“Or else,” Damon said lightly, “the entire story of the drawing of the lots was a lie.”
“Think what you like,” Elena said, with at least some of her usual fire. “And you can clean up this mess, too.”
Just as she turned to leave, Damon had a revelation. “Mrs. Flowers!” he exclaimed.
“Wrong,” Elena snapped.
Elena, I wasn’t talking about the star ball. I give you my word on this. You know how hard it is to lie telepathicallyYes, and I know that therefore, if there’s one thing in the world you’d… practice…at…
She couldn’t finish. She couldn’t make the speech. Elena knew how much Damon’s word meant to him.
I’ll never tell you where it is, she sent telepathically to Damon. And I swear to you that Mrs. Flowers won’t either.
“I believe you, but we’re still going to see her.”
He picked Elena up easily and stepped over the smashed cup and saucer. Elena automatically grabbed his neck with both hands to balance herself.
“Darling, what are you doing—?” Elena cried, then stopped, wide-eyed, two scalded fingers flying to her lips.
Standing in the doorway, not two yards away from them, was petite Bonnie McCullough, a bottle of Black Magic wine, nonalcoholic but mystically exhilarating, held high in her hand. But as Elena watched, Bonnie’s expression changed all in an instant. It had been triumphant joy. But now it was shock. It was disbelief that couldn’t hold. Elena knew exactly what she was thinking. The whole house had devoted itself to making Damon comfortable — while Damon stole what rightfully belonged to Stefan: Elena. Plus he’d lied about not being a vampire anymore. And Elena wasn’t even fighting him off. She was calling him “darling”!
Bonnie dropped the bottle and turned, running.
Damon leaped. Somewhere in the middle of the leap Elena felt herself left to the whims of gravity. She tried to curl into a ball to take the impact on one buttock.
What happened was strange — almost miraculous. She came down, right side up, on the opposite side of the couch from the plate of steak tartar. The plate did a little leap of its own, three or four inches, perhaps, and then settled back where it had been.
Elena was also lucky enough to get a perfect view of the end of the heroic rescue — which involved Damon diving for the floor and grabbing the bottle of precious Black Magic wine just before it hit the ground and smashed. He might not have the kind of lightning-fast reflexes he had when he was a vampire, but he was still far, far faster than an ordinary human. Leap holding girl, drop girl onto something soft, turn leap into dive, and at last instant grab bottle, just before it would hit. Amazing.
But there was another way that Damon wasn’t like a vampire anymore — he wasn’t invincible to falling onto hard surfaces. Elena only realized this when she heard him gasp, trying to breathe and not being able to.
She scrambled wildly in her mind for all the accidents she could remember with jocks, and — yes, recalled one when Matt had had the wind completely knocked out of him. The coach had seized him by the collar and thumped him on the back.
Elena ran to Damon and grabbed him under the arms, rolling him onto his back.
She put all her strength into hauling him into a sitting position. Then she made a club of her hands. Pretending she was Meredith, who had been on the baseball team at Robert E. Lee High and had a.225 ERA, she swung as hard as she could at Damon, slamming her fists into his back.
And it worked!
Suddenly Damon was wheezing, and then breathing again. A born straightener of ties, Elena knelt and tried to rearrange his clothes. As soon as he could breathe properly, his limbs stopped being pliant under her fingers. He gently curled her hands into each other. Elena wondered if possibly they’d gone so far beyond words that they would never find them again.
How had it all happened? Damon had picked her up — perhaps because her leg was burned, or perhaps because he had decided Mrs. Flowers was the one with the star ball. She herself had said, “Damon, what are you doing?” Perfectly straightforward. And then halfway through the sentence she had heard for herself the “darling” and — but who would ever believe her? — it hadn’t been connected with anything they had been doing earlier at all. It had been an accident, a slip of the tongue.
But she’d said it in front of Bonnie, the one person most likely to take it seriously and personally. And then Bonnie had been gone before she could even explain.
Darling! When they had just started fighting again.
It really was a joke. Because he had been serious about just taking the star ball.
She had seen it in his eyes.
To call Damon “darling” seriously, you would have to be — have to be… hopelessly…helplessly…desperately in…
Oh, God…
Tears began to run down Elena’s cheeks. But these were tears of revelation.
Elena knew she wasn’t in her best form today. No real sleep for going on three days — too many conflicting emotions — too much genuine terror right now.
Still, she was terrified to find that something fundamental had changed inside her.
It wasn’t anything she had asked for. All she had asked was that the two brothers stop feuding. And she had been born to love Stefan; she knew that! Once, he’d been willing to marry her. Well, since then she’d been a vampire, a spirit, and a new incarnation dropped from the sky, and she could hope that one day he would be willing to marry the new Elena, too.
But the new Elena was bewildered, what with her strange new blood that to vampires was like rocket fuel compared to the gasoline most girls carried about in their veins. With her Wings Powers, such as Wings of Redemption, most of which she didn’t understand and none of which she could control. Although lately she had seen the beginning of a stance, and she knew it was for Wings of Destruction.
That, she thought grimly, might be quite useful someday.
Of course a number of them had already been helpful to Damon, who was no longer simply an ally, but an enemy-ally again. Who wanted to steal something that her whole town needed.
Elena hadn’t asked to fall in love with Damon — but, oh God, what if she already had? What if she couldn’t make the feelings stop? What could she do?
Silently, she sat crying, knowing that she could never say any of these things to Damon. He had a gift of farseeing and a level head in times of emotion, but not, as she knew all too well, about this particular issue. If she told him what was in her heart, before she knew it, he would kidnap her. He would believe she had forgotten Stefan for good, as she had forgotten him briefly tonight.
“Stefan,” she whispered. “I’m sorry…”
She could never let Stefan know about it either — and Stefan was her heart.
“We’ve got to get rid of Shinichi and Misao fast,” Matt was saying moodily. “I mean, I really need to get into condition soon or Kent State’s gonna send me back stamped ‘Reject.’” He and Meredith were sitting in Mrs. Flowers’s warm kitchen nibbling on gingersnap cookies and watching her as she diligently worked at making beef carpaccio — the second of the two raw beef recipes in the antique cookbook she owned. “Stefan’s doing so well that in a couple of days we could even be tossing around the old pigskin,” he added, sarcasm edging his voice, “if everybody in town would just stop being crazy possessed. Oh, yeah, and if the cops would stop coming after me for assaulting Caroline.”
At the mention of Stefan’s name, Mrs. Flowers peeked into a cauldron that had been bubbling away on the stove for so long, and was now emitting such a fearsome odor that Matt didn’t know who to pity more: the guy getting the huge pile of raw meat or the one who’d soon be trying to choke down whatever was in that cooking pot.
“So — assuming you’re alive — you’re going to be glad to leave Fell’s Church when the time comes?” Meredith asked him quietly.
Matt felt as if she had just slapped him. “You’re joking, right?” he said, petting Saber with one tanned, bare
