Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

She couldn’t protect Matt.

Stefan told me to trust Damon in his note in my diary. Stefan knows more about him than I do, she thought desperately. But we both know what Damon wants, ultimately. What he’s always wanted. Me. My blood…

“Damon,” she began softly — and broke off. Without looking at her, he held out a hand with the palm toward her.

Wait.

“There’s something I have to do,” he murmured. He bent down, every movement as unconsciously and economically graceful as a panther’s, and picked up a small broken branch of what looked like ordinary Virginia pine. He waved it slightly, appraisingly, hefting it in his hand as if to feel weight and balance. It looked more like a fan than a branch.

Elena was now looking at Matt, trying with her eyes to tell him all the things she was feeling, foremost of which was that she was sorry: sorry that she had gotten him into this; sorry that she’d ever cared for him; sorry that she’d kept him bound into a group of friends who were so intimately intertwined with the supernatural.

Now I know a little bit of what Bonnie must have felt this last year, she thought, being able to see and predict things without having the slightest power to stop them.

Matt, jerking his head, was already moving stealthily toward the trees.

No, Matt. No. No!

He didn’t understand. Neither did she, except to feel that the trees were only keeping their distance because of Damon’s presence here. If she and Matt were to venture into the forest; if they left the clearing or even stayed in it too long…Matt could see the fear on her face, and his own face reflected grim understanding. They were trapped.

Unless“Too late,” Damon said sharply. “I told you, there’s something I have to do.”

He had apparently found the stick he was looking for. Now he raised it, shook it slightly, and brought it down in a single motion; slashing sideways as he did.

And Matt convulsed in agony.

It was a kind of pain he had never dreamed of before: pain that seemed to come from inside himself, but from everywhere, every organ in his body, every muscle, every nerve, every bone, releasing a different type of pain. His muscles ached and cramped as if they were strained to their ultimate flexion, but were being forced to flex farther still. Inside, his organs were on fire. Knives were at work in his belly. His bones felt the way his arm had when he had shattered it once, when he was nine years old and a car had broadsided his dad’s. And his nerves — if there was a switch on nerves that could be set from “pleasure” to “pain”—his had been set to “anguish.” The touch of clothes on his skin was unbearable. The currents of air passing were agony. He endured fifteen seconds of it and passed out.

“Matt!” For her part, Elena had been frozen, her muscles locked, unable to move for what seemed like forever. Suddenly released, she ran to Matt, pulled him up into her lap, stared into his face.

Then she looked up.

“Damon,why? Why?” Suddenly she realized that although Matt wasn’t conscious, he was still writhing in pain. She had to keep herself from screaming the words, to only speak forcefully. “Why are you doing this? Damon! Stop it.”

She stared up at the young man dressed all in black: black jeans with a black belt, black boots, black leather jacket, black hair, and those damned Ray-Bans.

“I told you,” Damon said casually. “It’s something I need to do. To watch. Painful death.”

“Death!”Elena stared at Damon in disbelief. And then she began gathering all her Power, in a way that had been so easy and instinctual just days ago while she had been mute and not subject to gravity, and that was so difficult and so foreign right now. With determination, she said, “If you don’t let him go — now — I’ll hit you with everything I’ve got.”

He laughed. She’d never seen Damon really laugh before, not like this. “And you expect that I’ll even notice your tiny Power?”

“Not that tiny.” Elena weighed it grimly. It was no more than the intrinsic Power of any human being — the Power that vampires took from humans along with the blood they drank — but since becoming a spirit, she knew how to use it. How to attack with it. “I think you’ll feel it, Damon. Let him go — NOW!”

“Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won’t?” Damon murmured.

Elena let him have it.

Or at least she prepared to. She took the deep breath necessary, held her inner self still, and imagined herself holding a ball of white fire, and then Matt was on his feet. He looked as if he’d been dragged to his feet and was being held there like a puppet, and his eyes were involuntarily watering, but it was better than Matt writhing on the ground.

“You owe me,” Damon said to Elena casually. “I’ll collect later.”

To Matt he said, in the tones of a fond uncle, with one of those instantaneous smiles that you could never be quite sure you saw, “Lucky for me that you’re a hardy specimen, isn’t it?”

“Damon.” Elena had seen Damon in his let’s-play-with-weaker-creatures mood, and it was the one she liked least. But there was something off today; something she couldn’t understand. “Let’s get down to it,” she said, while the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck rose again. “What do you really want?”

But he didn’t give the answer she expected.

“I was officially appointed as your caretaker. I’m officially taking care of you. And for one thing, I don’t think you should be without my protection and companionship while my little brother is gone.”

“I can handle myself,” Elena said flatly, waving a hand so they could get down to the real issue.

“You’re a very pretty girl. Dangerous and”—flash smile—“unsavory elements could be after you. I insist you have a bodyguard.”

“Damon, right now the thing I need most is to be protected from you. You know that. What is this really about?”

The clearing was…pulsing. Almost as if it were something organic, breathing. Elena had the feeling that beneath her feet — beneath Meredith’s old, rugged hiking boots — the ground was moving slightly, like a great sleeping animal, and the trees were like a beating heart.

For what? The forest? There was more dead wood than live here. And she could swear that she knew Damon well enough to know that he didn’t like trees or woods.

It was at times like this that Elena wished she still had wings. Wings and the knowledge — the hand motions, the Words of White Power, the white fire inside her that would allow her to know the truth without trying to figure it out, or to simply blast annoyances back to Stonehenge.

It seemed that all she’d been left with was being a greater temptation to vampires than ever, and her wits.

Wits had worked up until now. Maybe if she didn’t let Damon know how afraid she was, she could win a stay of execution for them.

“Damon, I thank you for being concerned about me. Now would you mind leaving Matt and me for a moment so that I can tell if he’s still breathing?”

From inside the Ray-Bans, she thought she could discern a single flash of red.

“Somehow I thought you might say that,” Damon said. “And, of course, it’s your right to have consolation after being so treacherously abandoned. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, for example.”

Elena wanted to swear. Carefully, she answered, “Damon, if Stefan appointed you as my bodyguard, then he hardly ‘treacherously abandoned’ me, did he? You can’t have it both—”

“Just indulge me in one thing, all right?” Damon said in the voice of one whose next words are going to be. Be careful or Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.