The Return: Shadow Souls

Damon, if there’s anything— even any way we can save Bonnie and Meredith — you have to tell me. You have to. I order you to!

Neither of them were in a mood to find that amusing or even to notice the “slave” giving orders to the “master.” But at last Elena heard Damon’s telepathic voice.

They say that if I take you back to Young Drohzne now and you apologize, that you can be let off with just six strokes of this. From somewhere Damon produced a pliant cane made of some pale wood. Ash, probably, Elena thought, surprised at how calm she was. It’s the one substance equally effective on everyone: even on vampires — even on Old Ones, which they undoubtedly have around here.

But it has to be in public so that they can get the rumors started the other way. They think then that the turmoil will stop, if you — the one who started the disobedience — will admit your slave status.

Damon’s thoughts were heavy, and so was Elena’s heart. How many of her principles would she be betraying if she did this? How many slaves would she be condemning to lives of servitude?

Suddenly Damon’s mental voice was angry. We didn’t come here to reform the Dark Dimension, he reminded her, in tones that made Elena wince away. Damon shook her slightly. We came to get Stefan, remember? Needless to say, we’ll never have a chance to do that if we try to play Spartacus. If we start a war that we know we can’t win. Even the Guardians can’t win it.

A light went on in Elena’s mind.

“Of course,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

“Think of what before?” Damon said desperately.

“We don’t fight the war — now. I haven’t even mastered my basic Powers, much less my Wings Powers. And this way they won’t even wonder about them.”

“Elena?”

“We come back,” Elena explained to him excitedly. “When I can control all my Powers. And we bring allies with us — strong allies we’ll find in the human world. It may take years and years but someday we come back and finish what we started.”

Damon was staring at her as if she’d gone mad, but that didn’t matter. Elena could feel Power coursing through her. This was one promise, she thought, that she would keep if it killed her.

Damon swallowed. “Can we talk about — about the present now?” he asked.

It was as if he had hit a bull’s-eye.

The present. Now.

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Elena looked at the ash cane contemptuously. “Of course, I’ll do it, Damon. I don’t want anyone else hurt because of me before I’m ready to fight. Dr. Meggar is a good healer. If they allow me to come back to him.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Damon said, holding her gaze. “But I do know one thing. You won’t feel a single blow, I promise you that,” he said quickly and earnestly, his dark eyes very big. “I’ll take care of that; it’ll all be channeled away. And you won’t even see a trace of a mark by morning. But,” he finished much more slowly, “you’ll have to kneel to apologize to me, your owner, and to that filthy, scrofulous, abominable old—” Damon’s imprecations carried him away for a moment so that he lapsed into Italian.

“To who?”

“To the leader of the slums, and possibly to Old Drohzne’s brother, Young Drohzne, as well.”

“Okay. Tell them I’ll apologize to as many Drohznes as they want.

Tell them quick, in case we lose our chance.”

Elena could see the look he gave her, but her mind was turned inward. Would she let Meredith or Bonnie do this? No. Would she allow it to happen to Caroline if by any means she could stop it? Again, no. No, no, no. Elena’s feelings about brutality toward girls and women had always been exceedingly strong. Her feelings about the worldwide second-class citizenship of females had become remarkably clear since her return from the afterlife. If she had been returned to the world for any purpose, she had decided, helping to free girls and women from the slavery that many of them could not even see, was part of it.

But this wasn’t just about a vicious slaveholder and faceless oppressed women and men. It was about Lady Ulma, and keeping her and her baby safe…and it was about Stefan. If she gave in, she would be just an impudent slave who caused a small ruckus in the road, but was firmly put back into her place by authorities.

Otherwise, if their party was scrutinized…if someone realized that they were here to release Stefan…if Elena was the one who caused the order to come: “Move him into stricter security — get rid of that silly kitsune-key thing….”

Her mind was ablaze with images of ways that Stefan could be punished, could be taken away, could be lost if this incident in the slums took on undue proportions.

No. She would not abandon Stefan now to fight a war that could not be won. But she wouldn’t forget, either.

I’ll come back for all of you, she promised. And then the story will have a different ending.

She realized that Damon still hadn’t left. He was watching her with eyes as keen as a falcon’s. “They sent me to bring you,” he said quietly. “They never thought of a no for an answer.” Elena could briefly feel the fierce rage of his fury at them and she took his hand and squeezed it.

“I’m coming back with you in the future, for the slaves,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Elena, and her quick kiss became a longer kiss. She hadn’t really absorbed what Damon had said about channeling away the pain. She felt she was due just one kiss for what she was about to endure, and then Damon stroked her hair and time meant nothing until Meredith knocked at the door.

The bloody-red dawn had taken on a bizarre, almost dreamlike quality by the time Elena was led to an open- air structure where the slumlords in charge of this area were seated on piles of once fine, now threadbare cushions. They were passing back and forth bottles and jeweled leather flasks filled with Black Magic, the only wine vampires could really enjoy, smoking hookahs and occasionally spitting into the darker shadows. This was regardless of the huge audience of street people dizzily attracted by word of a beautiful young human’s public punishment.

Elena had been rehearsed in her lines. She was marched, gagged, hands manacled, before the hawking and spitting authorities. Young Drohzne was sitting in somewhat uncomfortable glory on a golden couch, and Damon was standing between him and the authorities, looking tense. Elena had never been so tempted to improvise a part since her junior play, when she had thrown a flowerpot at Petruchio and brought down the house in the last scene of The Taming of the Shrew.

But this was deadly serious business. Stefan’s freedom, Bonnie’s and Meredith’s lives might depend upon it. Elena moved her tongue around inside her mouth, which was bone dry.

And, oddly, she found Damon’s eyes, the man with the stick, uplifting her. He seemed to be telling her courage and indifference without using telepathy at all. Elena wondered if he himself had ever been in a similar situation.

She was kicked by one of her escorts and remembered where she was. She’d been loaned an “appropriate” costume from the discarded wardrobe of Dr. Meggar’s married daughter. It was pearl-colored indoors, which meant it was mauve in the everlasting crimson sunlight. Most important, worn without its silken undershirt, its back plunged to below Elena’s waistline, leaving Elena’s own back completely bare. Now, in accordance with custom, she knelt in front of the elders, and bowed until her forehead rested on an ornate and very dirty carpet at the feet of the elders, but several steps lower. One of them spat on her.

There was excited, appreciative chattering, and ribaldry, and thrown missiles, mostly in the form of garbage. Fruit was too precious here to think of wasting. Dried excrement, however, was not, and Elena found the first tears coming to her eyes as she realized what she was being pelted with.

Courage and indifference, she told herself, not even daring to sneak a look up at Damon.

Presently, when the crowd was felt to have had its due playtime, one of the hookah-smoking civic elders stood up. He read words Elena couldn’t understand from a creased scroll. It seemed to go on forever. Elena, on her knees, with her forehead against the dusty carpet, felt as if she were smothering.

At last the scroll was put away and Young Drohzne leaped up and described in a high, almost hysterical voice, and flamboyant language, the story of a slave who attacked her own master (Damon, Elena noted mentally) to tear herself free of his supervision, and then attacked the head of his family (Old Drohzne, Elena thought) and his