Cut from The Vampire Diaries: Shadow Souls for
space. Elena and Damon have had an argument while driving to the Gateway to the
Dark Dimension. Damon has stopped the car at a crossroads, and now Elena is
pacing angrily. Tumbleweeds are all around them—piled up in suspicious mounds.
Elena is furious at Damon, who has scarcely spoken to her all day. She can’t
understand why he won’t even look at her.
Elena walked blindly to cool her
cheeks until she heard Damon’s voice behind her. “You’re getting too close to
them. There are a few tumbleweeds on this part of road, too, you know.”
Elena turned around and said, with a
need to reestablish control, “I’ll come back if you’ll call the Highway Patrol
and tell them that there’s something big—maybe a trapped car—under a bunch of
tumbleweeds on Crantz Highway—about three or four miles west of Silverado.”
To his credit, Damon didn’t play
around. He immediately said “All right,” and pulled out his mobile.
At the same moment a car going
probably the same speed Damon had been doing on Crantz flew by them on Silverado—too
fast to avoid the medium- large tumbleweed that was directly in its path.
The tumbleweed must have been
related to the Old Witch Grass variety Elena had heard about. Because it went
BANG when the car hit it—leaping up in fire and smoke, and then . . . it rained
down thousands of tiny malach on Damon and Elena.
These malach weren’t like the huge
one that had attacked Matt and furrowed his arm with its sharp teeth. These
were tiny, like miniature leeches, each with a mosquito-like proboscis that felt
like a tiny steel drill. They made no sound except a soft pattering, like rain,
as they showered all around Elena. But an instant after the tumbleweed
exploded, Elena felt the first little sting on her neck. And then another sting
and another—and suddenly the pain was everywhere. The jabbing of a hundred
needles at once.
She had her eyes and her mouth
tightly shut and her hands pressed over her face, but this meant she couldn’t
run. She couldn’t even cry out at the pain.
“Elena! Over this way!”
Elena took a few steps and stumbled,
almost falling. She could still feel new stings all over her body. The malach
were small enough to hang suspended in the air, or blow with the slightest
breeze. Elena’s mind was going through options wildly, so fast that she felt
numbed and bewildered.
“Elena! Follow my voice! Get to the
car!”
Elena took a few more stumbling
steps, and then stopped. She didn’t want to run into another tumbleweed and set
it off, and she didn’t dare take her hands down or open her eyes. A malach in
an open eye . . . she shuddered.
But even standing perfectly still,
she felt new stings by the dozen. Obviously,
she needed to get to the car. But by what path?
Suddenly she jumped as she felt a
hand touch her shoulder. Then she realized it was Damon. He’d come for her,
despite having to walk through a cloud of malach the whole way, and with him
he’d brought protection, the protection of Power. It was opened out over them
like an umbrella, keeping most of the stingers off—not all, but most.
“This way,” he said, and added
briefly, “It’s probably better not to open your eyes yet.”
No kidding, Elena thought, and she
was grateful for his assistance as he guided her back to the car, circling
tumbleweeds which were no longer stationary, according to Damon, but were
rolling toward them, trying to cut them off from the car.
When they reached the vehicle, Elena
realized that they’d left the front doors open. Malach had fallen inside, but
fortunately not too many—the angle was wrong when that other car had hit the
tumbleweed that had exploded.
Elena got in the car, clenching her
teeth against the pain of the hundreds of pricks as her body made contact with
the fabric of the seats. She couldn’t bear to put a seatbelt on.
Damon drove slowly on Silverado.
“Where are you going? We need to get
these malach out of us, fast!”
“I know. I’m looking for a turnoff,
a trail into woodlands or something where we can have privacy,” Damon said.
“There is no way I’m going into a
woodland of any kind, for any reason! Don’t you get it? It’s Shinichi and
Misao—and they’re kitsune! They can use any kind of plant to do anything they
want—”
“So what’s your idea?” Damon
interrupted. “To just keep going until we find a motel, and check in as a
couple of porcupines?”
“No, but there are farmhouses around
here—”
“And if we ask someone to help us
they may already be possessed! This is a hell of a big trap; it required a lot
of planning. Would Shinichi have left the people out of his calculations?”
“I wasn’t planning on asking anyone!
I was planning on finding a barn.”
“A barn?” Damon sounded bewildered.
“Or any kind of outbuilding. These
are small, small farms, with hardly any people on them. At this time of day,
when the cows are out grazing, there’s nobody in the barns. I know: I have two
great-aunts who live on a farm. Look, there’s a driveway. Turn in there.”
