Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

“Thank you,” Damon whispered, the weight of his head on her shoulder.

“And now,” said Elena, like a kindergarten teacher who wants to move quickly on to another activity, “We need to make plans. But to make plans in utter secrecy…”

“We have to share blood. But Elena, how much have you donated today? You look white.”

“You said you’d be my slave — now you won’t take a little of my blood.”

“You said you released me — instead you’re going to hold that over me forever, aren’t you? But there’s a simpler solution. You take some of my blood.”

And in the end that was what they did, although it made Elena feel slightly guilty, as if she were betraying Stefan. Damon cut himself with the minimum of fuss, and then it began to happen — they were sharing minds, melting seamlessly together. In much shorter a time than it would take to speak the sentences aloud, it was done: Elena had told Damon of what her friends had found about the epidemic among the girls of Fell’s Church — and Damon had told Elena everything he knew about Shinichi and Misao. Elena concocted a plan for scaring out any other possessed youngsters like Tami, and Damon promised to try to find out where Stefan was from the kitsune twins.

And, finally, when there was nothing more to say, and Damon’s blood had restored faint color to Elena’s cheeks they made plans as to how to meet again.

At the ceremony.

And then there was only Elena in the room, and a large raven winging its way toward the Old Wood.

Sitting on the cold stone floor, Elena took a moment to put all she now knew together. No wonder Damon had seemed so schizophrenic. No wonder he had remembered, and then forgotten, and then remembered that he was the one she was running from.

He remembered, she reasoned, when Shinichi was not controlling him, or at least was keeping him on a very loose rein. But his memory was spotty because some of the things he’d done were so terrible that his own mind had rejected them. They had seamlessly become part of the possessed Damon’s memory, for when possessed Shinichi was controlling every word, every deed. And in between episodes, Shinichi was telling him that he had to find Elena’s tormentor and kill him.

All very amusing, she supposed, for this kitsune, Shinichi. But for both her and Damon it had been hell.

Her mind refused to admit that there had been moments of heaven mixed in with the hell. She was Stefan’s, alone. That would never change.

Now Elena needed one more magical door, and she didn’t know how to find one. But there was the twinkling fairy light again. She guessed it was the last of the magic that Honoria Fell had left to protect the town she had founded. Elena felt a little guilty, using it up — but if it wasn’t meant for her, why had she been brought here?

To try for the most important destination she could imagine.

Reaching for the speck with one hand and clenching the key in the other she whispered with all the force at her command:

“Somewhere I can see and hear and touch Stefan.”

A prison, with filthy rushes on the floor and bars between her and the sleeping Stefan.

Between her and Stefan!

It was really him. Elena didn’t know how she could know. Undoubtedly they could twist and change your perceptions here. But just now, perhaps because nobody had been expecting her to drop into a dungeon, no one was prepared with anything to make her doubt her senses.

It was Stefan. He was thinner than before, and his cheekbones stuck out. He was beautiful. And his mind felt just right, just the right mixture of honor and love and darkness and light and hope and grim understanding of the world he lived in.

“Stefan! Oh,hold me! ”

He woke and half sat up. “At least leave me my sleep. And meanwhile go away and put on another face, bitch!”

“Stefan! Language!”

She saw muscles in Stefan’s shoulders freeze.

“What…did you…say?”

“Stefan…it’s really me.I don’t blame you for cursing. I curse this whole place and the two who put you here….”

“Three,” he said wearily, and bent his head. “You’d know that if you were real. Go and let them teach you about my traitor brother and his friends who sneak up on people with kekkai crowns…”

Elena couldn’t wait to debate about Damon now. “Won’t you look at me, at least?”

She saw him turn slowly, look slowly, then saw him leap up from a pallet made of sickly-looking hay, and saw him stare at her as if she were an angel dropped down from the sky.

Then he turned his back on her and put his hands over his ears.

“No bargains,” he said flatly. “Don’t even mention them to me. Go away. You’ve gotten better but you’re still a dream.”

“Stefan!”

“I said, go away!”

Time was wasting. And this was too cruel, after what she had been through just to speak to him.

“You first saw me just outside the principal’s office the day you brought your papers into school and influenced the secretary. You didn’t need to look at me to know what I looked like. Once I told you that I felt like a murderer because I said, ‘Daddy, look’ and pointed to — something outside — just before the car accident that killed my parents. I’ve never been able to remember what the something was. The first word I learned when I came back from the afterlife was Stefan. Once, you looked at me in the rear view mirror of the car and said that I was your soul….”

“Can’t you stop torturing me for one hour? Elena — the real Elena — would be too smart to risk her life by coming here.”

“Where’s ‘here’?” Elena said sharply, frightened. “I need to know if I’m supposed to get you out.”

Slowly Stefan uncovered his ears. Even more slowly he turned around again.

“Elena?” he said, like a dying boy who has seen a gentle ghost in his bed. “You’re not real. You can’t be here.”

“I don’t think I am. Shinichi made a magic house and it takes you wherever you want if you name it and open the door with this key. I said, ‘Somewhere I can hear and see and touch Stefan.’ But”—she looked down—“you say I can’t be here. Maybe it’s all an illusion anyway.”

“Hush.” Now Stefan was clenching the bars on his side of the cell.

“Is this where you’ve been? Is this the Shi no Shi?”

He gave a little laugh — not a real one. “Not exactly what either of us expected, is it? And yet, they didn’t lie in anything they said, Elena. Elena! I said ‘Elena.’ Elena, you’re really here!”

Elena couldn’t bear to waste any time. She took the few steps through damp, crackly straw and scampering creatures to the bars that separated her from Stefan.

Then she tilted up her face, clutching bars in either hand, and shut her eyes.

I will touch him. I will, I will. I’m real, he’s real — I’ll touch him!

Stefan leaned down — to humor her, she thought — and then warm lips touched hers.

She put her arms through the bars because they were both weak at the knees: Stefan in astonishment that she could touch him, and Elena in relief and sobbing joy.

But — there was no time.

“Stefan, take my blood now — take it!”

She looked desperately for something to cut herself with. Stefan might need her strength, and no matter what Damon had taken from her, she would always have enough for Stefan. If it killed her, she would have enough. She was glad, now, that in the tomb, Damon had persuaded her to take his.

“Easy. Easy, little love. If you mean it, I can bite your wrist, but…”

“Do it now!” Elena Gilbert, the princess of Fell’s Church, ordered. She had even gotten the strength to pull herself off her knees. Stefan gave her half a guilty glance.