cupola in the middle of the widow’s walk, still trying to out-lounge Damon. “Didn’t you see our prizewinner, Isobel? You carried her all the way here — didn’t she ever try to speak?”
Damon held out a hand. “Scissors,” he said, and a dainty pair of nail scissors rested in his palm. It seemed that, as long as Damon had Shinichi’s magic key, the magic field around them would continue to obey him even in the real world. He laughed. “No, adult-size scissors, for gardening. The tongue’s made of strong muscles, not paper.”
What he held in his hand then were large pruning shears — definitely not toys for children. He hefted them, feeling their weight. And then, to Elena’s utter shock, he looked straight up at her in her treetop refuge, not needing to search for her there at all — and winked.
Elena could only stare back in horror.
He knew, she thought. He knew where I was all the time.
That was what he had been whispering to Caroline about.
It hadn’t worked — the Wings of Redemption hadn’t worked, Elena thought, and it felt as if she were falling and would fall forever. I should have realized it would be no good. No matter what’s done to him, Damon will always be Damon. And now he’s offering me a choice: see my two best friends tortured and killed, or step forward and stop this horror by agreeing to his terms.
What could she do?
He had arranged the chess pieces brilliantly, she thought. The pawns on two different levels, so that even if Elena could somehow climb down to try to save Bonnie, Meredith would be lost. Bonnie was tied to four strong posts and guarded by Tree-Men. Meredith was closer, up on the roof, but to get her off Elena would have to get to her and then through Misao, Shinichi, Caroline, and Damon himself.
And Elena had to choose. Whether to step forward now, or be pushed forward by the anguish of one of the two who were almost a part of her.
She seemed to catch a faint strain of telepathy as Damon stood beaming there, and it said,This is the best night of my life.
You could always just jump,came the fog-like hypnotic whisper of annihilation once again.End the dead-end road you’re on. End your suffering. End all the pain…just like that.
“Now it’s my turn,” Caroline was saying, brushing past the twins to face Meredith herself. “It was supposed to be my choice in the first place. So it’s my turn now.”
Misao was laughing hysterically, but Meredith was already stepping forward, still in a trance.
“Oh, have it your own way,” Damon said. But he didn’t move, still staring curiously, as Caroline said to Meredith, “You’ve always had a tongue like an adder’s. Why don’t you make it forked for us — right here, right now? Before you cut it into pieces.”
Meredith held out her hand without a word, like an automaton.
Still with her eyes on Damon, Elena breathed in slowly. Her chest seemed to be going into spasms as it had when the sucker plants had wound their way around her and cut off her breath. But not even sensations in her own body could stop her.
How could I choose? she thought. Bonnie and Meredith — I love both of them.
And there’s nothing else to do, she realized numbly, the feeling draining from her hands and her lips. I’m not even sure if Damon can save both of them, even if I agree to…submit to him. These others — Shinichi, Misao, even Caroline — they want to see blood. And Shinichi not only controls trees, but just about everything in the Old Wood, including those monstrous Tree-Men. Maybe this time Damon has over-reached himself, taken on more than he could handle. He wanted me — but he went too far to get me. I can’t see any way out.
And then she did see. Suddenly everything fell into place and was brilliantly clear.
She knew.
Elena stared down at Bonnie, almost in a state of shock. Bonnie was looking at her, too. But there was no expectation of rescue in that small, triangular face. Bonnie had already accepted her fate: agony and death.
No,Elena thought, not knowing whether Bonnie could hear her.
Believe,she thought to Bonnie.
Not blindly, never blindly. But believe in what your mind tells you is the truth, and what your heart tells you is the right path. I would never let you go — or Meredith either.
I believe, Elena thought, and her soul was rocked by the force of it. She felt a sudden surge within herself, and she knew that it was time to go. One word was ringing in her mind as she stood and let go of her hand holds on the tree trunk. And that one word echoed in her mind as she dove headfirst from her sixty-foot perch in the tree.
Believe.
As she fell, it all rushed through her mind.
The first time she had seen Stefan…she had been a different person then. Ice-cold outside, manic inside — or was it the other way around? Still numb from the death of her parents so long ago. Jaded by the world and by anything to do with boys…A princess in an icy tower…with a lust only for conquest, for power…until she’d seen him.
Believe.
Then the world of the vampires…and Damon. And all the wicked wildness she’d found inside herself, all the passion. Stefan was her lynch pin, but Damon was the fiery breath beneath her wings. However far she went, Damon seemed to lure her on just a little farther. And she knew that one day it would be too far…for both of them. But for now, all she had to do was simple.
Believe.
And Meredith, and Bonnie, and Matt. She had changed relations with them, oh, most definitely. At first, not knowing what she had done to deserve friends like these three, she hadn’t even bothered to treat them as they deserved. Yet they had all stuck by her. And now she did know how to appreciate them — knew that if it came to that, she would die for them.
Below, Bonnie’s eyes had followed her dive. The audience on the widow’s walk looked, too, but it was Bonnie’s face that she stared into: Bonnie startled and terrified and disbelieving and about to scream and realizing at the same time that no screaming would save Elena from a headlong dive to her death.
Bonnie, believe in me. I’ll save you.
I remember how to fly.
Bonnie knew that she was going to die.
She had had a clear premonition of it just before those things — the trees that moved like humans, with their hideous faces and their thick, knotted arms — had surrounded the little band of humans in the Old Wood. She had heard the howl of the black weir dog, turned, and just caught a glimpse of one vanishing in the glare of her flashlight. The dogs had a long history in Bonnie’s family: when one of them howled, a death was soon to come.
She’d guessed then that it would be hers.
But she hadn’t said anything, even when Dr. Alpert had said, “What in the name of heaven was that?” Bonnie was practicing being brave. Meredith and Matt were brave. It was something built into them, an ability to keep going when any sane person would run away and hide. They both put the group’s good ahead of their own. And of course Dr. Alpert was brave, not to mention strong, and Mrs. Flowers seemed to have decided that the teenagers were her own special charges to take care of.
Bonnie had wanted to show that she could be brave, too. She was practicing holding her head up and listening for things in the bushes, while simultaneously listening with her psychic senses for any sign of Elena. It was hard to juggle the two kinds of hearing. There was a lot to hear with her real ears; all kinds of quiet chucklings and whisperings from the bushes that didn’t belong there. But from Elena there wasn’t a sound, not even when Bonnie called her name over and over: Elena, Elena, Elena!
She’s human again, Bonnie had realized sadly, at last. She can’t hear me or make contact. Out of all of us,
