“Please don’t be sad. That’s what he told me to say. That you shouldn’t be sad… or afraid. He said it’s a little bit like going to sleep, and a little bit like flying.”
“I’ll…remember that. And — thank you — big brother.”
“I think that’s all. You know to watch over our girls….” There was another of the terrible spasms that left the child breathless. Stefan spoke quickly.
“Of course. I’ll take care of everything. You fly.”
Elena could feel the grief slash at Stefan’s heart, but his voice was calm. “Fly away now, my brother. Fly away.”
Elena felt something through the link — Bonnie touching Stefan’s shoulder. He quickly got up so that she could lie down. Bonnie was almost hysterical with sobbing, but she had done a good thing, Elena saw. While Elena had been in her own little world with Damon, Bonnie had taken a dagger and cut off a long lock of Elena’s hair. Then she had cut one of her own strawberry curls, and placed the locks — one wavy and golden, one curling and red-blond — on Damon’s chest. It was all they could do on this flowerless world to honor him, to be with him forever.
Elena could hear Bonnie, too, through her link with Damon, but at first all Bonnie could do was sob, “Damon, please! Oh, please! I didn’t know — I never thoughtthat anyone would get hurt! You saved my life! And now — oh, please! I can’t say good-bye!”
She didn’t understand, Elena thought, that she was talking to a very young child.
But Damon had sent the child a message to repeat.
“I’m supposed to tell you good-bye, though.” For the first time the child looked uneasy. “And — and I’m supposed to tell you ‘I’m sorry,’ too. He thought you’d know what that meant and you’d forgive me. But…if you don’t…I don’t know what will happen — oh!”
Another of the hateful spasms went through the child. Elena held on to him hard, biting her own lip until the blood came; at the same time trying to shield the little boy completely from her own feelings. And deep in Damon’s mind, she saw Bonnie’s expression change, from tearful penance to astonished fear to careful control. As if Bonnie had grown up all in an instant.
“Of course — of course I understand! And I forgive you — but you haven’t done anything wrong. I’m such a silly girl — I…”
“We don’t think you’re a silly girl,” the child said, looking vastly relieved. “But thank you for forgiving me. There’s a special name I’m supposed to call you, too — but I…” He sank back against Elena. “I guess — I’m… getting sleepy…”
“Was it ‘redbird’?” Bonnie asked carefully, and the little boy’s pale face lit up.
“That was it. You knew already. You’re all…so nice and so smart. Thank you… for making it easy…But can I say one more thing?”
Elena was about to answer, when abruptly she was jarred completely out of Damon’s mind and back into reality. The Tree had slammed down another spider’s leg set of branches, trapping them and Damon’s body between two circles of wooden bars.
Elena had no plans. No idea how to get to the star ball that Damon had died for.
Either the Tree was intelligent, or it was wired to have such efficient defenses that it might as well have been. They were lying on the evidence that many, many people had tried for that star ball — and left behind their bones ground to sand.
Come to that, she thought, I wonder why it hasn’t gone for us, too — especially for Bonnie. She’s been in, and then out, and back in again, which I should never have let her do except that we were all thinking about Damon. Why didn’t it go for her again?
Stefan was trying to be strong, trying to organize something out of this disaster that was so stunning that Elena herself simply sat. Bonnie was sobbing again, making heart-wrenching sounds.
Between both circular sets of bars a wooden network was spreading — too closeknit for even Bonnie to squeeze through. Elena’s group was efficiently separated from anything outside the sand pit, and just as efficiently separated from the star ball.
“The axe!” Stefan called to her. “Throw me—” But there was no time. A rootlet had curled around it and was swiftly dragging it into the upper branches.
“Stefan, I’m sorry! I was too slow!”
“It was too fast!” Stefan corrected.
Elena held her breath, waiting for the last crash from above, the one that would kill them all. When it didn’t come, she realized something. The Tree was not only intelligent, but sadistic. They were to be trapped here, away from their supplies, to die slowly of thirst and starvation, or to go mad watching the others die.
The best that they could hope for was that Stefan would kill both Bonnie and her — but even he would never get out. These wooden branches would come crashing down again and again, as often as the Tree felt necessary, until Stefan’s crushed bones joined the others that had been milled to fine sand.
That was what did it, the thought of all of them, trapped with Damon, making a mockery of his death. The thing that had been swelling inside Elena for weeks now, at hearing the stories about children who ate their pets, at creatures who delighted in pain, had, with Damon’s sacrifice, finally gotten so big that she could no longer contain it.
“Stefan, Bonnie — don’t touch the branches,” she gasped. “Make sure you’re not touching any part of the branches.”
“I’m not, love, and Bonnie isn’t either. But why?”
“I can’t keep it in anymore! I have to stand like this—”
“Elena, no! That spell—” Elena could no longer think. The hateful demi-light was driving her mad, reminding her of the pinpoint of green in Damon’s pupils, the horrible green light of the Tree.
She understood exactly about the Tree’s sadism to her friends…and in the corner of her eye she could see a bit of black…like a rag doll. Except that it was no doll; it was Damon. Damon with all of his wild and witty spirit broken. Damon…who must be gone from this and all worlds by now.
His face was covered with her blood. There was nothing peaceful or dignified about him. There was nothing the Tree had not taken from him.
Elena lost her mind.
With a scream that peeled raw and bleeding from her backbone and came hoarsely out of her throat, Elena grabbed a branch of the Tree that had killed Damon, that had murdered her beloved, and that would murder her and these two others she loved as well.
She had no thoughts. She wasn’t capable of thinking. But instinctively she held a high bough of the Tree’s cage and let the fury explode out of her, the fury of murdered love.
Wings of Destruction.
She felt the Wings arch behind her, like ebony lace and black pearls, and for a moment she felt like a deadly goddess, knowing that this planet would never harbor any life ever again.
When the attack flared out, it turned the twilight all around her to matte black.
What a fitting color. Damon will like this, she thought in confusion, and then she remembered again, and it slammed blistering out of her again, the Power to destroy the Tree all over this small world. It shattered her from the inside but she let it keep coming. No physical pain could compare with what was in her heart, with the pain of losing what she had lost. No physical pain could express how she felt.
The huge roots in the ground underneath them were bucking as if there was an earthquake, and thenThere was a deafening sound as the trunk of the Great Tree exploded straight upward like a rocket, disintegrating to fine ash as it went. The spider’s-leg bars around them simply disappeared along with the canopy above. Something in Elena’s mind noted that very far away the same destruction was going on, racing to turn branches and leaves into infinitesimal bits of matter that hung in the air like haze.
“The star ball!” Bonnie cried in the eerie silence, anguished.
“Vaporized!” Stefan caught Elena as she sank to her knees, her ethereal black wings fading. “But we’d never have gotten it anyway. That Tree had been protecting it for thousands of years! All we’d have gotten would have been a slow death.”
Elena had turned back to Damon. She had not been touching the stake that ran through him — in seconds it
