Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

Once again, only the combination of almost instantaneous reflex and perfectly designed automobile allowed him to keep out of the wide, muddy ditches on either side of the one-lane road. But he managed it and ended up with the sunset at his back, gazing at the long shadows down the road and wondering what the hell had just happened to him.

Was he sleep-driving now? The passenger door — why was it open?

And then something happened. A long, thin thread, slightly waving, almost like a single strand of gossamer, lit up as the reddish sunlight hit it. It was dangling from the top of the passenger window, which was shut, with the roof down.

He didn’t bother to pull the car to one side, but stopped in the middle of the road and went around to look at that hair.

In his fingers, held toward the light, it turned white. But turned toward the dark of the forest, it showed its true color: gold.

A long, slightly waving, golden hair.

Elena.

As soon as he had identified it, he got back into the car and began to backtrack. Something had ripped Elena right out of his car without putting so much as a scratch on the paint. What could have done that?

How had he managed to get Elena to go for a spin anyway? And why couldn’t he remember? Had they both been attacked…?

When he backtracked, however, the marks by the passenger’s side of the road told the entire grisly story. For some reason, Elena had been frightened into jumping out of the car — or some power had pulled her. And Damon, who now felt as if there were steam rising from his skin, knew that in all the woods there were only two creatures that could have been responsible.

He sent out a scouting probe, a simple circle that was meant to be undetectable, and almost lost control of the car again.

Merda! That blast had come out as a sphere-shaped killing strafe — birds were dropping out of the sky. It tore through the Old Wood, through Fell’s Church, which surrounded it, and into the areas beyond, before finally dying out hundreds of miles away.

Power? He wasn’t a vampire, he was Death Incarnate. Damon had a vague thought of pulling over and waiting until the turmoil inside himself had stopped. Where had such Power come from?

Stefan would have stopped, would have dithered around, wondering. Damon just grinned savagely, gunned the engine, and sent thousands of probes raining from the sky, all attuned to catch a fox-shaped creature running or hiding in the Old Wood.

He got a hit in a tenth of a second.

There. Under a black cohosh bush, if he wasn’t mistaken — under some unspeakable bush, anyway. And Shinichi knew he was coming.

Good. Damon sent a wave of Power directly at the fox, catching it in akekkai, a sort of invisible rope-barrier that he tightened deliberately, slowly, around the struggling animal. Shinichi fought back, with killing force. Damon used the kekkai to pick him up bodily and slam the little fox body into the ground. After a few of these slams Shinichi decided to stop fighting and played dead instead. That was fine with Damon. It was the way he thought Shinichi looked best, except for the bit about playing.

At last he had to stash the Ferrari between two trees and ran swiftly to the bush where Shinichi was now fighting the barrier around him to get into human form.

Standing back, eyes narrowed, arms crossed on his chest, Damon watched the struggle for a while. Then he let up enough on the kekkai’s field to allow the change.

And the instant Shinichi became human, Damon’s hands were around his throat.

“Where is Elena, kono bakayarou?” In a lifetime as a vampire you learned a lot of curse words. Damon preferred to use those of a victim’s native language. He called Shinichi everything he could think of, because Shinichi was fighting, and was Calling telepathically for his sister. Damon had some choice things to say about that in Italian, where hiding behind your younger twin sister was…well, good for a lot of creative cursing.

He felt another fox-shape racing at him — and he realized that Misao intended to kill. She was in her true shape as a kitsune: just like the russet thing he’d tried to run over while driving with Damaris. A fox, yes, but a fox with two, three…six tails altogether. The extra ones usually were invisible, he gathered, as he neatly caught her in a kekkai as well. But she was ready to show them, ready to use all her powers to rescue her brother.

Damon contented himself with holding her as she struggled vainly within the barrier, and saying to Shinichi, “Your baby sister fights better than you do,bakayarou. Now,give me Elena. ”

Shinichi changed forms abruptly and leaped for Damon’s throat, sharp white teeth in evidence, top and bottom. They were both too keyed up, too high on testosterone — and Damon, on his new Power — to let it go.

Damon actually felt the teeth scrape his throat before he got his hands again around the fox’s neck. But this time Shinichi was showing his tails, a fan that Damon didn’t bother to count.

Instead he stomped one neat boot on the fan and pulled with his other two hands. Misao, watching, shrieked in anger and anguish. Shinichi thrashed and arched, golden eyes fixed on Damon’s. In another minute his spine would crack.

“I’ll enjoy that,” Damon told him sweetly. “Because I’ll bet that Misao knows whatever you know. Too bad you won’t be here to seeher die.”

Shinichi, rabid with fury, seemed willing to die and condemn Misao to Damon’s mercies just to avoid losing the fight. But then his eyes darkened abruptly, his body went limp, and words appeared faintly in Damon’s mind.

…hurts…can’t…think…

Damon regarded him gravely. Now, Stefan, at this point, would release a good deal of the pressure on the kitsune so the poor little fox could think, Damon, on the other hand, increased the pressure briefly, then released it back to the previous level.

“Is that better?” he asked solicitously. “Can the cute little foxie think now?”

You…bastard…

Angry as he was, Damon suddenly remembered the point of all this.

“What happened to Elena?Her trail runs out up against a tree. Is she inside it? You have seconds left to live, now. Talk.”

“Talk,” seconded another voice, and Damon barely glanced up at Misao. He’d left her relatively unguarded and she’d found power and room to change into her human shape. He took it in instantaneously, dispassionately.

She was small-boned and petite, looking like any Japanese schoolgirl, except that her hair was just like her brother’s — black tipped with red. The only difference was that the red in her hair was lighter and brighter — a truly brilliant scarlet. The bangs that fell into her eyes had blazing fiery tips, and so did the silky dark hair falling over her shoulders. It was striking but the only neurons that lit in Damon’s mind in response were connected to fire and danger and deception.

She might have fallen into a trap,Shinichi managed.

A trap? Damon frowned.What kind of trap?

I’ll take you to where you can look into them,Shinichi said evasively.

“And the fox can suddenly think again. But you know what? I don’t think you’re cute at all,” Damon whispered, then dropped the kitsune on the ground. Shinichi-as-a-human fountained up, and Damon dropped the barrier just long enough to let the fox in human form try to take his head off with one punch. He leaned away from it easily, and returned it with a blow that knocked Shinichi back into the tree hard enough to bounce. Then, while the kitsune was still dazed and glassy-eyed, he picked him up, slung him over one shoulder, and started back to the car.

What about me? Misao was trying to curb furious and sound pathetic, but she really wasn’t very good at it.