Damon seemed about to object, but he
followed her directions.
“Now go over there, and back here’s a barn. I’ll bet you anything it’s empty.”
They spilled out of the car; Elena
grabbing her duffel bag and ran into the barn.
“I’ll bet you anything that if this
place isn’t empty, I can kill them before they can catch us.” Damon was
swinging his head around, turning toward every corner, as if he could see
through farm machinery or the hayloft above.
“Don’t kill humans!” Elena was
almost insane with the prickling and itching all over her body, but she had to
make this clear. “Influence them, knock them out if you can’t—but please don’t kill them.”
“Why? You don’t know anybody here,
do you? What’s it to you?”
“Damon, it’s a lot to me!” Elena had
been frantically dumping out her duffel bag, trying to find a bathing suit she
had thrown in at the last minute while packing. She found it—a black bikini.
She felt dimly pleased by her foresight in packing it. “Now please, let me go
up the ladder to the hayloft and I’ll tell you when it’s okay.”
“When what’s okay?”
“When it’s okay to come up!”
Damon just stared at her and Elena
knew what he was thinking. Only a week ago, she had had no compunctions about
standing entirely naked in front of him, and he had been the one trying to get
her clothed. Only a week ago, he had massaged her body piece by piece, one arm
out of a sheet at a time, until she had become boneless under his fingers, had
surrendered all voluntary motion, and—
“I—I’ve changed,” she shouted to him
as she kicked off her shoes and began the slow and painful trip up the ladder. “I
understand the modesty taboo now, and—well, things have changed.” Please let
him understand that, Elena added silently.
Damon
had
changed, too, Elena thought angrily. Although he had worked with her when it
meant their joint survival, and had even protected her, he’d made it clear that
he felt nothing kindly or special toward her afterwards. He’d jerked away from
her touch.
I’m not innocent and oblivious
anymore, Elena thought. Which, I suppose, means I was totally clueless when I
was with him back then. Elena felt a pang, not of anger, but of sorrow at
having lost that innocence. She had enjoyed it, however much other people
wanted to wake her up. And right now—well, she didn’t know what she was going
to do if Damon didn’t want to touch her. How would she ever get all these
malach off? She’d be possessed . . .
And she was starting to get delirious,
she realized. It must be the malachs’ poison affecting her already.
As Elena frantically stripped and
put on the bathing suit, she did her best not to look at her body, but of
course she couldn’t help but see it. Hundreds of jellylike little sacs hung
from her; and the tiny drills on the ends of the sacs were steadily drawing the
jelly blobs closer to her 6body. The pain was bad enough, but the itching was
absolutely maddening. She knew that if she scratched, she would only tear away
the soft jelly part and leave the drill winding its way into her skin, but it
was agony to keep from scratching.
“I’m dressed—what?”
Just as Elena began to call, she
sensed something from below her. A sort of . . . disturbance. It registered in
Elena’s mind as an explosion, and, disregarding the pain, she dropped to her
hands and knees.
“Damon?”
Elena
tried to whisper, while sending the message in a telepathic shout. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said in normal
conversational tones, if a bit tersely.
“I felt something—”
“It’s not enemies. You felt me using
Power. Are you ready yet or not?”
Elena opened her mouth to ask more
questions, then decided not to. Apparently he was going to help her. “I’m
ready.”
She heard Damon’s swift, stealthy
tread on the ladder. A moment later he appeared among the bundles of hay. Elena
stared.
He was dressed just as before, from
black jeans to black bomber jacket, in defiance of the summer heat. But
although Elena knew she’d seen malach that had pierced those jeans, they were
gone now.
“How
did you get them off so fast?”
“I told you. With Power,” he said
impatiently. “I burned them all off. You sensed it yourself.”
And he must have done. Elena didn’t
know what she had expected. For Damon to have come up covered in parasites, the
way she was? Looking at him now, immaculate and annoyed, it was impossible to
imagine.
For the first time in her life,
Elena Gilbert felt ashamed of her body.
My God, I must look hideous, she
thought wretchedly. Even she couldn’t bear to look at herself. And she couldn’t
look at Damon’s expression, either.
She’d begun to shake with the pain
and itching, though, and she couldn’t help but say, “Can you do the same thing
to me?”
