And that was how she knew that Wings of Purification would seek out and destroy anything foreign inside Damon and that the feeling could be very unpleasant for him. When the malach didn’t seem to be coming out of its own accord, she said, prompted by her inner voice, “Take off your shirt. The malach is attached to your spine and it’s closest to the skin at the back of your neck where it entered. I’m going to have to strip it out by hand.”
“Attached to my spine?”
“Yes. Did you ever feel it? I think it would have felt like a bee sting at first, as it entered you, just a sharp little drill and a blob of jelly that attached to your spine.”
“Oh. The mosquito bite. Yes, I felt that. And then later, my neck began to ache, and at last my whole body. Was it…growing inside me?”
“Yes, and taking over more and more of your nervous system. Shinichi was controlling you like a marionette.”
“Dear God, I’m sorry.”
“Let’s make him be sorry instead. Will you take off your shirt?”
Silently, like a trusting child, Damon took off his black jacket and shirt. Then, as Elena motioned him into position, he lay across her lap, his back hard with muscle and pale against the dark ground on either side.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Getting rid of it this way — pulling it out through the hole where it entered — will really hurt.”
“Good,” grunted Damon. And then he buried his face in his lithe, flat-muscled arms.
Elena used the pads of her fingers, feeling at the top of his spine for what she was looking for. A squishy point. A blister. When she found it, she pinched it with her fingernails until blood suddenly spurted.
She almost lost it then as it tried to go flat, but she was pursuing it with sharp nails — and it was too slow. At last she had it held firmly between thumbnail and two fingernails.
The malach was still alive and aware enough to feebly resist her. But it was like a jellyfish trying to resist — only jellyfish broke apart when you pulled. This slick, slimy, man-shaped thing retained its shape as she slowly pulled it through the breach in Damon’s skin.
And it was hurting him. She could tell. She started to take some of the pain into herself, but he gasped,“No!” with such vehemence that she decided to let him have his way.
The malach was much larger and more substantial than she had realized. It must have been growing a long time, she thought — the little blob of jelly that had expanded until it controlled him to the fingertips. She had to sit up, then scoot away from Damon and back again before it lay on the ground, a sickly, stringy, white caricature of a human body.
“Is it done?” Damon was breathless — it really had hurt, then.
“Yes.”
Damon stood and looked down at the flabby white thing — barely twitching — that had made him persecute the person he cared most about in the world. Then, deliberately, he trampled on it, crushing it under the heels of his boots until it lay torn in pieces, and then trampling the pieces. Elena guessed that he didn’t dare blast it with Power for fear of alerting Shinichi.
At last, all that was left was a stain and a smell.
Elena didn’t know why she felt so dizzy then. But she reached for Damon and he reached for her and they went to their knees holding each other.
“I release you from every promise you made — while in the possession of that malach,” Elena said. This was strategy. She didn’t want to release him from the promise of caring for his brother.
“Thank you,” Damon whispered, the weight of his head on her shoulder.
“And now,” said Elena, like a kindergarten teacher who wants to move quickly on to another activity, “We need to make plans. But to make plans in utter secrecy…”
“We have to share blood. But Elena, how much have you donated today? You look white.”
“You said you’d be my slave — now you won’t take a little of my blood.”
“You said you released me — instead you’re going to hold that over me forever, aren’t you? But there’s a simpler solution. You take some of my blood.”
And in the end that was what they did, although it made Elena feel slightly guilty, as if she were betraying Stefan. Damon cut himself with the minimum of fuss, and then it began to happen — they were sharing minds, melting seamlessly together. In much shorter a time than it would take to speak the sentences aloud, it was done: Elena had told Damon of what her friends had found about the epidemic among the girls of Fell’s Church — and Damon had told Elena everything he knew about Shinichi and Misao. Elena concocted a plan for scaring out any other possessed youngsters like Tami, and Damon promised to try to find out where Stefan was from the kitsune twins.
And, finally, when there was nothing more to say, and Damon’s blood had restored faint color to Elena’s cheeks they made plans as to how to meet again.
At the ceremony.
And then there was only Elena in the room, and a large raven winging its way toward the Old Wood.
Sitting on the cold stone floor, Elena took a moment to put all she now knew together. No wonder Damon had seemed so schizophrenic. No wonder he had remembered, and then forgotten, and then remembered that he was the one she was running from.
He remembered, she reasoned, when Shinichi was not controlling him, or at least was keeping him on a very loose rein. But his memory was spotty because some of the things he’d done were so terrible that his own mind had rejected them. They had seamlessly become part of the possessed Damon’s memory, for when possessed Shinichi was controlling every word, every deed. And in between episodes, Shinichi was telling him that he had to find Elena’s tormentor and kill him.
All very amusing, she supposed, for this kitsune, Shinichi. But for both her and Damon it had been hell.
Her mind refused to admit that there had been moments of heaven mixed in with the hell. She was Stefan’s, alone. That would never change.
Now Elena needed one more magical door, and she didn’t know how to find one. But there was the twinkling fairy light again. She guessed it was the last of the magic that Honoria Fell had left to protect the town she had founded. Elena felt a little guilty, using it up — but if it wasn’t meant for her, why had she been brought here?
To try for the most important destination she could imagine.
Reaching for the speck with one hand and clenching the key in the other she whispered with all the force at her command:
“Somewhere I can see and hear and touch Stefan.”
A prison, with filthy rushes on the floor and bars between her and the sleeping Stefan.
Between her and Stefan!
It was really him. Elena didn’t know how she could know. Undoubtedly they could twist and change your perceptions here. But just now, perhaps because nobody had been expecting her to drop into a dungeon, no one was prepared with anything to make her doubt her senses.
It was Stefan. He was thinner than before, and his cheekbones stuck out. He was beautiful. And his mind felt just right, just the right mixture of honor and love and darkness and light and hope and grim understanding of the world he lived in.
“Stefan! Oh,hold me! ”
He woke and half sat up. “At least leave me my sleep. And meanwhile go away and put on another face, bitch!”
“Stefan! Language!”
She saw muscles in Stefan’s shoulders freeze.
“What…did you…say?”
“Stefan…it’s really me.I don’t blame you for cursing. I curse this whole place and the two who put you here….”
“Three,” he said wearily, and bent his head. “You’d know that if you were real. Go and let them teach you
