Лиза Смит - The Return - Shadow Souls

He was stroking her hair, which was so unfair, curling the ends and crushing them in his fingers…just hours after he’d taught her to feel things to the tips of her hair. He knew her weak spots. Not just every woman’s weak spots. He knew hers; he knew how to make her want to cry out in pleasure and how to soothe her.

There was nothing to do but test her theory and maybe break a bone. She would not submit when she had not invited him. She would not !

But then she remembered her curiosity about the little boy and the great stone boulder, and she deliberately opened her mind to Damon’s. He fell into the trap of his own making.

As soon as their minds connected there were something like fireworks. Explosions. Rockets. Stars going nova. Elena set her mind to ignoring her body and began looking for the boulder.

It was deep, deep inside the most locked-off part of his brain. Deep in the eternal darkness that slept there. But Elena seemed to have brought a searchlight with her. Wherever she turned, dark festoons of cobwebs fell and heavy-looking stone arches crumbled and fell to the ground.

“Don’t worry,” Elena found herself saying. “The light won’t do that to you ! You don’t have to live down here. I’ll show you the beauty of the light.”

What am I saying? Elena wondered even as the words left her lips. How can I promise him — and maybe he likes living here in the dark!

But in the next second she had come much closer to the little boy, close enough to see his pale, wondering face.

“You came again,” he said, as if it were a miracle. “You said you would come, and you did!”

That brought down all Elena’s barriers at once. She knelt, and pulling the chains to their utmost length, took him on her lap. “Are you glad that I came back?” she asked gently. She was already stroking his hair smooth.

“Oh, yes!” It was a cry , and it frightened Elena almost as much as it pleased her. “You’re the nicest person I’ve ever — the most beautiful thing I ever—”

“Hush,” Elena told him, “hush. There’s got to be some way to warm you up.”

“It’s the iron,” the child said humbly. “Iron keeps me weak and cold. But it has to be iron; otherwise he wouldn’t be able to control me.”

“I see,” Elena said grimly. She was beginning to get a grasp on what kind of relationship Damon had with this little boy. For a moment, on a hunch, she took two lengths of iron in her hands and tried to tear them apart. Elena had super-light here; why not superpowers? But all that happened was that she twisted and turned the length for nothing, and finally cut the web of her finger against an iron burr.

“Oh!” The boy’s huge dark eyes fixed on the dark bead of blood. He stared as if he were fascinated — and afraid.

“Do you want it?” Elena held out the hand to him uncertainly. What a poor scrap of a creature to be coveting other people’s blood, she thought. He nodded timidly as if he were sure she’d be angry. But Elena just smiled and he reverently held her finger and took the whole globe of blood at once, closing his lips like a kiss.

As he lifted his head, he seemed to have a tinge more color in his pale face.

“You told me Damon keeps you here,” she said, holding him again and feeling heat being sucked from her into his cold body. “Can you tell me why?”

The child was still licking his lips, but he turned his face toward her immediately and said, “I’m the Warden of Secrets. But”—sadly—“the Secrets have gotten so big that even I don’t know what they are.”

Elena followed the motion of his head from his own small limbs to the iron chain to the huge, metallic ball. She felt a sinking inside herself and a deep pity for such a small warden. And she wondered what on earth could be inside that great stone sphere that Damon was guarding so intently.

But she didn’t get the chance to ask.

Even as Elena opened her mouth to speak, she could feel herself lifted as if in a hurricane. For a moment she clung to the boy who was being torn from her grasp, then she just had time to shout, “I’ll be back,” and to hear his reply, before she was pulled into the ordinary world of baths and manipulation and motel rooms.

“I’ll keep our secret!” That was what the little boy had cried to her at the last moment.

And what could that mean but that he would keep their rendezvous from the real (or “ordinairy”) Damon?

A moment later Elena was standing in a dingy motel room, and Damon was clutching her upper arms. As he released her, Elena could taste salt. Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks.

It didn’t seem to make any difference to her attacker. Damon seemed to be at the mercy of raw desperation. He was shaking like a little boy the first time he kissed his first love. That’s what’s driving the control away, Elena thought fuzzily.

As for herself, she felt as if she might faint.

No! She had to stay conscious.

Elena pushed and twisted, hurting herself deliberately against the apparently unbreakable grip that held her.

It held.

The possessor? Shinichi again, sneaking into Damon’s mind and making him do things—?

Elena fought harder, pushed herself until she actually could have screamed with pain. She whimpered once—

The hold broke.

Somehow Elena knew that Shinichi wasn’t involved in this. The true soul of Damon was a little boy held in chains for God-knew-how-many centuries, who had never known warmth and closeness but who still had a tearful appreciation for them. The child who was chained to the rock surrounding was one of Damon’s deepest secrets.

And now Elena was trembling so hard she wasn’t sure she could stand up, and she was wondering about the child. Was he cold? Was he crying like Elena? How could she tell?

She and Damon were left staring at each other, both breathing hard. Damon’s sleek hair was mussed, making him look rakish as a buccaneer. His face, always so pale and self-composed, was flushed with blood. His eyes dropped to watch Elena automatically massaging her wrists. She could feel pins and needles now: she was getting back some circulation. Once he’d looked away, he couldn’t seem to look her in the eye again.

Eye contact. All right. Elena recognized a weapon, groping for a chair and finding the bed unexpectedly close behind her. She didn’t have many weapons right now; and she needed to use all of them.

She sat, giving in to the weakness in her body, but she kept her eyes on Damon’s face. His mouth was swollen. And that was…unfair. Damon’s pout was a part of his most basic artillery. He had always had the most beautiful mouth she’d ever seen on anyone, man or woman. The mouth, the hair, the half-drooping lids, the heavy lashes, the delicacy of his jawline…unfair, even to someone like Elena, who’d long ago gotten past interest in a person because of some accident of beauty.

But she’d never seen that mouth swollen, the perfect hair disordered, the eyelashes trembling because he was looking everywhere except at her and trying not to show it.

“Was that… what you’ve been thinking about while you’ve been refusing to talk to me?” she asked, and her voice was almost steady.

Damon’s sudden stillness was perfection like all his other perfections. No breathing, of course. He stared at a spot in the beige carpet that by rights ought to have broken into flames.

Then, finally, he lifted those huge dark eyes to hers. It was so hard to tell anything about Damon’s eyes because the iris was almost the same color as the pupil, but Elena had a feeling that at this moment they were dilated so far as to be all pupil. How could eyes as dark as midnight trap and hold light? She seemed to see in them a universe of stars.