Damon laughed shortly. “Yes, if you
don’t mind having your skin microwaved.” She looked up, knowing there were
tears in her eyes and he said in a slightly different tone, “Let’s just say
that vampire skin can take it, but you’d end up like a sun-dried mummy.”
“Then what am I supposed to do? How
do I make them come out?”
Damon looked her over and for a
moment Elena would swear that shock and dismay flashed across his face before
he swept them away into expressionless stillness. “We have to unscrew the
little devils,” he said, gesturing for her to come closer. “Turn them in the
opposite direction they’re going in, like unwinding a screw.”
“How am I supposed to see that?”
Elena’s temper, always combustible, was on the verge of explosion. If he was
trying to make fun of her at this point—
“Just let me see, will you?”
The dim barn was no place to see
anything, as far as Elena was concerned. But Damon took hold of one of her arms
and began to scrutinize it. Then, carefully, pulling the skin around it taut
with the fingers of one hand, he reached for a malach with the other hand and
removed one of the tiny spines with a deft spin of thumb and forefinger.
“Did that hurt?” he asked.
“Oh . . . just a little. But it’s
fine, it’s a good hurt—if you know
what I mean. Is it really out?”
“Yes, but I’ll have to destroy them
as we remove them or they’ll try to wriggle back up to us. They’re heat
seekers.” Again Damon stretched the skin of Elena’s forearm, deftly spun a
shaft and pulled it out. This time there was a brief flash of fire between his
fingers as he finished, a puff of black smoke and the malach was gone, leaving
an acrid smell. “That one found heat,”
he said, with his most deadly smile.
Elena tried to hold herself still.
She felt as if she and Damon had been having an argument that was not quite
concluded. But her back was itching in a way that threatened to drive her
insane and her pride was rapidly eroding.
“What’s wrong? Did I hurt you too
much?”
“No,” Elena said. “But . . . oh,
Damon, my back is killing me! I don’t know how they got in—”
“Straight through the material of
that flimsy top of yours. They can squeeze themselves unbelievably thin.”
“—it’s just that I itch like—”
Talking about it made it unbearable. She reached around to scratch at one
shoulder.
“Don’t do that!” Damon snapped
immediately.
“I can’t help it!”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s my body!”
“Do you want to be possessed?”
“At
this point, I don’t care!”
Damon stared at her for a long
moment. Elena knew he was thinking of all the things he could say to that, but
he controlled himself and said nothing. For her sake, she thought suddenly, in
wonder.
Briefly and expressionlessly he
said, “All right, lie down on your stomach.”
When Elena obeyed she felt Damon
start slightly. She couldn’t help saying, “Oh, God, they’re all over my back,
aren’t they?”
No answer. But then Damon began
working on her very rapidly, scarcely seeming to unscrew the malach so much as
to pluck them out. Elena could tell he was working as quickly as he could. It
hurt more, but—like scratching an itch—the pain, in some strange way, felt
good.
It was like being de-ticked, Elena
decided. First was the nearly unbearable itching and swelling and pain that
went with having just one of these horrible things burrowing into you. Then
there was the slight relief of having the skin around it stretched, and then
the quick hot flare of pain as Damon grasped it and flicked it out, and finally
the relief of having the steel splinter gone and warm blood flowing instead,
cleansing the wound, easing the swelling.
“Will they leave scars?” she asked,
feeling helpless and useless.
“Who knows?”
“I wonder whether any got into that
car that ran over the tumbleweed?”
“Who cares?”
Each brusque answer pushed Elena
closer to tears. Finally, she stopped talking completely. She had no idea why
he was helping her if, as she had guessed, he was tired of her and the problems
she seemed to bring along with her as a human. She shut her eyes and let him do
what he could to keep her from becoming a pawn of Shinichi.
* * * * *
Damon was doing his best to construct
walls inside himself, walls that would help him with what he was doing. There
was no way, he thought, that he couldn’t look as dutifully as possible, poring
over the creamy skin with the delicate rose bloom with Power channeled to his
vision as if he were looking at it a magnifying glass. There was no way to
avoid touching Elena either, and every time he touched her he felt a shock of
electricity up his arm. Worst of all, there was no way to stop each tiny wound
from bleeding, from cleansing itself from any bits of foreign matter left
inside. But the blood . . .
Ah, yes, the blood.
No vampire could get away from a
situation like this without sighing over the blood. Blood was everything—and
the only thing—a vampire needed. Blood was meat and drink, rest and refreshment
and Power.
And Elena’s blood was unique.
