The Return: Shadow Souls

and Damon worked their way toward the mansion, sometimes with, sometimes against the tide of constantly moving people.

They made it up one steep set of white (pink) marble stairs, which sported on either side banks of glorious blue (violet) delphiniums and pink (scarlet) wild roses. Elena stopped here, for two reasons. One was to get a new goblet of Black Magic. The first had already given her a pleasant glow — although of course everything was constantly glowing here. She was hoping that the second cup would help her forget everything that Damon had brought up in the litter except the key — and help her remember what she’d been fretting over originally, before her thoughts had been hijacked by Bonnie and Meredith’s talk.

“I expect the best way is just to ask someone,” she told Damon, who was suddenly and silently at her elbow.

“Ask what?”

Elena leaned a little toward the slave who’d just supplied her with a fresh goblet. “May I ask — where is Lady Bloddeuwedd’s main ballroom?”

The liveried slave looked surprised. Then, with his head, he made a gesture all around. “This plaza — below the canopy — has gained the name the Great Ballroom,” he said, bowing over his tray.

Elena stared at him. Then she stared around her.

Under a giant canopy — it looked semipermanent to her and was hung all around with pretty lanterns in shades that were enhanced by the sun — the smooth grass lawn stretched away for hundreds of yards on all sides.

It is bigger than a football field.

“What I’d like to know,” Bonnie was asking a fellow guest, a woman who had clearly been to many of Bloddeuwedd’s affairs and knew her way around the mansion, “is this: which room is the main ballroom?”

“Oh, my deah, it depends on what you mean,” the guest replied cheerfully. “Theah’s the Great Ballroom out of doors — you must have seen it while climbing — the big pavilion? And then theah’s the White Ballroom inside. That’s lit with candelabras and has the curtains drawn all round. Sometimes it’s called the Waltz Room, since all that is played in there is waltzes.”

But Bonnie was still caught in horror a few sentences back. “There’s a ballroom outside?” she said shakily, hoping that somehow she hadn’t heard right.

“That’s it, deah, you can see through that wall theah.” The woman was telling the truth. You could see through the wall, because the walls were all of glass, one beyond another, allowing Bonnie to see what seemed to be an illusion done with mirrors: lighted room after lighted room, all filled with people. Only the last room on the bottom floor seemed to be made out of something solid. That must be the White Ballroom.

But through the opposite wall, where the guest was pointing — oh, yes. There was a canopy top. She remembered vaguely passing it. The other thing she remembered was…

“They dance on the grass? That — enormous field of grass?”

“Of course. It’s all especially cut and rolled smooth. You won’t trip over a weed or hummock of ground. Are you sure you’re feeling quite well? You look rathah pale. Well”—the guest laughed—“as pale as anyone can look in this light.”

“I’m fine,” Bonnie said dazedly. “I’m just…fine.”

The two parties met later and told each other of the horrors that they had unearthed. Damon and Elena had discovered that the ground of the outdoor ballroom was almost as hard as rock — anything that had been buried there before the ground was rolled smooth by heavy rollers would now be packed down in something like cement. The only place that anyone could dig there was around the perimeter.

“We should have brought a diviner,” Damon said. “You know, someone who uses a forked stick or a pendulum or a bit of a missing person’s clothing to home in on the correct area.”

“You’re right,” Meredith said, her tone clearly adding for once. “Why didn’t we bring a diviner?”

“Because I don’t know of any,” Damon said, with his sweetest, most ferocious barracuda smile.

Bonnie and Meredith had found that the inside ballroom’s flooring was rock — very beautiful white marble. There were dozens of floral arrangements in the room, but all that Bonnie had stuck her small hand into (as unobtrusively as possible) were simply cut flowers in a vase of water. No soil, nothing that could justify using the term “buried in.”

“And besides, why would Shinichi and Misao put the key in water they knew would be thrown out in a few days?” Bonnie asked, frowning, while Meredith added,

“And how do you find a loose floorboard in marble? So we can’t see how it could be buried there. By the way, I checked — and the White Ballroom has been here for years, so there’s no chance that they dumped it under the building stones, either.”

Elena, by now drinking her third goblet of Black Magic, said, “All right. The way we look at this is: one room scratched off the list. Now, we’ve already got half of the key — look how easy that was—”

“Maybe that was just to tease us,” Damon said, raising an eyebrow. “To get our hopes up, before dashing them completely…here.”

“That can’t be,” Elena said desperately, glaring at him. “We’ve come so far — farther than Misao ever imagined we would. We can find it. We will find it.”

“All right,” Damon said, suddenly deadly serious. “If we have to pretend to be staff and use pickaxes on that soil outdoors, we’ll do it. But first, let’s go through the entire house inside. That seemed to work well last time.”

“All right,” Meredith said, for once looking straight at him and without disapproval. “Bonnie and I will take the upstairs floors and you can take the downstairs ones — maybe you can make something of that White Waltz Ballroom.”

“All right.”

They set to work. Elena wished that she could calm down. Despite most of three goblets of Black Magic oscillating inside her — or perhaps because of them — she was seeing certain things in new lights. But she must keep her mind on the quest — and only on the quest. She would do anything—anything— she told herself, to get the key. Anything for Stefan.

The White Ballroom smelled of flowers and was garlanded with large, opulent blooms in the midst of abundant greenery. Standing arrangements were placed to shield an area around a fountain into an intimate nook where couples could sit. And, although there was no visible orchestra, music poured into the ballroom, demanding a response from Elena’s susceptible body.

“I don’t suppose you know how to waltz,” Damon said suddenly, and Elena realized that she had been swaying in time to the beat, eyes closed.

“Of course I do,” Elena answered, a little offended. “We all of us went to Ms. Hopewell’s classes. That was the equivalent of charm school in Fell’s Church,” she added, seeing the funny side of it and laughing at herself. “But Ms. Hopewell did love to dance, and she taught us every dance and movement she thought was graceful. That was when I was about eleven.”

“I suppose it would be absurd for me to ask you to dance with me,” Damon said.

Elena looked at him with what she knew were large and puzzled eyes. Despite the low-cut scarlet dress, she didn’t feel like an irresistible siren tonight. She was too wrought up to feel the magic woven in the cloth, magic which she now realized was telling her she was a dancing flame, a fire elemental. She supposed that Meredith must feel like a quiet stream, flowing swiftly and steadily to her destination, but sparkling and glinting all the way. And Bonnie — Bonnie, of course was a sprite of the air, meant to dance as lightly as a feather in that opalescent dress, barely subject to gravity.

But abruptly Elena remembered certain glances of admiration she had seen directed toward herself. And now suddenly Damon was vulnerable? Yet he didn’t imagine she would dance with him?

“Of course I would love to dance,” she said, realizing with a slight shock that she hadn’t noticed before, that Damon was in flawless white tie. Of course, it was on the one night when it might hinder them, but it made him look like a prince of the blood.

Her lips quirked slightly at the title. Of the blood…oh, yes.