The Return: Shadow Souls

“No, he really is—” Elena began, and then she caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Oh, God, this is Damon we’re talking about. I am in trouble.”

“Let’s just watch and see what happens,” Meredith said sensibly. “He’s definitely changed, too. Before, he would have just told you that your friends couldn’t come — and that was it. Today he stuck around and listened.”

“Yes. I just have to — to be on my guard from now on,” Elena said, a little unsteadily. How was she going to help the child inside Damon without getting closer to him? And how would she explain all she might need to do to Stefan?

She sighed.

“It’ll probably be all right,” Bonnie muttered sleepily. Meredith and Elena both turned to look at her and Elena felt a chill go up her spine. Bonnie was sitting propped up, but her eyes were shut and her voice was indistinct. “The real question is: what will Stefan say about that night at the motel with Damon?”

“What?” Elena’s voice was sharp and loud enough to awaken any sleeper. But Bonnie didn’t stir.

“What happened what night at what motel?” Meredith demanded. When Elena didn’t answer immediately, she caught Elena’s arm and swung her so that they were face-to-face.

At last Elena looked at her friend. But her eyes, she knew, gave away nothing.

“Elena, what’s she talking about? What happened with Damon?”

Elena still kept her face perfectly expressionless, and used a word she’d learned just that night. “Sa…”

“Elena, you’re impossible! You’re not going to dump Stefan after you rescue him, are you?”

“No, of course not!” Elena was hurt. “Stefan and I belong together — forever.”

“But still you spent a night with Damon where something happened between you.”

“Something…I guess.”

“And that something was?”

Elena smiled apologetically. “Sa…”

“I’ll get it out of him! I’ll put him on the defensive….”

“You can make a Plan A and Plan B and all,” Elena said. “But it won’t help. Shinichi took his memories away. Meredith, I’m sorry — you don’t know how sorry. But I swore that nobody would ever know.” She looked up at the taller girl, feeling tears pool in her eyes. Can’t you just — once — let me leave it that way?”

Meredith sank bank. “Elena Gilbert, the world is lucky there is only one of you. You are the…” She paused, as if deciding whether to say the words or not. Then she said, “It’s time to get to bed. Dawn is going to come early and so is the Demon Gate.”

“Merry?”

“What now?”

“Thank you.”

13

The Demon Gate.

Elena glanced over her shoulder at the backseat of the Prius. Bonnie was blinking sleepily. Meredith, who’d gotten much less sleep but heard much more alarming news, was looking like a razor blade: keen, sharp as ice, and ready.

There was nothing else to see except Damon with his paper bags on the seat beside him, driving the Prius. Out the windows, where an arid Arizona dawn should be blinding its way across the horizon, was nothing but fog.

It was frightening and disorienting. They had taken a small road off Highway 179 and, gradually, the fog had crept in, sending tendrils of mist around the car, and finally engulfing it whole. It seemed to Elena that they were being deliberately cut off from the old ordinary world of McDonald’s and Target, and were crossing a border into a place they weren’t meant to know about, much less go.

There was no traffic in the other direction. None at all. And as hard as Elena peered out of her window, it was like trying to look through fast-moving clouds.

“Aren’t we going too fast?” Bonnie asked, rubbing her eyes.

“No,” Damon said. “It would be — a remarkable coincidence — if anyone else were on the same route at the same time we are.”

“It looks a lot like Arizona,” she said, disappointed.

“It may be Arizona, for all I know,” Damon replied. “But we haven’t crossed the Gate yet. And this isn’t anywhere in Arizona you could just accidentally walk into. The path always has its little tricks and traps. The problem is that you never know what you’ll be facing.

“Now listen,” he added, looking at Elena with an expression she had gotten to know. It meant: I’m not joking around; I’m talking to you as an equal; I’m serious.

“You’ve gotten very good at showing only a human-sized aura,” Damon said. “But that means that if you can learn one more thing before we go in, you can actually use your aura, make it do you some good when you want it to, instead of just hiding it until it pops up out of control and lifts three-thousand- pound cars.”

“Like what kind of good?”

“Like what I’m going to show you. First of all just relax and let me control it. Then, little by little, I’ll slacken the controls and you’ll take them up. By the end, you should be able to send your Powers to your eyes — and see much better; to your ears — and hear much better; to your limbs — and move much more quickly and precisely. All right?”

“You couldn’t have taught me this before we started on this little excursion?”

He smiled at her, a wild, reckless smile that made her smile, too, even if she didn’t know what it was about. “Until you showed how well you could control your aura throughout the path — the way here — I didn’t think you were ready,” he said bluntly. “Now I do. There are things in your mind just waiting to be unlocked. You’ll understand when we unlock them.”

And we unlock them — with what? A kiss? Elena thought suspiciously.

“No. No. And that’s the other reason you’ve got to learn this. Your telepathy is getting out of hand. If you don’t learn how to keep from projecting your thoughts, you’ll never make it past the checkpoint at the Gate as a human.”

Checkpoint. That sounded ominous. Elena nodded and said, “All right; what do we do?”

“What we did before. Like I said, relax. Try to trust me.”

He put his right hand just to the left of her breastbone, not touching the cloth of her deep gold top. Elena could feel herself flushing, and she wondered what Bonnie and Meredith must think of this if they were watching.

And then Elena felt something else.

It wasn’t cold; it wasn’t heat, but it was something like the furthest extremities of both of them. It was pure Power. It would have knocked her over if Damon hadn’t been holding her by the arm with his other hand. She thought, he’s using his own Power to prime mine, to do something—

— something that hurt—

No! Elena tried, vocally and telepathically, to tell Damon that the Power was too much, that it hurt. But Damon ignored her pleas even as he ignored the tears that spilled onto her cheeks. His Power was leading hers now, painfully, throughout her body. It was in her bloodstream, dragging her own Power behind it like a comet’s tail. It was forcing her to take the Power to different parts of her body and let it build and build there, not letting her exhale it, not letting her move it on.

I’m going to burst—

All this time her eyes had been fixed on Damon’s, broadcasting her feelings to him: from indignant anger to shock to agonized pain — and now…to…