be you — you’re all grown up!”
“What’s the trouble?” demanded Aunt Maggie, who was Aunt Tilda’s friend, coming in from the other room. She was taller and fiercer than Aunt Tilda.
“I’m being chased,” cried Elena. “I need to find a door, and if you see a boy after me—” And just then Damon stepped out of the coat closet, and at the same time Aunt Maggie tripped him neatly and said, “Bathroom door
