Лиза Смит - The Return - Nightfall

And then they were using bits of torn cloth, even more clumsily, to tie Bonnie, spread-eagled, to four knobby posts snapped off their own bodies and hammered into the ground around the trunk with four powerful blows by the thick-armed one.

Meanwhile, from somewhere even farther away in the shadows, a third man-tree shuffled forward. And Elena saw that this one was, undeniably, unmistakably male.

For a moment Elena worried that Damon might lose it, go mad, turn around and attack both the were-foxes, revealing his true allegiance now. But his feelings about Bonnie had obviously changed since he had saved her at Caroline’s. He appeared perfectly relaxed beside Shinichi and Misao, sitting back and smiling, even saying something that made them laugh.

Suddenly something inside Elena seemed to plummet. This wasn’t a qualm. It was full-blown terror. Damon had never looked so natural, so in tune, so happy with anyone as he did here with Shinichi and Misao. They couldn’t possibly have changed him, she tried to convince herself. They couldn’t have possessed him again so quickly, not without her, Elena, knowing it….

But when you showed him the truth, he was miserable, her heart whispered. Desperately miserable — miserably desperate. He might have reached for possession as a defiant alcoholic reaches for a bottle, wanting only forgetfulness. If she knew Damon, he had willingly invited the darkness back in.

He couldn’t stand to stand in the light, she thought. And so now, he’s able to laugh even at Bonnie’s suffering.

And where did that leave her? With Damon defected to the other side, no longer ally, but enemy? Elena began to tremble with anger and hatred — yes, and fear, too, as she contemplated her position.

All alone to struggle against three of the strongest enemies she could imagine, and their army of deformed, conscienceless killers? Not to mention Caroline, the cheerleader of spite?

As if to corroborate her fears, as if to show her how slim her chances really were, the tree she was clinging to seemed suddenly to let go of her, and for a moment Elena thought she would fall, spinning and screaming, all the way to the ground. Her handholds and footholds seemed to disappear all at once, and she only saved herself by a frantic — and painful — scrambling through serrated pine needles up to the grooved, dark bark.

You are a human girl now, my dear,the strong, resinous smell seemed to be telling her.And you are up to your neck in the Powers of the undead and of sorcery. Why fight it? You’ve lost before you’ve begun. Give in now and it won’t hurt so much.

If a person had been telling her this, trying to hammer it in, the words might have sparked some kind of defiance from the flint of Elena’s character. But instead this was just a feeling that came over her, an aura of doom, a knowledge of the hopelessness of her cause, and the inadequacy of her weapons, that seemed to settle over her as gently and as inescapably as a fog.

She leaned her throbbing head against the trunk of the tree. She had never felt so weak, so helpless — or so alone, not since she had been a newly wakened vampire. She wanted Stefan. But Stefan hadn’t been able to beat these three, and because of that she might never see him again.

Something new was happening on the roof, she realized wearily. Damon was looking down at Bonnie on the altar, and his expression was petulant. Bonnie’s white face was staring up at the evening sky in determination, as if refusing any longer to weep or beg again.

“But…are all the hors d’oeuvres so predictable?” Damon asked, seeming genuinely bored.

You bastard, you’d turn on your best friend for amusement, Elena thought. Well, just you wait. But she knew the truth was that without him, she couldn’t even put together Plan A, much less fight against these kitsune, these were-foxes.

“You told me that in the Shi no Shi, I would see acts of genuine originality,” Damon was going on. “Maidens hypnotized to cut themselves…”

Elena ignored his words. She concentrated all her energy on the thudding pain in the center of her chest. She felt as if she were drawing blood from her tiniest capillaries, from the far reaches of her body, and collecting it here at her center.

The human mind is infinite, she thought. It is as strange and as infinite as the universe. And the human soul…

The three youngest of the possessed began dancing around the spread-eagled Bonnie, singing in falsely sweet little-girl voices:

“You are going to die in here, When you die inhere, out there They throw dirt right on your face!”

How delightful, Elena thought. Then she tuned back in to the drama unfolding on the roof. What she saw startled her. Meredith was now up on the widow’s walk, moving as if she were underwater — entranced. Elena had missed how she’d gotten there — was it by some sort of magic? Misao was facing Meredith, giggling. Damon was laughing, too, but in mocking disbelief.

“And you expect me to believe that if I give this girl a pair of scissors…” he said, “she would actually cut her own—”

“Try and see for yourself,” Shinichi interrupted, with one of his languid gestures. He was leaning against the cupola in the middle of the widow’s walk, still trying to out-lounge Damon. “Didn’t you see our prizewinner, Isobel?You carried her all the way here — didn’t she ever try to speak?”

Damon held out a hand. “Scissors,” he said, and a dainty pair of nail scissors rested in his palm. It seemed that, as long as Damon had Shinichi’s magic key, the magic field around them would continue to obey him even in the real world. He laughed. “No, adult-size scissors, for gardening. The tongue’s made of strong muscles, not paper.”

What he held in his hand then were large pruning shears — definitely not toys for children. He hefted them, feeling their weight. And then, to Elena’s utter shock, he looked straight up at her in her treetop refuge, not needing to search for her there at all — and winked.

Elena could only stare back in horror.

He knew, she thought. He knew where I was all the time.

That was what he had been whispering to Caroline about.

It hadn’t worked — the Wings of Redemption hadn’t worked, Elena thought, and it felt as if she were falling and would fall forever. I should have realized it would be no good. No matter what’s done to him, Damon will always be Damon. And now he’s offering me a choice: see my two best friends tortured and killed, or step forward and stop this horror by agreeing to his terms.

What could she do?

He had arranged the chess pieces brilliantly, she thought. The pawns on two different levels, so that even if Elena could somehow climb down to try to save Bonnie, Meredith would be lost. Bonnie was tied to four strong posts and guarded by Tree-Men. Meredith was closer, up on the roof, but to get her off Elena would have to get to her and then through Misao, Shinichi, Caroline, and Damon himself.

And Elena had to choose. Whether to step forward now, or be pushed forward by the anguish of one of the two who were almost a part of her.

She seemed to catch a faint strain of telepathy as Damon stood beaming there, and it said,This is the best night of my life.

You could always just jump,came the fog-like hypnotic whisper of annihilation once again.End the dead-end road you’re on. End your suffering. End all the pain…just like that.

“Now it’s my turn,” Caroline was saying, brushing past the twins to face Meredith herself. “It was supposed to be my choice in the first place. So it’s my turn now.”

Misao was laughing hysterically, but Meredith was already stepping forward, still in a trance.

“Oh, have it your own way,” Damon said. But he didn’t move, still staring curiously, as Caroline said to Meredith, “You’ve always had a tongue like an adder’s. Why don’t you make it forked for us — right here, right now? Before you cut it into pieces.”