heart-shaped face; the keen assessment in Stefan’s eyes; Damon’s dangerous smile.
They were viewing their hard-won reward, at last.
But she couldn’t look for too long. Things had to be done. Even as they watched, the star ball brightened, showing such brilliant, incandescent colors that Elena was half-blinded. She shielded her eyes just as she heard Bonnie inhaling sharply.
“What?” Stefan asked, a hand in front of his eyes, which, of course were much more sensitive to light than human eyes.
“Someone’s using it right now!” Bonnie replied. “When it went bright like that, it sent out Power! A long, long way out!”
“Things are heating up in what’s left of poor old Fell’s Church,” said Damon, who was staring intently upward at the branches above him.
“Don’t talk about it like that!” Bonnie exclaimed. “It’s our home. And now we can finally defend it!” Elena could practically see what Bonnie was thinking: families embracing; neighbors smiling at neighbors again; the entire town working to fix the destruction.
This is how great tragedies sometimes happen. People with a single goal, yet who are not in sync. Assumptions. Presumptions. And, maybe, most important of all, the failure to sit down and talk.
Stefan tried, even though Elena could see that he was still blind from the brilliance of the star ball. He said quietly, “Let’s talk this over for a while and brainstorm ways to get it—” But Bonnie was laughing at him, though not unkindly. She said, “I can get up there as fast as a squirrel. All I need is someone strong to catch it when I knock it down. I know I can’t climb down with it; I’m not that silly. Come on, you guys, let’s go!”
That’s how it happened. Different personalities, different modes of thinking. And one laughing, light-headed girl, who didn’t have a precognition when it was needed.
Elena, who was envying Meredith the fighting stave, didn’t even see the beginning. She was watching Stefan, who was blinking rapidly to get his eyesight back.
And Bonnie was scrambling as lightly as she had boasted, up on top of the dead tree branch that sheltered them. She even gave them a little laughing salute just before she leaped into the barren, sparkling circle around the tree.
Then microseconds stretched infinitely. Elena felt her eyes slowly getting wider, even though she knew they were flying open. She saw Stefan leisurely reach across her to try to twine his fingers around Bonnie’s leg, even though she knew that what she was seeing was a lightning-fast grab for the petite girl’s ankle. She even heard Damon’s instantaneous telepathy: No, little fool! as if he were speaking the words in his accustomed lazy tones of superiority.
Then, still in slow motion, Bonnie’s knees bent and she launched into the air above the circle.
But she never touched the ground. Somehow, a black streak, stunningly fast even in the slow-motion horror film that Elena was watching, landed where Bonnie would have landed. And then Bonnie was being thrown, being hurled too fast for Elena’s eyes to track, outside of the barren circle and then there was a dull thudtoo fast for Elena’s mind to track as being Bonnie’s landing.
Quite clearly, she heard Stefan cry “Damon!” in a terrible voice. And then Elena saw the thin dark objects — like curving lances — that were already shooting downward. Another thing her eyes couldn’t follow. When her vision adjusted, she saw that they were long, curved black branches, spaced evenly around the tree like thirty spider legs, thirty long spears that were meant to either imprison someone inside them like the bars of a cell, or to — pin them into the strange sand beneath her feet.
“Pin” was a good word. Elena liked the sound of it. Even as she was staring at the sharp recurved barbs on the branches, meant to keep anything caught by them held permanently in the ground, she was thinking of Damon’s annoyance if a shaft had pierced his leather jacket. He would curse at them, and Bonnie would try to pretend he hadn’t — and…
She was close enough by now to see that it wasn’t as simple as that. The branch, which was proper javelin size, had gone through Damon’s shoulder, which must hurt like hell, in addition to having splattered a blood drop right at the corner of his mouth. But far more annoying than that was the fact that he had closed his eyes against her. That was how Elena thought of it. He was shutting them out deliberately — maybe because he was angry; maybe because of the pain in his shoulder. But it reminded her of the steel wall feeling she’d gotten the last time she’d tried to touch his mind — and, damn, couldn’t he tell he was scaring them?
“Open your eyes, Damon,” she said, flushing, because that was what he wanted her to say. He really was the greatest manipulator of all. “Open your eyes, I said!”
Now she was really irritated. “Don’t play possum, because you’re not fooling anyone, and we’ve really had enough!” She was about to shake him hard when something lifted her into the air, into Stefan’s line of vision.
Stefan was in pain, but surely not as badly as Damon, so she was looking back to curse Damon when Stefan said harshly, “Elena, he can’t!”
For just the tiniest fleeting instant the words sounded like nonsense to her. Not only garbled, but meaningless, like saying someone couldn’t stop their appendix from doing — whatever it was an appendix did. That was all the respite that she got, and then she had to deal with what her eyes were showing her.
Damon wasn’t pinned by his shoulder. He’d been staked, just slightly to the left of center of his torso.
Exactly where his heart was.
Words drifted back to her. Words that someone had once said — although she couldn’t remember who right now. “You can’t kill a vampire so easily. We only die if you stake us through the heart….”
Die? Damon die? This was some kind of mistake…
“Open your eyes!” “Elena, he can’t!”
But she knew, without knowing how, that Damon wasn’t dead. She wasn’t surprised that Stefan didn’t know it; it was a hum on a private frequency between her and Damon.
“Come on, hurry, give me your axe,” she said, so desperately, and with such an air of knowledge that Stefan handed it over wordlessly, and obeyed when she told him to steady the curving spider-leg branch from above and below. Then with a few quick strokes of the axe she cut through the black branch that was thick enough in circumference that she couldn’t have clasped her fingers around it. It was done in a spurt of pure adrenaline, but she knew it awed Stefan and allowed him to let her continue doing it.
When she was finished, she had a loose spider-leg branch that drooped back to the tree, anchored to nothing — and something that looked more like a proper stake in Damon.
It wasn’t until she began pulling upward on the stake that a horrified Stefan made her stop.
“Elena! Elena, I wouldn’t lie to you! This is just what these branches are for. For intruders who are vampires. Look, love — see.” He was showing her another of the spider legs that was anchored in the sand, and the barbs on it. Just like the backward-facing tines of a primitive stone arrowhead.
“These branches are meant to be like this,” Stefan was saying. “And if you pulled up on it hard enough, you’d just — just end up pulling out chunks of — his heart.”
Elena froze. She wasn’t sure she really could understand the words — she couldn’t allow herself to, or she might picture it. But it didn’t matter.
“I’ll destroy it some other way,” she said shortly, looking at Stefan but not able to see the true green of his eyes because of the olive light. “You wait. Just wait and watch. I’ll find a Wings power that will dissolve this — this — damned abomination.”
She could think of many other words to call the stake, but she had to stay in some sort of control.
“Elena.” Stefan whispered her name as if he could barely get it out. Even in the twilight she could see the tears on his cheeks. He continued, nonverbally, Elena, look at his closed eyes. This Tree is a vicious killer, with wood like nothing I’ve ever seen, but I’ve heard about it. It’s…it’s spreading. Inside him.
“Inside him?” Elena repeated stupidly.
Along his arteries and veins — and his nerves — everything connected to his heart. He’s — oh, God, Elena, just look at his eyes!
Elena looked. Stefan had knelt and gently pulled up the lids of Damon’s eyes and Elena began screaming.
