Лиза Смит - The Return - Shadow Souls

“What?” Elena said sharply, shocked out of her tiredness. “Damon,

what do you mean?”

“What I said. There’s something you’ve all missed. Ha. Maybe even Stefan has missed it. The story gets told and retold, but nobody catches it.”

Damon had turned his face away. Elena moved closer to him, just a bit, so he could smell her perfume, which was attar of roses that night. “Damon, tell me. Tell me, please !”

Damon started to turn toward her—

And it was at that moment that the liftmen stopped. Elena had only a second to wipe her face, and the curtains were being drawn.

Meredith had told them all the myth about Bloddeuwedd, which she’d got from a story-telling globe. All about how Bloddeuwedd had been made out of flowers and brought to life by the gods, and how she had betrayed her husband to his death, and how, in punishment, she had been doomed to spend each night from midnight to dawn as an owl.

And, apparently, there was something the myths didn’t mention. The fact that she had been doomed to live here, banished from the Celestial Court into the deep red twilight of the Dark Dimension.

All things considered, it was logical that her parties started at six in the evening.

Elena found that her mind was jumping from subject to subject. She accepted a goblet of Black Magic from a slave as her eyes wandered.

Every woman and most of the men at the party were wearing clever attire that changed color in the sun. Elena felt quite modest — after all, everything out of doors seemed to be pink or scarlet or wine-colored. Downing her goblet of Magic, Elena was slightly surprised to find herself going into automatic party-mode behavior, greeting people she’d met earlier in the week with cheek kisses and hugs as if she’d known them for years. Meanwhile she and Damon worked their way toward the mansion, sometimes with, sometimes against the tide of constantly moving people.

They made it up one steep set of white (pink) marble stairs, which sported on either side banks of glorious blue (violet) delphiniums and pink (scarlet) wild roses. Elena stopped here, for two reasons. One was to get a new goblet of Black Magic. The first had already given her a pleasant glow — although of course everything was constantly glowing here. She was hoping that the second cup would help her forget everything that Damon had brought up in the litter except the key — and help her remember what she’d been fretting over originally, before her thoughts had been hijacked by Bonnie and Meredith’s talk.

“I expect the best way is just to ask someone,” she told Damon, who was suddenly and silently at her elbow.

“Ask what?”

Elena leaned a little toward the slave who’d just supplied her with a fresh goblet. “May I ask — where is Lady Bloddeuwedd’s main ballroom?”

The liveried slave looked surprised. Then, with his head, he made a gesture all around. “This plaza — below the canopy — has gained the name the Great Ballroom,” he said, bowing over his tray.

Elena stared at him. Then she stared around her.

Under a giant canopy — it looked semipermanent to her and was hung all around with pretty lanterns in shades that were enhanced by the sun — the smooth grass lawn stretched away for hundreds of yards on all sides.

It is bigger than a football field.

“What I’d like to know,” Bonnie was asking a fellow guest, a woman who had clearly been to many of Bloddeuwedd’s affairs and knew her way around the mansion, “is this: which room is the main ballroom?”

“Oh, my deah, it depends on what you mean,” the guest replied cheerfully. “Theah’s the Great Ballroom out of doors — you must have seen it while climbing — the big pavilion? And then theah’s the White Ballroom inside. That’s lit with candelabras and has the curtains drawn all round. Sometimes it’s called the Waltz Room, since all that is played in there is waltzes.”

But Bonnie was still caught in horror a few sentences back. “There’s a ballroom outside ?” she said shakily, hoping that somehow she hadn’t heard right.

“That’s it, deah, you can see through that wall theah.” The woman was telling the truth. You could see through the wall, because the walls were all of glass, one beyond another, allowing Bonnie to see what seemed to be an illusion done with mirrors: lighted room after lighted room, all filled with people. Only the last room on the bottom floor seemed to be made out of something solid. That must be the White Ballroom.

But through the opposite wall, where the guest was pointing — oh, yes. There was a canopy top. She remembered vaguely passing it. The other thing she remembered was…

“They dance on the grass? That — enormous field of grass?”

“Of course. It’s all especially cut and rolled smooth. You won’t trip over a weed or hummock of ground. Are you sure you’re feeling quite well? You look rathah pale. Well”—the guest laughed—“as pale as anyone can look in this light.”

“I’m fine,” Bonnie said dazedly. “I’m just…fine.”

The two parties met later and told each other of the horrors that they had unearthed. Damon and Elena had discovered that the ground of the outdoor ballroom was almost as hard as rock — anything that had been buried there before the ground was rolled smooth by heavy rollers would now be packed down in something like cement. The only place that anyone could dig there was around the perimeter.

“We should have brought a diviner,” Damon said. “You know, someone who uses a forked stick or a pendulum or a bit of a missing person’s clothing to home in on the correct area.”

“You’re right,” Meredith said, her tone clearly adding for once. “Why didn’t we bring a diviner?”

“Because I don’t know of any,” Damon said, with his sweetest, most ferocious barracuda smile.

Bonnie and Meredith had found that the inside ballroom’s flooring was rock — very beautiful white marble. There were dozens of floral arrangements in the room, but all that Bonnie had stuck her small hand into (as unobtrusively as possible) were simply cut flowers in a vase of water. No soil, nothing that could justify using the term “buried in.”

“And besides, why would Shinichi and Misao put the key in water they knew would be thrown out in a few days?” Bonnie asked, frowning, while Meredith added,

“And how do you find a loose floorboard in marble? So we can’t see how it could be buried there. By the way, I checked — and the White Ballroom has been here for years, so there’s no chance that they dumped it under the building stones, either.”

Elena, by now drinking her third goblet of Black Magic, said, “All right. The way we look at this is: one room scratched off the list. Now, we’ve already got half of the key — look how easy that was—”

“Maybe that was just to tease us,” Damon said, raising an eyebrow. “To get our hopes up, before dashing them completely…here.”

“That can’t be,” Elena said desperately, glaring at him. “We’ve come so far — farther than Misao ever imagined we would. We can find it. We will find it.”

“All right,” Damon said, suddenly deadly serious. “If we have to pretend to be staff and use pickaxes on that soil outdoors, we’ll do it. But first, let’s go through the entire house inside. That seemed to work well last time.”

“All right,” Meredith said, for once looking straight at him and without disapproval. “Bonnie and I will take the upstairs floors and you can take the downstairs ones — maybe you can make something of that White Waltz Ballroom.”

“All right.”

They set to work. Elena wished that she could calm down. Despite most of three goblets of Black Magic oscillating inside her — or perhaps because of them — she was seeing certain things in new lights. But she must keep her mind on the quest — and only on the quest. She would do anything— anything —she told herself, to get the key. Anything for Stefan.