Damon could see her blood now, a
little red ruby for each malach he’d removed, each one the catching light from
a crack in the barn’s wooden roof and glinting to his dark-adjusted eyes. He
could hear the blood, or at least he could hear Elena’s heartbeat, slowing and
becoming more steady as she relaxed, trusting him, and then speeding up again
as she worried, pumping hard enough to burst a ruby and cause it to flow down
the side of her back.
And he could smell the blood and
taste Elena’s aura in the smell, since her aura was merely the advertisement of
the life-force in her blood.
That was what was really driving him
stark, staring, raving mad.
The combined smell of all those
little rubies was, to his vampire nostrils, like golden frankincense, like musk
and jasmine: heady, warm, as complex as Tolu balsam with its sweetness of
cinnamon and vanilla; and as simple as the freshness of a newly picked wild
rose. It was torture to go on doing this, each twist of his fingers releasing
another drop, another note in the symphony of fragrance. He would twist and
unexpectedly come up against the smell of juniper or copal, all the balmier and
sweeter for the sharp scent of burned malach that came between each one;
resetting him, as it were, for a new bombardment, like a gourmet eating sherbet
between courses. A deep note of earthy ambergris, a fragrant, light tinge of
orange blossom . . .
It was so enthralling, such
exquisite torture, that when he finally heard Elena, it was clear that she had
already spoken several times.
“Damon!”
“What? Yes? I’ve been
concentrating.”
“I could tell,” she said, but there
was nothing in her voice that indicated she understood what he had been
concentrating on. Elena was using the quiet, well-controlled voice she affected
when she herself was in turmoil. The voice she’d used ever since she’d tried to
hug him in the car, wild with excitement because they’d made it past the
tumbleweeds—and he had pried her arms away with stiff fingers.
Since he had pried her arms
away—because he had so nearly kissed her.
Damon allowed his mind to split,
with one half listening to Elena’s voice, the voice that still had the slow
honeysuckle drawl it had acquired on her vacation in the afterlife, while the
other half drifted off into his private fantasies
Ye gods, but the girl was priceless.
And here he was, taking her toward
the Dark Dimension, a danger that she couldn’t possibly measure or understand
by her past experiences. All right, so with Shinichi and Misao she had gotten
on the bad side of some rather nasty people. Nothing she had learned from those
encounters could prepare her for a world which roasted its own children, a
world where there was no good to
compare against the blackest evil, only lighter and darker shades of ebony.
A world which even Damon had
avoided, rationalizing that from the rumors he had heard it was backward and
violent and that the humans enslaved there were tough and scrawny and devoid of
vibrant life force.
“Damon, I think I’ve gotten them off
my arms, but they keep crawling out of the pail,” Elena said patiently.
The half of Damon’s mind that was
tuned in to Elena’s voice moved his eyes to a rusty pail which must have been
within Elena’s reach, because she had it on its side and had been throwing the
malach into it, only to have them inch, earthworm-like, back toward her. She’d
been hurting her soft fingers, twisting the steely spines out of her skin, and
now her arms glinted with rubies as well as her back.
“Good job,” Damon said softly,
absently. “Keep your hands away from the bucket now.”
Elena pulled both hands back and
propped herself on her elbows.
Damon directed a strafe of Power
into the bucket. The malach inside turned into ash. Smoke trickled out of rusty
rim.
“Thank you,” Elena said. “How’s my
back?”
Exquisite, thought Damon. A pattern
of jewels from neck to hips, most of them dried by now, a few gently trickling
down into the mysterious area covered by her bathing suit.
“Stay like that,” Damon ordered,
hearing the dispassion in his own voice. “Only a few more right here.” He knew
that his composition in fragrant ruby would soon be ruined, but he plucked off
the last few malach above Elena’s bathing suit bottoms as swiftly and deftly as
he could.
“And don’t scratch,” he told her as
she immediately reached around with one hand to feel the little hemispheres of
dried blood. He didn’t really think that it could affect the malachs’ poison
one way or another, but it was best to be safe. Puncture wounds could be
dangerous.
“I didn’t get so many on my legs or
my front,” she said as she sat up, her voice as carefully dispassionate as his:
Elena the Ice Princess. Then a wrinkle appeared on her perfectly controlled
brow. “Did I?”
“No, but they’ve had more time to
burrow in. Stand up, please, and try to unscrew all you can reach while I do
your legs. I can do it more quickly than you can,” Damon said, still rigidly
polite.
