The Return: Shadow Souls

“It’s different colors on the other side!” Bonnie discovered, letting the wind transform her pale green veil into a shimmering silver. Meredith was shaking out a dramatic deep violet silk into a mysterious dark blue dotted with a myriad of stars. Elena, who had been expecting her own veil to be blue, found herself looking up at Damon. He was holding a tiny square of cloth in a clenched fist.

“Let’s see how good you’ve gotten,” he murmured, nodding her closer to him. “Guess what color.”

Another girl might only have noticed the sloe black eyes and the pure, carven lines of Damon’s face, or maybe the wild, wicked smile — somehow wilder and sweeter than ever here, like a rainbow in the middle of a hurricane. But Elena also made note of the stiffness in his neck and shoulders — places where tension built up. The Dark Dimension was already taking its toll on him, psychically, even as he mocked it.

She wondered how many soundings of Power by the merely curious he was having to block each second. She was about to offer to help by opening herself up to the eldritch world, when he snapped, “Guess!” in a tone that didn’t make it a suggestion.

“Gold,” Elena said instantly, surprising herself. When she reached to take the golden square from his hand a powerful, pleasurable feeling of electric current shot from her palm up her arm and seemed to skewer her straight through the heart. Damon clung to her fingers briefly as she took the square and Elena found she could still feel electricity pulsing from his fingertips.

The underside of her veil blew out white and sparkling as if set with diamonds. God, maybe they were diamonds, she thought. How could you tell with Damon?

“Your wedding veil, perhaps?” Damon murmured, lips close to her ear. The rope around Elena’s wrists had come very loose and she stroked the diaphanous fabric helplessly, feeling the tiny jewels on the white side cool to the touch of her fingers.

“How did you know you’d need all this stuff?” Elena asked, with bruising practicality. “You didn’t know everything, but you seemed to know enough.”

“Oh, I did research in bars and other places. I found a few people who’d been here and had managed to get out again — or who had gotten kicked out.” Damon’s wild grin grew even wilder. “At night while you were asleep. At a little hidden store, I got those.” He nodded at her veil, and added, “You don’t have to wear that over your face or anything. Press it to your hair and it will cling to it.”

Elena did so, wearing the gold side out. It fell to her heels. She fingered her veil, already able to see the flirtatious possibilities in it, as well as the dismissive ones. If only she could get this damned rope off her wrists…

After a moment, Damon retreated back into the persona of the imperturbable master and said, “For all our sakes, we ought to be strict about these things. The slum lords and nobility who run this abominable mess they call the Dark Dimension know that it’s only two days away from revolution at any time, and if we add anything to the balance they’re going to Make a Public Example of Us.”

“All right,” Elena said. “Here, hold my string and I’ll get on the litter.”

But there wasn’t much point in the rope, not once they were both sitting in the same litter. It was carried by four men — not big men, but wiry ones, and all of the same height, which made for a smooth ride.

If Elena had been a free citizen, she would never have allowed herself to be carried by four people whom (she assumed) were slaves. In fact, she would have made a big noisy fuss over it. But that talk she’d had with herself at the docks had sunk in. She was a slave, even if Damon hadn’t paid anyone to buy her. She didn’t have the right to make a big noisy fuss about anything. In this crimson, evil-smelling place she could imagine that her fuss might even make problems for the litter bearers themselves — make their owner or whoever ran the litter-bearing business punish them, as if it were their fault.

Best Plan A for now: Keep Mouth Shut.

There was plenty to see anyway, now that they had passed on a bridge over bad-smelling slums and alleys full of tumbledown houses. Shops began to appear, at first heavily barred and made of unpainted stone, then more respectable buildings, and then suddenly they were winding their way through a bazaar. But even here the stamp of poverty and weariness appeared on too many faces. Elena had expected, if anything, a cold, black, antiseptic city with emotionless vampires and fire-eyed demons walking the streets. Instead, everyone she saw looked human, and they were selling things — from medicines to food and drink — that vampires didn’t need.

Well, maybe the kitsune and the demons need them, Elena reasoned, shuddering at the idea of what a demon might want to eat. On the street corners were hard-faced, scantily clad girls and boys, and tattered, haggard people holding pathetic signs: A MEMORY FOR A MEAL.

“What do they mean?” Elena asked Damon, but he didn’t answer her immediately.

“This is how the free humans of the city spend most of their time,” he said. “So remember that, before you start going on one of your crusades—”

Elena wasn’t listening. She was staring at one of the holders of such a sign. The man was horribly thin, with a straggly beard and bad teeth, but worse was his look of vacant despair. Every so often he would hold out a trembling hand on which there was a small, clear ball, which he balanced on his palm, muttering, “A summer’s day when I was young. A summer’s day for a ten-geld piece.” As often as not there was no one near when he said this.

Elena slipped off a lapis ring Stefan had given her and held it toward him. She didn’t want to annoy Damon by getting out of the litter, and she had to say, “Come here, please,” while holding the ring toward the bearded man.

He heard, and came to the litter quickly enough. Elena saw something move in his beard — lice, perhaps — and she forced herself to stare at the ring as she said, “Take it. Quickly, please.”

The old man stared at the ring as if it were a banquet. “I don’t have change,” he moaned, bringing up his hand and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He seemed about to drop to the ground unconscious. “I don’t have change!”

“I don’t want change!” Elena said through the huge swelling that had formed in her throat. “Take the ring. Hurry or I’ll drop it.”

He snatched it from her fingers as the litter bearers started forward again. “May the Guardians bless you, lady,” he said, trying to keep up with the litter bearer’s trot. “Hear me who may! May They bless you!”

“You really shouldn’t,” Damon said to Elena when the voice had died away behind them. “He’s not going to get a meal with that, you know.”

“He was hungry,” Elena said softly. She couldn’t explain that he reminded her of Stefan, not just now. “It was my ring,” she added defensively. “I suppose you’re going to say he’ll spend it on alcohol or drugs.”

“No, but he won’t get a meal with it, either. He’ll get a banquet.”

“Well, so much the—”

“In his imagination. He’ll get a dusty orb with some old vampire’s memory of a Roman feast, or someone from the city’s memory of a modern one. Then he’ll play it over and over as he slowly starves to death.”

Elena was appalled. “Damon! Quick! I have to go back and find him—”

“You can’t, I’m afraid.” Lazily, Damon held up a hand. He had a firm grip on her rope. “Besides, he’s long gone.”

“How can he do that? How could anyone do that?”

“How can a lung cancer patient refuse to quit smoking? But I agree that those orbs can be the most addictive substances of all. Blame the kitsune for bringing their star balls here and making them the most popular form of obsession.”

“Star balls? Hoshi no tama?” Elena gasped.

Damon stared at her, looking equally surprised. “You know about them?”

“All I know is what Meredith researched. She said that kitsune were often portrayed with either keys”—she raised her eyebrows at him—“or with star balls. And that myths say they can put some or all of their power in the ball, so that if you find it, you can control the kitsune. She and Bonnie want to find Misao’s or Shinichi’s star balls and have control over them.”

“Be still, my unbeating heart,” Damon said dramatically, but the next second he was all business. “Remember what that old guy said? A summer’s day for a meal? He was talking about