Why would you do such a thing?”
“I got here through the road of my madness. I did it out of what I know is madness I can no longer live with.”
“What madness? And are you going to do it now?” the princess asked with interest. “Because if you’re not, I’ll have to call my guards and — wait a minute,” she interrupted herself.
She grabbed his knife before he could stop her and licked it. “This is a metal blade,” she told him, tossing it back.
“I know.” Damon let his head fall so that hair curtained his eyes and said painfully: “I am…a human, your highness.”
He was covertly watching through his lashes and he saw that Jessalyn brightened up. “I thought you were just some weak, useless vampire,” she said absently. “But now that I look at you…” A rose petal of a pink tongue came out and licked her lips. “There’s no point in wasting the good stuff, is there?”
She was like Bonnie. She said exactly what she thought, when she thought it.
Something inside Damon wanted to laugh.
He stood again, looking at the girl on the bed with all the fire and passion of which he was capable — and felt that it wasn’t enough. Thinking about the real Bonnie, alone and unhappy, was…well, passion-quenching. But what else could he do?
Suddenly he knew what he could do. Before, when he’d stopped himself from thinking of Elena, he had cut off any genuine passion or desire. But he was doing this for Elena, as much as for himself. Elena couldn’t be his Princess of Darkness if he couldn’t be her Prince.
This time, when he looked down at M. le Princess, it was differently. He could feel the atmosphere change.
“Highness, I have no right even to speak to you,” he said, deliberately putting one booted foot on the metal scrollwork that formed the frame of the bed. “You know as well as I that you can kill me with a single blow…say, here”—pointing to a spot on his jaw—“but you have already slain me—” Jessalyn looked confused, but waited.
“—with love. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you. You could break my neck, or — as I would say if I were permitted to touch your perfumed white handyou could curl those fingers around my throat and strangle me. I beg you to do it.”
Jessalyn was beginning to look puzzled but excited. Blushing, she held out one small hand to Damon, but clearly without any intention of strangling him.
“Please, you must,” Damon said earnestly, never taking his eyes off hers. “That is the only thing I ask of you: that you kill me yourself instead of calling your guards so that the last sight I see will be your beautiful face.”
“You’re ill,” Jessalyn decided, still looking flustered. “There have been other unbalanced minds who have made their way past the first wall of my castlealthough never to my chambers. I’ll give you to the doctors so that they can make you well.”
“Please,” said Damon, who had forged his way through the last of the filmy black hangings and was now looming over the sitting princess. “Grant me instant death, rather than leaving me to die a little each day. You don’t know what I’ve done. I can’t stop dreaming of you. I’ve followed you from shop to shop when you went out. I am already dying now as you ravish me with your nobility and radiance, knowing that I am no more than the paving stones you walk on. No doctor can change that.”
Jessalyn was clearly considering. Obviously, no one had ever talked to her like this.
Her green eyes fixed on his lips, the lower of which was still bleeding. Damon gave an indifferent little laugh and said, “One of your guards caught me and very properly tried to kill me before I could reach you and disturb your sleep. I’m afraid I had to kill him to get here,” he said, standing between one pillar candle and the girl on the bed so that his shadow was thrown over her.
Jessalyn’s eyes widened in approval even as the rest of her seemed more fragile than ever. “It’s still bleeding,” she whispered. “I could—”
“You can do anything you want,” Damon encouraged her with a wry quirk of a smile on his lips. It was true. She could.
“Then come here.” She thumped a place by the nearest pillow on the bed. “What are you called?”
“Damon,” he said as he stripped off his jacket and lay down, chin propped on one elbow, with the air of one not unused to such things.
“Just that? Damon?”
“You can cut it still shorter. I am nothing but Shame now,” he replied, taking another minute to think of Elena and to hold Jessalyn’s eyes hypnotically. “I was a vampire — a powerful and proud one — on Earth — but I was tricked by a kitsune…”
He told her a garbled version of Stefan’s story, omitting Elena or any nonsense about wanting to be human. He said that when he managed to escape the prison that had taken his vampire self, he decided to end his own human life.
But at that moment, he had seen Princess Jessalyn and thought that, serving her, he would be happy with his sorry lot. Alas, he said, it only fed his disgraceful feelings for her highness.
“Now my madness has driven me to actually accost you in your own chambers.
Make an example of me, your highness, that will cause other evildoers to tremble.
Burn me, have me flogged and quartered, put my head on a pike to cause those who might do you ill to cast themselves into a fire first.” He was now in bed with her, leaning back a little to expose his bare throat.
“Don’t be silly,” Jessalyn said, with a little catch in her voice. “Even the meanest of my servants wants to live.”
“Perhaps the ones that never see you do. Scullions, stable boys — but I cannot live, knowing that I can never have you.”
The princess looked Damon over, blushed, gazed for a moment into his eyes… and then she bit him.
“I’ll get Stefan to go down to the root cellar,” Elena said to Meredith, who was angrily thumbing tears out of her eyes.
“You know we can’t do that. With the police right here in the house—”
“Then I’ll do it—”
“You can’t! You know you can’t, Elena, or you wouldn’t have come to me!”
Elena looked at her friend closely. “Meredith, you’ve been donating blood all along,” she whispered. “You never seemed even slightly bothered…”
“He only took a tiny bit — always less from me than anyone. And always from my arm. I just pretended I was having blood drawn at the doctor’s. No problem. It wasn’t even bad with Damon back in the Dark Dimension.”
“But now…” Elena blinked. “Now — what?”
“Now,” Meredith said with a faraway expression, “Stefan knows that I’m a hunter-slayer. That I even have a fighting stave. And now I have to…to submit to…”
Elena had gooseflesh. She felt as if the distance from her to Meredith in the room was getting larger. “A hunter-slayer?” she said, bewildered. “And what’s a fighting stave?”
“There’s no time to explain now! Oh, Elena…”
If Plan A was Meredith and Plan B was Matt, there was really no choice. Plan C had to be Elena herself. Her blood was much stronger than anyone else’s anyway, so full of Power that Stefan would only need a“ No!” Meredith whispered right in Elena’s ear, somehow managing to hiss a word without a single sibilant. “They’re coming down the stairs. We have to find Stefan now! Can you tell him to meet me in the little bedroom behind the parlor?”
“Yes, but—”
“Do it!”
And I still don’t know what a fighting stave is, Elena thought, allowing Meredith to take her arms and propel her toward the bedroom. But I know what a “hunterslayer” sounds like, and I definitely don’t like it. And that weapon — it makes a stake look like a plastic picnic knife. Still, she sent to Stefan, who was following the sheriffs downstairs: Meredith is going to donate as much blood as you need to Influence them. There’s no time to argue. Come here fast and for God’s sake look cheerful and reassuring.
Stefan didn’t sound cooperative. I can’t take enough from her for our minds to touch. It mightElena lost her temper. She was frightened; she was suspicious of one of her two best friends — a horrible feeling — and she was desperate. She needed Stefan to do just as she said. Get here fast! was all she projected, but she had the feeling
