She was afraid that Sage would attack Stefan, and that she couldn’t even fight for him.
But instead, suddenly, Sage threw back his head and laughed wildly. Or perhaps it was something between thunderous laughing and crying. It was as eerie as the sound of a wolf baying, and Elena felt Bonnie’s small, trembling body hug her — to comfort both of them.
“What the hell!” Sage bellowed, and now there was a wild look in his eyes, too.
“Mais oui, what the Hell?” He laughed again. “After all, I am the Gatekeeper, and I have already broken the rules by allowing you through two different doors.”
Stefan was still breathing hard. Now he reached out and grabbed Sage by his broad shoulders and shook him with the strength of a vampire gone mad. “What are you talking about? There’s no time for talk!”
“Ah, but there is, mon ami. My friend, there is. What you need is the firepower of the heavens to save Fell’s Church — and to undo the damage that has already been done. To wipe it out, to make it as if it had never happened. And,” Sage added deliberately, looking directly at Elena, “perhaps — just perhaps — to undo this day’s events, also.”
Suddenly every inch of Elena’s skin was tingling. Her whole body was listening to Sage, leaning toward him, yearning, while her eyes widened with the only other question that mattered.
Sage said, very softly, very triumphantly, “Yes. They can bestow life upon the dead. They have that Power. They can bring back mon petit tyran Damon — as they brought you back.”
Stefan and Bonnie were holding Elena up. She couldn’t stand on her own.
“But why would they help?” she whispered painfully. She wouldn’t allow herself even a breath of hope, not until she understood everything.
“In exchange for what was stolen from them millennia ago,” Sage replied. “You are in a fortress of Hell, you know. That is what the Gatehouse is. The Guardians cannot enter here. They cannot storm the gate and demand back what is inside… the seven — pardon, now six — kitsune treasures.”
Not a breath of hope. Not a breath. But Elena heard herself give a wild laugh.
“How do we give them a park? Or a field of black roses?”
“We give them the rights to the land that the park and the field of roses lie upon.”
Not a breath, even though the bodies on either side of Elena were shaking now.
“And how do we offer them the Fountain of Eternal Youth and Life?”
“We do not. However, I have here various containers, waiting to be collected as garbage. The threat of a gallon bottle of La Fontaine randomly spread all over your Earth…that would devastate them. And, of course,” Sage added, “I know the kinds of gems with enchantments already upon them that they would most desire. Here, let me open the doors all at once! We take all we can — the rooms, strip them bare!”
His enthusiasm was contagious. Elena half-turned, breath held, eyes widened to catch the first glowing of a door’s light.
“Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your — your father — going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed this?”
“He will not kill me,” Sage said brusquely, the wild tone back in his voice. “He may even find it as amusant as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.”
“And if he doesn’t find it amusing? Sage, I don’t think…Damon wouldn’t have wanted—” Sage whirled around and for the first time since she had met him, Elena could believe with her whole soul that he was the son of his father. His eyes had even seemed to change color, to the yellow of a flame, with diamond pupils like a cat’s.
His voice was like steel splintering, harder even than Stefan’s. “What is between my father and me is my own business — mine! Stay here if you want. He never bothers himself about vampires, anyway — he says they’re cursed already. But I am going to do everything I can to bring mon cheri Damon back.”
“Whatever the cost to you?”
“The hell with the cost!”
To Elena’s surprise, Stefan gripped Sage’s shoulders for a moment and then simply hugged as much of him as he could hold.
“I just wanted to make sure,” he said quietly. “Thank you, Sage. Thank you.” Then he turned and strode over to the Royal Radhika plant, and with one yank, pulled it out of its bower.
Elena, heart beating in her lips and throat and fingertips, ran to gather the empty containers and bottles Sage was tossing out of a ninth doorway that had appeared in between the mine shaft and the field of black roses. She snatched up a gallon container and an Evian water bottle, both with secure caps intact. They were made of plastic, which was good, because she dropped them both just going across the room to the bubbling fountain. Her hands were shaking that badly; and all the time she was sending up a monotonous prayer, Oh, please. Oh, please. Oh, please!
She got water into both containers at the Fountain and capped them. And then she realized that Bonnie was still standing in the middle of the Gatehouse. She looked bewildered, frightened.
“Bonnie?”
“Sage?” Bonnie said. “How do we get these things to the Celestial Court to bargain with them?”
“Have no worries,” Sage said kindly. “I am certain that Guardians will be waiting just outside to arrest us. They will take us to the Court.”
Bonnie didn’t stop trembling, but she nodded and hurried to help Sage get bottles of Black Magic — and break them. “A symbol,” he said. “Un signe of what we will do to this area if the Celestials don’t agree. Be careful not to cut your pretty hands.”
Elena thought she heard Bonnie’s husky voice then, and that it was not a happy tone. But Sage’s rumbling murmur was reassuring. And Elena would neither allow herself to hope nor despair. She had a task in hand, a scheme. She was making private Plans for the Celestial Court.
When she and Bonnie had all the plunder they could carry, and their backpacks were full as well, when Stefan had two narrow black boxes that held deeds, and when Sage looked like a cross between Santa Claus and a bronzed, gorgeous, long-haired Hercules, as he carried two sacks made of pillowcases, they gave one last look around at the ravaged Gatehouse.
“All right,” Sage said then. “Time to face the Guardians.” He smiled reassuringly at Bonnie.
As usual, Sage was right. The moment they came out with their booty, Guardians from two different dimensions were ready for them. The first type were the ones who looked vaguely like Elena: blond hair, dark blue eyes, slender. The Guardians of the Nether World seemed senior to these, and were lithe women with skin so dark it was almost ebony, and hair that curled tightly in a cap over their heads.
Behind them were brilliant golden air cars.
“You are under arrest,” one of the dark ones said, not looking as if she enjoyed her job, “for removing treasures that rightfully belong to the Celestial Court out of the sanctuary where it was agreed that they would be kept, under the laws of both our dimensions.”
And then it was only a matter of hanging on to the golden air cars while hanging on at the same time to their unlawful booty.
The Celestial Court was…celestial. Pearly white with a faint hint of blue. Minarets. It was a long distance from the heavily guarded gate — where Elena had seen a third type of Guardian, one with short red hair and slanted, piercing green eyes — to the actual palace, which seemed to encompass a city.
But it was when Elena’s group was guided to the throne room that the real culture shock hit. It was far larger and far more glorious than any room Elena had ever imagined. No ball or gala in the Dark Dimensions could have prepared her in the least for it. The cathedral ceiling seemed to be made entirely of gold, as were the double line of stately columns that marched vertically across the floor. The floor itself was of intricately patterned malachite and gold-threaded lapis lazuli, with gold seemingly used as grouting — and with a heavy hand at that. The three golden fountains in the middle of the room (the central one was the largest and most elaborate) threw into the air not water, but delicately perfumed flower petals that sparkled like diamonds in turning at their apex and then floated down again.
Stained-glass windows in brilliant colors that Elena couldn’t remember ever having seen before threw rainbow light like a benediction from high on every wall, giving warmth to the otherwise cool engraved gold.
Sage and Elena and Stefan and Bonnie were seated in small comfortable chairs just a few feet back from a
