Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

“From eleven to around eleven thirty,” Stefan recited. “While I tried to go into hibernation to have a prophetic dream….”

“We really tried hard,” Elena said grimly.

“And then we nailed the last few boards up,” Stefan added. “Bringing us to a little after twelve thirty P.M.”

“Can you think of a single Plan — we’re down to G or H now — that might allow us to help them any more?”

“I can’t. I just honestly can’t,” Stefan said. Then he added, hesitantly, “Maybe Mrs. Flowers has some housework for us. Or”—even more hesitantly, testing the waters—“we could go into town.”

“No! You’re definitely not strong enough for that!” Elena said sharply. “And there’s no more housework,” she added. Then she threw everything to the wind.

Every responsibility. Every rationality. Just like that. She began to tow Stefan to the house so they could get there quicker.

“Elena—” I’m burning my bridges! Elena thought stubbornly, and suddenly she didn’t care.

And if Stefan cared she would bite him. But it was as if some spell had suddenly come over her so that she felt she would die without his touch. She wanted to touch him. She wanted him to touch her. She wanted him to be her mate.

“Elena!” Stefan could hear what she was thinking. He was torn, of course, Elena thought. Stefan was always torn. But how dare he be torn about this?

She turned around to face him, blazing. “You don’t want to!”

“I don’t want to do it and then find out I’ve Influenced you into it!”

“You were Influencing me?” shouted Elena.

Stefan threw out his hands and yelled, “How can I know when I want you so much?”

Oh. Well, that was better. There was a little glitter in Elena’s side-eye and she looked at it and realized that Mrs. Flowers had quietly shut a window.

Elena darted a glance at Stefan. He was trying not to blush. She doubled over, trying not to laugh. Then she stood on his shoes again.

“Maybe we deserve an hour alone”—dangerously.

“A whole hour?” Stefan’s conspiratorial whisper made an hour sound like eternity.

“We do deserve it,” Elena said, enthralled. She began to tow him again.

“No.” Stefan pulled her back, lifted her — bridal-style — and suddenly they were going straight up, fast. They shot up three stories and a little more and landed on the platform of the widow’s walk above his room.

“But it’s locked from inside—” Stefan stomped on the trapdoor — hard. The door disappeared.

Elena was impressed.

They floated down into Stefan’s room amid a shaft of light and motes of dust that looked like fireflies or stars.

“I’m a little nervous,” Elena said.

She heeled her sandals off and slid out of her jeans and top and into bed…only to find Stefan already there.

They’re faster, she thought. As fast as you think you are, they’re always faster.

She turned toward Stefan in the bed. She was wearing a camisole and underwear. She was scared.

“Don’t,” he said. “I don’t even have to bite you.”

“You do so. It’s all that weird stuff about my blood.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, as if he’d forgotten. Elena would bet that he hadn’t forgotten a word about her blood…allowing vampires to do things they couldn’t otherwise.

Her life energy gave them back all their human abilities, and he wouldn’t forget that.

They’re smarter, she thought.

“Stefan, it’s not supposed to be like this! I’m supposed to parade in front of you in a golden negligee designed by Lady Ulma, with jewels by Lucen and golden stiltswhich I don’t own. And there are supposed to be scattered flower petals on the bed and roses in little round bubble bowls and white vanilla candles.”

“Elena,” Stefan said, “come here.”

She went into his arms, and let herself breathe in the fresh smell of him, warm and spicy, with a trace of rusty nails.

You’re my life, Stefan told her silently. We’re not going to do anything today.

There’s not much time, and you deserve your golden negligee and your roses and candles. If not from Lady Ulma, from the finest Earth designers that money can provide. But…kiss me?

Elena kissed him willingly, so glad that he was willing to wait. The kiss was warm and comforting and she didn’t mind the slight taste of rust. And it was wonderful to be with someone who would provide exactly what she needed, whether that was a slight mind probe, just to make her feel safer, or…

And then sheet lightning hit them. It seemed to come from both of them at once, and then Elena involuntarily clamped her teeth on Stefan’s lip, drawing blood.

Stefan locked his arms around her, and barely waited for her to back off a little, before deliberately taking her lower lip in his own teeth and…after a moment of tension that seemed to last forever…biting down hard.

Elena almost cried out. She almost then and there unleashed the still-undefined Wings of Destruction on him. But two things stopped her. One, Stefan had never, ever hurt her before. And, two, she was being drawn into something so ancient and mystical that she couldn’t stop now.

A minute of finessing and Stefan had the two little wounds aligned. Blood surged from Elena’s bleeding lip and, in direct connection with Stefan’s less serious wound, caused a backflow. Her blood into his lip.

And the same thing happened with Stefan’s blood; some of it, rich with Power, rushed into Elena.

It wasn’t perfect. A bead of blood swelled and stood gleaming on Elena’s lip. But Elena couldn’t have cared less. A moment later the bead dropped down into Stefan’s mouth and she felt the sheer staggering power of how much he loved her.

She herself was concentrating on one single tiny feeling, somewhere in the center of this storm they’d called up. This kind of exchange of blood — she was sure as she could be — this was the old way, the way that two vampires could share blood and love and their souls. She was being drawn into Stefan’s mind. She felt his soul, pure and unconstrained, swirling around her with a thousand different emotions, tears from his past, joy from the present, all open without a trace of a shield from her.

She felt her own soul lift to meet his, herself unshielded and unafraid. Stefan had long ago seen any selfishness, vanity, over-ambition in her — and forgiven it. He’d seen all of her and loved all of her, even the bad parts.

And so she saw him, as darkness as tender as rest, as gentle as evensong, wrapping black protective wings around her…

Stefan, I…

Love…I know…

That was when someone knocked on the door.

After breakfast Matt went online to find two stores, neither in Fell’s Church, that had the amount of clay Mrs. Flowers said she’d need and that said they’d deliver.

But after that there was the matter of driving away from the boardinghouse and by the last lonely remains of where the Old Wood had been. He drove by the little thicket where Shinichi often came like a demonic Pied Piper with the possessed children shuffling behind him — the place where Sheriff Mossberg had gone after them and hadn’t come out. Where, later, protected by magical wards on Post-it Notes, he and Tyrone Alpert had pulled out a bare, chewed femur.

Today, he figured the only way to get past the thicket was to work his wheezing junk car up by stages, and it was actually going over sixty when he flew by the thicket, even managing to hit the turn perfectly. No trees fell on him, no swarms of foot-long bugs.

He whispered “Whoa,” in relief and headed for home. He dreaded that — but simply driving through Fell’s Church was so horrible it glued his tongue to the top of his mouth. It looked — this pretty, innocent little town where he had grown up — as if it were one of those neighborhoods you saw on TV or on the Internet that had been bombed, or something. And whether it was bombs or disasterous fires, one house in four was simply rubble. A few were half-rubble, with police tape enclosing them, which meant that whatever had happened had happened early enough for the police to care — or dare. Around the burned-out bits the vegetation flourished strangely: a decorative bush from one house grown so as to be halfway across a neighbor’s grass. Vines dipping from one tree to another, to another, as if this were some ancient jungle.