Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

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 would be the only remnant of the Tree on this world. She could hardly dare hope that there was a spark of life left in him now, but the child had wanted to speak with her and she would make that possible or die trying. She scarcely felt Stefan’s arms around her.

Once again, she plunged into the very depths of Damon’s mind. This time she knew exactly where to go.

And there, by a miracle, he was, although obviously in hideous pain. Tears were rolling down his cheeks and he was trying not to sob. His lips were bitten raw. Her Wings had not been able to destroy the wood inside him — it had already done its poisonous damage — and there was no way to reverse that.

“Oh, no, oh God!” Elena caught the child in her arms. A teardrop fell on her hand.

She rocked him, scarcely knowing what she was saying. “What can I do to help?”

“You’re here again,” he said, and in his voice, she heard the answer. This was all that he wanted. He was a very simple child.

“I’ll be here — always. Always. I’m never letting go.”

This didn’t have the effect that she wanted. The boy gasped, trying to smile, but was torn with a horrible spasm that almost arched his body out of her arms.

And Elena realized that she was turning the inevitable into slow, excruciating torture.

“I’ll hold you,” she modified her words for him, “until you want me to let go. All right?”

He nodded. His very voice was breathless with pain. “Could you — could you let me shut my eyes? Just…just for a moment?”

Elena knew, as perhaps this child did not, what would happen if she stopped badgering him and let him sleep. But she couldn’t stand to see him suffering any longer, and nothing was real again, and there was no one else in the world for her, and she didn’t even care if doing it this way meant she would follow him into death.

Carefully steadying her voice, she said, “Maybe…we can both shut our eyes.

Not for a long time — no! But…just for a moment.”

She kept rocking the small body in her arms. She could still feel a faint pulse of life…not a heartbeat, but still, a pulsing. She knew that he hadn’t shut his eyes yet; that he was still fighting the torture.

For her. Not for anything else. For her sake only.

Putting her lips close to his ear, she whispered, “Let’s close our eyes together, all right? Let’s close them…at the count of three. Is that all right?”

There was such relief in his voice and such love. “Yes. Together. I’m ready. You can count now.”

“One.” Nothing mattered except holding him and keeping herself steady. “Two.

And…”

“Elena?”

She was startled. Had the child ever said her name before?

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Elena…I…love you. Not just because of him. I love you too.”

Elena had to hide her face in his hair. “I love you, too, little one. You’ve always known that, haven’t you?”

“Yes — always.”

“Yes. You’ve always known that. And now…we’ll close our eyes — for a moment.

Three.”

She waited until the last faint movement stopped, and his head fell back, and his eyes were shut and the shadow of suffering was gone. He looked, not peaceful, but simply gentle — and kind, and Elena could see in his face what an adult with Damon’s features and that expression would look like.