Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

“No,” Elena said quietly. “I would have been dead a long time ago. You found me at the point of suffocation, remember?”

“Yes.” A moment of fierce joy on his face. But then the trapped, horrified look returned. “I was the tormenter, the persecutor, the one you were so terrified of. I made you do things with — with—”

“Matt.”

“O God,” he said, and it was clearly an invocation to the deity, not just an exclamation, because he looked up, holding his clenched hands to heaven. “I thought I was being a hero for you. Instead I’m the abomination. What now? By rights, I should be dead at your feet already.” He looked at her with wide, feral, black eyes. There was no humor in them, no sarcasm, no holding back. He looked very young and very wild and desperate. If he’d been a black leopard he’d have been pacing his cage frantically, biting at the bars.

Then he bowed his head to kiss her bare foot.

Elena was shocked.

“I’m yours to do what you please with,” he said in that same stunned voice. “You can order me to die right now. After all my clever talk, it turns out that I’m the monster.”

And then he wept. Probably no other set of circumstances could have brought tears to Damon Salvatore’s eyes. But he had boxed himself in. He never broke his word, and he’d given his word to break the monster, the one who had done all this to Elena. The fact that he had been possessed — at first a little, and then more and more, until his entire mind was simply another of Shinichi’s toys, to be picked up and put down at leisure — didn’t make up for his crimes.

“You know that I–I’m damned,” he told her, as if perhaps that might go a small way toward restitution.

“No, I don’t,” Elena said. “Because I don’t believe that’s true. And Damon, think of how many times you fought them. I’m sure they wanted you to kill Caroline that first night you said you felt something in her mirror. You said you almost did it. I’m sure they want you to kill me. Are you going to do it?”

He bent toward her foot again, and she hastily grabbed him by the shoulders. She couldn’t stand to see him in such pain.

But now Damon was looking this way and that, as if he had a definite purpose. He was also twisting the lapis lazuli ring.

“Damon — what are you thinking? Tell me what you’re thinking!”

“That he may pick me up as a puppet again — and that this time there may be areal birch rod. Shinichi — he’s monstrous beyond your innocent belief. And he can take me over at a moment’s notice. We’ve seen that.”

“He can’t if you’ll let me kiss you.”

“What?” He looked at her as if she hadn’t been following the conversation properly.

“Let me kiss you — and strip out that dying malach inside you.”

“Dying?”

“It dies a little more each time you gain enough strength to turn your back on it.”

“Is — it very big?”

“As big as you are by now.”

“Good,” he whispered. “I only wish I could fight it myself.”

“Pour le sport?” Elena answered, showing that her summer in France last year hadn’t been entirely wasted.

“No. Because I hate the bastard’s guts and I’d happily suffer a hundred times its pain as long as I knew I was hurting it. ”

Elena decided this was no time for delay. He was ready. “Will you let me do this one last thing?”

“I told you before — the monster who hurt you is your slave now.”

All right. They could argue about that point later. Elena leaned forward and tilted her head up, lips pursed slightly.

After a few moments, Damon, the Don Juan of darkness, got the point.

He kissed her very gently, as if afraid to make too much contact.

“Wings of Purification,” Elena whispered against his lips. These wings were as white as untrammeled snow, and lacelike, barely existing in some places at all. They arched high above Elena, shimmering with an iridescence that reminded her of moonlight on frosted cobwebs. They encased mortal and vampire in a web made of diamond and pearl.

“This is going to hurt you,” Elena said, not knowing how she knew. The knowledge seemed to come moment by moment as she needed it. It was almost like being in a dream where great truths are understood without needing to be learned, and accepted without astonishment.

And that was how she knew that Wings of Purification would seek out and destroy anything foreign inside Damon and that the feeling could be very unpleasant for him. When the malach didn’t seem to be coming out of its own accord, she said, prompted by her inner voice, “Take off your shirt. The malach is attached to your spine and it’s closest to the skin at the back of your neck where it entered. I’m going to have to strip it out by hand.”

“Attached to my spine?”

“Yes. Did you ever feel it? I think it would have felt like a bee sting at first, as it entered you, just a sharp little drill and a blob of jelly that attached to your spine.”

“Oh. The mosquito bite. Yes, I felt that. And then later, my neck began to ache, and at last my whole body. Was it…growing inside me?”

“Yes, and taking over more and more of your nervous system. Shinichi was controlling you like a marionette.”

“Dear God, I’m sorry.”

“Let’s make him be sorry instead. Will you take off your shirt?”

Silently, like a trusting child, Damon took off his black jacket and shirt. Then, as Elena motioned him into position, he lay across her lap, his back hard with muscle and pale against the dark ground on either side.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Getting rid of it this way — pulling it out through the hole where it entered — will really hurt.”

“Good,” grunted Damon. And then he buried his face in his lithe, flat-muscled arms.

Elena used the pads of her fingers, feeling at the top of his spine for what she was looking for. A squishy point. A blister. When she found it, she pinched it with her fingernails until blood suddenly spurted.

She almost lost it then as it tried to go flat, but she was pursuing it with sharp nails — and it was too slow. At last she had it held firmly between thumbnail and two fingernails.

The malach was still alive and aware enough to feebly resist her. But it was like a jellyfish trying to resist — only jellyfish broke apart when you pulled. This slick, slimy, man-shaped thing retained its shape as she slowly pulled it through the breach in Damon’s skin.

And it was hurting him. She could tell. She started to take some of the pain into herself, but he gasped,“No!” with such vehemence that she decided to let him have his way.

The malach was much larger and more substantial than she had realized. It must have been growing a long time, she thought — the little blob of jelly that had expanded until it controlled him to the fingertips. She had to sit up, then scoot away from Damon and back again before it lay on the ground, a sickly, stringy, white caricature of a human body.

“Is it done?” Damon was breathless — it really had hurt, then.

“Yes.”

Damon stood and looked down at the flabby white thing — barely twitching — that had made him persecute the person he cared most about in the world. Then, deliberately, he trampled on it, crushing it under the heels of his boots until it lay torn in pieces, and then trampling the pieces. Elena guessed that he didn’t dare blast it with Power for fear of alerting Shinichi.

At last, all that was left was a stain and a smell.

Elena didn’t know why she felt so dizzy then. But she reached for Damon and he reached for her and they went to their knees holding each other.

“I release you from every promise you made — while in the possession of that malach,” Elena said. This was strategy. She didn’t want to release him from the promise of caring for his brother.