Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

“All right,” she said in a small voice. She was afraid to look at Damon. “Now — what do you want?”

Damon inclined from the waist in a very graceful bow, indicating the Ferrari. She wondered what would happen once she got in. If he were any normal attacker — if there wasn’t Matt to think about — if she didn’t fear the forest even more than she feared him…

She hesitated and then got into Damon’s car.

Inside, she pulled her camisole out of her jeans to conceal the fact that she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. She doubted Damon ever wore a seat belt or locked his doors or anything like that. Precautions weren’t his thing. And now she prayed that he had other matters on his mind.

“Seriously, Damon, where are we going?” she said as he got into the Ferrari.

“First, how about one for the road?” Damon suggested, his voice fake-jocular.

Elena had expected something like this. She sat passively as Damon took her chin in fingers that trembled slightly, and tilted it up. She shut her eyes as she felt the double-snakebite pinch of razor-sharp fangs piercing her skin. She kept her eyes shut as her attacker fastened his mouth on the bleeding flesh and began to drink deeply. Damon’s idea of “one for the road” was just what she would have expected: enough to put both of them in danger. But it wasn’t until she actually began to feel as if she would pass out any minute that she shoved at his shoulder.

He held on for a few more very painful seconds just to show who was Boss here. Then he let go of her, licking his lips avidly, his eyes actually gleaming at her through the Ray-Bans.

“Exquisite,” he said. “Unbelievable. Why you’re—” Yeah, tell me I’m a bottle of single malt scotch, she thought. That’s the way to my heart.

“Can we go now?” she asked pointedly. And then, as she suddenly remembered Damon’s driving habits, she added deliberately, “Be careful; this road twists and turns a lot.”

It had the effect she had hoped for. Damon hit the accelerator and they shot out of the clearing at high speed. Then they were taking the sharp turns of the Old Wood faster than Elena had ever driven through here; faster than anyone had dared go with her as a passenger before.

But still, they were her roads. From childhood on she had played here. There was only one family who lived right on the perimeter of the Old Wood, but their driveway was on the right side of the road — her side — and she got herself ready for it. He would take the sudden curve to the left just before the second curve that was the Dunstans’ driveway — and on the second curve she would jump.

There was no sidewalk edging Old Wood Road, of course, but at that point there was a heavy growth of rhododendron and other bushes. All she could do was pray. Pray that she didn’t snap her neck on impact. Pray that she didn’t break an arm or leg before she limped through the few yards of woods to the driveway. Pray that the Dunstans were home when she pounded on their door and pray that they listened when she told them not to let the vampire in behind her.

She saw the curve. She didn’t know why the Damon-thing couldn’t read her mind, but apparently he couldn’t. He wasn’t speaking and his only precaution against her trying to get out seemed to be speed.

She was going to get hurt, she knew that. But the worst part of any hurt was fear, and she wasn’t afraid.

As he rounded the curve, she pulled the handle and pushed open the door as hard as she could with her hands while she kicked it as hard as she could with her feet. The door swung open, quickly being caught by centrifugal force, as were Elena’s legs. As was Elena.

Her kick alone took her halfway out of the car. Damon grabbed for her and got only a handful of hair. For a moment she thought he would keep her in, even without keeping hold of her. She tumbled over and over in the air, floating, remaining about two feet off the ground, reaching out to grab fronds, branches of bushes, anything she could use to slow her velocity. And in this place where magic and physics met; she was able to do it, to slow while still floating on Damon’s power, although it took her much farther from the Dunstans’ house than she wanted.

Then she did hit the ground, bounced, and did her best to twist in the air, to take the impact on her buttock or the back of a shoulder, but something went wrong and her left heel hit first — God! — and tangled, swinging her around completely, slamming her knee into concrete — God, God! — flipping her in the air and bringing her down on her right arm so hard it seemed to be trying to drive it into her shoulder.

She had the wind knocked out of her by the first blow and was forced to hiss air in by the second and third.

Despite the flipping, flying universe, there was one sign she couldn’t miss — an unusual spruce growing into the road that she had noticed ten feet behind her when she’d exploded out of the car. Tears were pouring uncontrollably down her cheeks as she pulled at tendrils of bush that had entangled her ankle — and a good thing, too. A few tears might have blurred her vision, made her afraid — as she had been with the last two explosions of pain — that she might pass out. But she was out on the road, her eyes were washed clear, she could see the spruce and the sunset both directly ahead, and she was thoroughly conscious. And that meant that if she headed for the sunset but at a forty-five-degree angle to her right, she couldn’t miss the Dunstans’; driveway, house, barn, cornfield were all there to guide her after perhaps twenty-five steps in the woods.

She had barely stopped rolling when she was pulling at the bush that had thwarted her and getting to her feet just as she pulled the last entangling stems from her hair. The calculation about the Dunstans’ house happened instantaneously in her head, even as she turned and saw the crushed swath she’d cut through the greenery and the blood on the road.

At first she looked at her skinned hands in bewilderment; they couldn’t have left such a gory trail. And they hadn’t. One knee had been skinned — flayed, really — right through her jeans — and one seriously messed up leg, less bloody but causing her sheets of pain like white lighting even while she was not trying to move it. Two arms with quite a lot of skin removed.

No time to find out how much or to figure out what she’d done to her shoulder. Ascreeeeeeech of brakes ahead. Lord, he’s slow. No, I’m fast, hyped up by pain and terror. Use it!

She ordered her legs to sprint into the forest. Her right leg obeyed, but when she swiveled her left and it hit the ground fireworks went off behind her eyes. She was in a state of hyper-alertness; she saw the stick even as she was falling. She rolled over once or twice, which caused dull red flares of pain to go off in her head, and then she was able to grab it. It might have been specially designed for a crutch, around underarm height and blunt on one end but sharp on the other. She tucked it under her left arm and somehow willed herself up from her place in the mud: boosting off with her right leg and catching herself on the crutch so that she scarcely had to touch her left foot to the ground.

She’d got turned around in the fall and had to twist to right herself again — but there she saw it, the last remains of sunset and the road behind her. Head forty-five-degrees right from that glow, she thought. Thank God, it was her right arm that was messed up; this way she could support herself with her left shoulder on the crutch. Still without a moment’s hesitation, without giving Damon an extra millisecond to follow her, she plunged in her chosen direction into the forest.

Into the Old Wood.

When Damon woke up, he was wrestling with the wheel of the Ferrari. He was on a narrow road, heading almost straight into a glorious sunset — and the passenger door was waving open.