Лиза Смит - The Return - Shadow Souls

But we both enjoy worship , she replied telepathically, and felt his laughter on her lips as he admitted the truth of it. There was nothing sweeter in her life these days than Damon’s kisses. She could drift like this forever, forgetting the outside world. And that was a good thing,

because she had the feeling that there was much depression in the outside and not too much happiness. But if she could always come back to this, this welcome, this sweetness, this ecstasy…

Elena jerked in the litter, throwing her weight back so fast that the men carrying it almost fell in a heap.

“You bastard,” she whispered venomously. They were still psychically entangled, and she was glad to see that through Damon’s eyes she was like a vengeful Aphrodite: her golden hair lifting and whipping behind her like a thunderstorm, her eyes shining violet in her elemental fury.

And now, worst of all, this goddess turned her face away from him. “Not one day,” she said. “You couldn’t even keep your promise for a single day!”

“I didn’t! I didn’t Influence you, Elena!”

“Don’t call me that. We have a professional relationship now. I call you ‘Master.’ You can call me ‘Slave’ or ‘Dog’ or whatever you want.”

“If we have the professional relationship of master and slave,” Damon said, his eyes dangerous, “then I can just order you to—”

“Try it!” Elena lifted her lips in what really wasn’t a smile. “Why don’t you do that, and see just what happens?”

Damon clearly decided to throw himself on the mercy of the court, and looked piteous and a little unbalanced, which he could easily do whenever he wanted. “I really didn’t try to Influence you,” he repeated, but then hastily added, “Maybe I can just change the subject for a while — tell you more about the star balls.”

“That,” Elena said in her most frosty voice, “might be a rather good idea.”

“Well, the balls make recordings directly from your neurons, you see? Your neurons in your brain. Everything you’ve ever experienced is there in your mind somewhere, and the ball just draws it out.”

“So you can always remember it and watch it over and over like a movie, too?” Elena said, twiddling with her veil to shade her face from him, and thinking that she would give a star ball to Alaric and Meredith before their wedding.

“No,” Damon said, rather grimly. “ Not like that. For one thing, the memory is gone from you — these are kitsune toys we’re talking about, remember? Once the star ball has taken it from your neurons, you don’t remember a thing about the event. Second, the ‘recording’ on the star ball gradually fades — with use, with time, with some other factors nobody understands. But the ball gets cloudier, and the sensations weaker, until finally it’s just an empty crystal sphere.”

“But — that poor man was selling a day of his life . A wonderful day! I should think he would want to keep it.”

“You saw him.”

“Yes.” Once again Elena saw the louse-ridden, haggard, gray-faced old man. She felt something like ice down her spine at the thought that he had once been the laughing, joyous, young John that she had experienced. “Oh, how sad,” she said, and she wasn’t talking about memory.

But, for once, Damon hadn’t followed her thoughts. “Yes,” he said. “There are a lot of the poor and the old here. They worked themselves free of slavery, or had a generous owner die…and then this is where they end up.”

“But the star balls? Are they just made for poor people? The rich ones can just travel to Earth and see a real summer day for themselves, right?”

Damon laughed without much humor. “Oh, no, they can’t. Most of them are bound here.”

He said bound oddly. Elena ventured, “Too busy to go on vacation?”

“Too busy, too powerful to get through the wards protecting Earth from them, too worried about what their enemies will do while they’re gone, too physically decrepit, too notorious, too dead.”

“Dead?” The horror of the tunnel and the corpse-smelling fog seemed ready to envelope Elena.

Damon flashed one of his evil smiles. “Forgot that your boyfriend is de mortius ? Not to mention your honorable master? Most people, when they die, go to another level than this — much higher or much lower. This is the place for the bad ones, but it’s the upper level. Farther down — well, nobody wants to go there.”

“Like Hell?” Elena breathed. “We’re in Hell?”

“More like Limbo, at least where we are. Then there’s the Other Side.” He nodded toward the horizon where the lowering sun still sat. “The other city, which may have been where you went on your ‘vacation’ to the afterlife. Here they just call it ‘The Other Side.’ But I can tell you two rumors I heard from my informants. There, they call it the Celestial Court. And there, the sky is crystal blue and the sun is always rising.”

“The Celestial Court…” Elena forgot that she was speaking aloud. She knew instinctively that it was the queens-and-knights-and-sorceresses kind of court, not a court of law. It would be like Camelot. Just saying the words brought up an aching nostalgia, and — not memories, but the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that memories were locked right behind a door. It was a door, however, that was securely locked, and all Elena could see through the keyhole were ranks of more women like the Guardians, tall, golden-haired, and blue-eyed, and one — child-sized among the grown women — who glanced up, and, piercingly, from a long way off, met Elena’s gaze directly.

The litter was moving out of the bazaar into more slums, which Elena took in with darting quick glances on either side of her, hiding in her veil. They seemed like any earthly slums, barrios, or favella — only worse. Children, their hair turned red by the sun, crowded around Elena’s litter, their hands held out in a gesture with universal meaning.

Elena felt a tearing at her insides that she had nothing of real value to give them. She wanted to build houses here, make sure these children had food and clean water, and education, and a future to look forward to. Since she had no idea how to give them any of these things, she watched them dash off with treasures such as her Juicy Fruit gum, her comb, her minibrush, her lip gloss, her water bottle, and her earrings.

Damon shook his head, but didn’t stop her until she began fumbling with a lapis and diamond pendant Stefan had given her. She was crying as she tried to disengage the clasp when suddenly the last bit of the rope around her wrist came up short.

“No more,” Damon said. “You don’t understand anything. We haven’t even entered the city proper yet. Why don’t you have a look at the architecture instead of worrying about useless brats who’re likely to die anyway?”

“That’s cold,” Elena said, but she couldn’t think of any way to make him understand, and she was too angry with him to try.

Still, she stopped fumbling with the chain and looked beyond the slums as Damon had suggested. There she could see a breathtaking skyline, with buildings that seemed meant to last for eternity, made of stones that looked the way the Egyptian pyramids and Mayan ziggurats must have looked when they were new. Everything, though, was colored red and black by a sun now concealed by sullen crimson cloudbanks. That huge red sun — it gave the air a different look for different moods. At times it seemed almost romantic, glinting on a large river Elena and Damon passed, picking out a thousand tiny wavelets in the slow-moving water. At other times, it simply seemed alien and ominous, showing clearly on the horizon like a monstrous omen, tingeing the buildings, no matter how magnificent, the color of blood. When they turned away from it, as the litter bearers moved down into the city where the huge buildings were, Elena could see their own long and menacing black shadow thrown ahead of them.