The Return: Shadow Souls

She also handed him a sturdy dagger, smaller than the sword she was still carrying, but very serviceable — Matt immediately cut himself on it.

“Put your faith in friends and your instincts,” she said.

Slightly dazed, but feeling encouraged, Matt drove to Dr. Alpert’s house.

31

“I’m feeling much better,” Elena told Dr. Meggar. “I’d like to take a walk around the estate.” She tried not to bounce up and down on the bed. “I’ve been eating steak and drinking milk and I even took that vile cod liver oil you sent. Also I have a very firm grasp of reality: I’m here to rescue Stefan and the little boy inside Damon is a metaphor for his unconscious, which the blood we shared allowed me to ‘see.’” She bounced once, but covered it by reaching for a glass of water. “I feel like a happy puppy pulling at the leash.” She exhibited her newly designed slave bracelets: silver with lapis lazuli inserts in fluid designs. “If I die suddenly, I am prepared.”

Dr. Meggar’s eyebrows worked up and down. “Well, I can’t find anything wrong with your pulse or your breathing. I don’t see how a nice afternoon walk can hurt you. Damon’s certainly up and walking. But don’t you go giving Lady Ulma any ideas. She still needs months of bed rest.”

“She has a nice little desk made from a breakfast tray,” Bonnie explained, gesturing to show size and width. “She designs clothes on that.” Bonnie leaned forward, wide-eyed. “And you know what? Her dresses are magic.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” grunted Dr. Meggar.

But the next moment Elena remembered something unpleasant. “Even when we get the keys,” she said, “we have to plot the actual jailbreak.”

“What’s a jailbreak?” Lakshmi asked excitedly.

“It’s like this — we’ve got the keys to Stefan’s cell, but we still need to figure out how we’re going to get into the prison, and how we’re going to smuggle him out.”

Lakshmi frowned. “Why not just go in with the line and take him out the gate?”

“Because,” Elena said, trying for patience, “they won’t let us just walk in and get him.” She narrowed her eyes as Lakshmi put her head in her hands. “What’re you thinking, Lakshmi?”

“Well, first you say that you’re going to have the key in your hand when you go to the prison, then you act like they’re not going to let him out of the prison.”

Meredith shook her head, bewildered. Bonnie put a hand to her forehead as if it ached. But Elena slowly leaned forward.

“Lakshmi,” she said, very quietly, “are you saying that if we have a key to Stefan’s cell it’s basically a pass in and out of prison?”

Lakshmi brightened up. “Of course!” she said. “Otherwise, what would a key be good for? They could just lock him in another cell.”

Elena could hardly believe the wonder of what she had just heard, so she immediately began trying to poke holes in it. “That would mean we could go straight from Bloddeuwedd’s party to the prison and just take Stefan out,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could inject into her voice. “We could just show our key and they’d let us take him away.”

Lakshmi nodded eagerly. “Yes!” she said joyfully, the sarcasm having gone right over her head. “And, don’t be mad, okay? But I wondered why you never went to visit him.”

“We can visit him?”

“Sure, if you make an appointment.”

By now Meredith and Bonnie had come to life and were supporting Elena on either side. “How soon can we send someone to make an appointment?” Elena said through her teeth, because it was taking all her effort to speak — her entire weight was resting on her two friends. “Who can we send to make an appointment?” she whispered.

“I’ll go,” Damon said from the crimson darkness behind them. “I’ll go tonight — give me five minutes.”

Matt could feel that he had on his most cross and stubborn expression.

“C’mon,” Tyrone said, looking amused. They were both gearing up for a trip into the thicket. This meant putting on two of the mothball-clove-recipe coats each and then using duct tape to fasten the gloves to the coats. Matt was sweating already.

But Tyrone was a good guy, he thought. Here Matt had come out of nowhere and said, “Hey, you know that bizarre thing you saw with poor Jim Bryce last week? Well, it’s all connected to something even more bizarre — all about fox spirits and the Old Wood, and Mrs. Flowers says that if we don’t figure out what’s going on, we’re going to be in real trouble. And Mrs. Flowers isn’t just a batty old lady at the boardinghouse, even though everybody says so.”

“Of course she isn’t,” Dr. Alpert’s brusque voice had said from the doorway. She put down her black bag — still a country doctor, even when the town was in crisis — and addressed her son. “Theophilia Flowers and I have known each other a long time — and Mrs. Saitou, too. They were both always helping people. That’s their nature.”

“Well—” Matt had seen an opportunity and jumped at it. “Mrs. Flowers is the one who needs help now. Really, really needs help.”

“Then what’re you sitting there for, Tyrone? Hurry up and go help Mrs. Flowers.” Dr. Alpert had ruffled her own iron-gray hair with her fingers, then ruffled her son’s black hair fondly.

“I was, Mom. We were just leaving when you came in.”

Tyrone, seeing Matt’s grim horror-story of a car, had politely offered to drive them to Mrs. Flowers’s house in his Camry. Matt, afraid of a terminal blowout at some crucial moment, was only too happy to accept.

He was glad that Tyrone would be the lynchpin of the Robert E. Lee High football team in the coming year. Ty was the kind of guy you could count on — as witness his immediate offer of help today. He was a good sport, and absolutely straight and clean. Matt couldn’t help but see how drugs and drinking had ruined not only the actual games, but the sportsmanship of the other teams on campus.

Tyrone was also a guy who could keep his mouth shut. He hadn’t even peppered Matt with questions as they drove back to the boardinghouse, but he did give a wolf whistle, not at Mrs. Flowers, but at the bright yellow Model T she was driving into the old stables.

“Whoa!” he said, jumping out to help her with a grocery bag, while his eyes drank in the Model T from fender to fender. “That’s a Model T Fordor Sedan! This could be one beautiful car if—” He stopped abruptly and his brown skin burned with a sunset glow.

“Oh, my, don’t be embarrassed about the Yellow Carriage!” Mrs. Flowers said, allowing Matt to take another bag of groceries back through the kitchen garden and into the kitchen of the house. “She’s served this family for nearly a hundred years, and she’s accumulated some rust and damage. But she goes almost thirty miles an hour on paved roads!” Mrs. Flowers added, speaking not only proudly, but with the somewhat awed respect owed to high- speed travel.

Matt’s eyes met Tyrone’s and Matt knew there was only one shared thought hanging in the air between them.

To restore to perfection the dilapidated, worn, but still beautiful car that spent most of its time in a converted stable.

“We could do it,” Matt said, feeling that, as Mrs. Flowers’s representative, he should make the offer first.

“We sure could,” Tyrone said dreamily. “She’s already in a double garage — no problems about room.”

“We wouldn’t have to strip her down to the frame…she really rides like a dream.”

“You’re kidding! We could clean the engine, though: have a look at the plugs and belts and hoses and stuff. And”—dark eyes gleaming suddenly—“my dad has a power sander. We could strip the paint and repaint it the exact same yellow!”

Mrs. Flowers suddenly beamed. “That was what dear Mama was waiting for you to say, young man,” she said, and Matt remembered his manners long enough to introduce Tyrone.

“Now, if you had said, ‘We’ll paint her burgundy’ or ‘blue’ or any other color, I’m sure she would have objected,” Mrs. Flowers said as she began to make ham sandwiches, potato salad, and a large kettle of baked