Caroline. “You choose the first act in the Moonspire Festival! What shall we do with her?”
Caroline began to imitate Misao, kissing Shinichi’s cheek and ear. “I’m new here,” she said flirtatiously. “I don’t really know what you want me to pick.”
“Silly Caroline. Naturally, how she di—” Shinichi was suddenly smothered by a great hug and kiss from his sister.
Caroline, who had obviously wanted the attention of choice put to her, even if she didn’t understand the subject, said huffily, “Well, if you don’t tell me, I can’t choose. And anyway, where’s Elena? I don’t see her anywhere!” She seemed about to say more when Damon glided over and whispered in her ear. Then she smiled again, and they both looked at the pine trees surrounding the boardinghouse.
That was when Elena had her second qualm. But Misao was already speaking and that required Elena’s full attention.
“Lucky! Then I’ll pick.” Misao leaned forward, peeking over the edge of the roof at the humans below, her dark eyes wide, summing up the possibilities in what looked like a barren clearing. She was so delicate, so graceful as she got up to pace and think; her skin was so fair, and her hair so glossy and dark that even Elena couldn’t take her eyes off her.
Then Misao’s face lit up and she spoke. “Spread her on the altar. You brought some of your half- breeds?”
The last was not so much a question as an excited exclamation.
“My experiments? Of course, darling. I told you so,” Shinichi replied and added, staring into the forest, “Two of you — er, men — and Old Faithful!” And he snapped his fingers. There were several minutes of confusion during which the humans around Bonnie were struck, kicked, thrown to the ground, trampled on, and crushed as they fought with the shadows. And then the things that had shambled forward before, shambled farther forward with Bonnie held in between them, dangling limply from each by a slim arm.
The half-breeds were something like men and something like trees with all the leaves stripped off them. If they had been made, it looked as if they had been made specifically to be grotesque and asymmetrical. One had a crooked, knobby left arm that reached almost to its feet, and a right arm that was thick, lumpy, and only waist- high.
They were hideous. Their skin was similar to the chitin-like skin of the insects, but much bumpier, with knotholes and burls and all the outward aspects of bark on their branches. They had a shaggy, unfinished look in places.
They were terrifying. The way their limbs were twisted; the way they walked, shambling forward like apes, the way their bodies ended on top with treelike caricatures of human faces, surmounted by a tangle of thinner branches sticking out at odd angles — they were calculated to look like creatures of nightmare.
And they were naked. They had nothing in place of clothes to disguise the ghastly deformities of their bodies.
And then Elena really knew what terror meant, as the two shambling malach carried the limp Bonnie to a sort of roughly hewn stump of tree like an altar, laid her on it and began to pluck at the many layers of her clothing, clumsily, pulling at them with sticklike fingers that broke off with little crackling sounds even as cloth tore. They didn’t seem to care that they broke their fingers off — as long as they accomplished their task.
And then they were using bits of torn cloth, even more clumsily, to tie Bonnie, spread-eagled, to four knobby posts snapped off their own bodies and hammered into the ground around the trunk with four powerful blows by the thick-armed one.
Meanwhile, from somewhere even farther away in the shadows, a third man-tree shuffled forward. And Elena saw that this one was, undeniably, unmistakably male.
For a moment Elena worried that Damon might lose it, go mad, turn around and attack both the were-foxes, revealing his true allegiance now. But his feelings about Bonnie had obviously changed since he had saved her at Caroline’s. He appeared perfectly relaxed beside Shinichi and Misao, sitting back and smiling, even saying something that made them laugh.
Suddenly something inside Elena seemed to plummet. This wasn’t a qualm. It was full-blown terror. Damon had never looked so natural, so in tune, so happy with anyone as he did here with Shinichi and Misao. They couldn’t possibly have changed him, she tried to convince herself. They couldn’t have possessed him again so quickly, not without her, Elena, knowing it….
But when you showed him the truth, he was miserable, her heart whispered. Desperately miserable — miserably desperate. He might have reached for possession as a defiant alcoholic reaches for a bottle, wanting only forgetfulness. If she knew Damon, he had willingly invited the darkness back in.
He couldn’t stand to stand in the light, she thought. And so now, he’s able to laugh even at Bonnie’s suffering.
And where did that leave her? With Damon defected to the other side, no longer ally, but enemy? Elena began to tremble with anger and hatred — yes, and fear, too, as she contemplated her position.
All alone to struggle against three of the strongest enemies she could imagine, and their army of deformed, conscienceless killers? Not to mention Caroline, the cheerleader of spite?
As if to corroborate her fears, as if to show her how slim her chances really were, the tree she was clinging to seemed suddenly to let go of her, and for a moment Elena thought she would fall, spinning and screaming, all the way to the ground. Her handholds and footholds seemed to disappear all at once, and she only saved herself by a frantic — and painful — scrambling through serrated pine needles up to the grooved, dark bark.
You are a human girl now, my dear,the strong, resinous smell seemed to be telling her.And you are up to your neck in the Powers of the undead and of sorcery. Why fight it? You’ve lost before you’ve begun. Give in now and it won’t hurt so much.
If a person had been telling her this, trying to hammer it in, the words might have sparked some kind of defiance from the flint of Elena’s character. But instead this was just a feeling that came over her, an aura of doom, a knowledge of the hopelessness of her cause, and the inadequacy of her weapons, that seemed to settle over her as gently and as inescapably as a fog.
She leaned her throbbing head against the trunk of the tree. She had never felt so weak, so helpless — or so alone, not since she had been a newly wakened vampire. She wanted Stefan. But Stefan hadn’t been able to beat these three, and because of that she might never see him again.
Something new was happening on the roof, she realized wearily. Damon was looking down at Bonnie on the altar, and his expression was petulant. Bonnie’s white face was staring up at the evening sky in determination, as if refusing any longer to weep or beg again.
“But…are all the hors d’oeuvres so predictable?” Damon asked, seeming genuinely bored.
You bastard, you’d turn on your best friend for amusement, Elena thought. Well, just you wait. But she knew the truth was that without him, she couldn’t even put together Plan A, much less fight against these kitsune, these were-foxes.
“You told me that in the Shi no Shi, I would see acts of genuine originality,” Damon was going on. “Maidens hypnotized to cut themselves…”
Elena ignored his words. She concentrated all her energy on the thudding pain in the center of her chest. She felt as if she were drawing blood from her tiniest capillaries, from the far reaches of her body, and collecting it here at her center.
The human mind is infinite, she thought. It is as strange and as infinite as the universe. And the human soul…
The three youngest of the possessed began dancing around the spread-eagled Bonnie, singing in falsely sweet little-girl voices:
“You are going to die in here, When you die inhere, out there They throw dirt right on your face!”
How delightful, Elena thought. Then she tuned back in to the drama unfolding on the roof. What she saw startled her. Meredith was now up on the widow’s walk, moving as if she were underwater — entranced. Elena had missed how she’d gotten there — was it by some sort of magic? Misao was facing Meredith, giggling. Damon was laughing, too, but in mocking disbelief.
“And you expect me to believe that if I give this girl a pair of scissors…” he said, “she would actually cut her own—”
“Try and see for yourself,” Shinichi interrupted, with one of his languid gestures. He was leaning against the