Elena blushed. Damon had forgotten
how charming she looked with the color coming up from her bosom and flooding
her throat and her cheeks with rose. It was the true blush of the natural
blond. What a pity, though, that since he’d last seen so much of her lovely
body, she had learned to blush because of it.
Before either of them could say a
word, Damon reached out and began to dexterously pull the malach off her long,
slender legs, his fingers almost a blur as he moved from flesh to pail. Now
she’s going to ask why I didn’t do the first ones this quickly, Damon thought,
but Elena asked nothing. She simply seemed to be enormously relieved to get the
things off of her, twirling off any she could reach and throwing them into the
bucket with shudders of revulsion.
“We need to find a motel tonight.
I’m dying for a long, hot bubble bath. I need
one. And as soon as you finish me, you’d better do that Power thing to
yourself again,” she said, not bossily, not even seeming to take control. That
was the thing about Elena—or one of the things about her—Damon thought,
appreciatively rather than otherwise. Even when giving orders she did it with
such an air of dignity, of natural leadership, that no one questioned her.
Except, he thought, for someone like
him. Damon questioned everything.
But he went along with his
princess’s plan because it was the best plan—
another thing Elena had going for her; she usually managed to make her plans
the most expedient and efficient, so that not
going along with them made you an obstacle to progress.
He understood Elena’s need for
ritual cleansing. These parasites were disturbing at some primal level. Even if
they hadn’t been dangerous, they were simply hideous.
Damon also took Elena’s suggestion
and sent a burst of Power all over his skin, to the distance of two centimeters
inside and outside. That should eliminate
any malach that had penetrated him, he told himself.
It wasn’t for his sake only. If he
had missed just one, it would grow and grow, attach itself to his spine,
feather out along his nervous system . . . until he became a helpless puppet
again—and a deadly menace to Elena.
Elena said nothing about the second
burst of Power, but she glanced over at him anxiously. “Are you sure there
aren’t any in your hair or inside your clothes? I’ll turn around—”
“You don’t need to. I’m positive.”
Elena was running anxious hands
through her own hair, old gold in this twilight, feeling over her skull. She
had held up remarkably well under what Damon knew had been a hideous strain for
her, and he felt the quick, fierce surge of pride that he always did when his
princess proved herself.
“How can I know if one drilled all
the way into my skin before we could get it?” she asked in a low voice that was
not quite steady.
“You can’t. But I can. Just stand
there; I’ll look.” Damon sent Power to his eyes and looked at her as if through
night field glasses—with a little psychedelic psychosis mixed in. He could see
her lovely heart pumping away, sending her sweet blood through her exquisite
body; he could see all her organs, everything belonging to her, everything
working smoothly together in its proper order—except . . . there.
Sharply, he began, “There’s one
burrowing in under your bikini top, on your left—”
“I know!” Elena interrupted. With
her back turned to him, she was wrestling with something under her skimpy top.
“I’ve been waiting to get it— there.” She tossed the malach into the bucket and
Damon blasted it.
“That’s all,” Damon said. “You’re
clean. Let’s go.”
“All right, but I need a minute to
change my clothes back. And—Damon?”
“What?” He made his voice harsh and
impatient because he didn’t know if he could stand much more of this: Elena’s
lovely body cleansed and sweet and her face so sad, her eyes so lost. Lost
because she thought he hated her. Because he was being the world’s biggest
bastard to her.
And he didn’t know how long he could
mask the fire with ice. At any moment, he felt that he might break down, snatch
her into his arms and rain kisses on her. Or
stroke her cheek gently as he slowly bent to taste her lips. Or even possibly
sling her over his shoulder and take her to the quietest, dimmest part of the
hayloft.
He wanted her blood. But that wasn’t
all he wanted. He didn’t want an unwilling or Influenced partner. He wanted the
golden glow of Elena’s love to shine for him.
He wanted to look down and see that special look in Elena’s eyes; the one that
she gave to Stefan for the smallest things—or for no reason at all.
And if Stefan weren’t in the
picture, he thought that he might be able to get it. Damon wasn’t vain; he was
simply practical. Girls liked him. If there were no Stefan, Elena would like
him—would . . . love . . . him. But here he was, on a quest to get Stefan back.
True, he was proceeding in the most roundabout fashion that he could—and not
just to throw pursuers off their trail—but eventually he would get to the Dark Dimension. And that hideous place wasn’t
where he wanted to take Elena at all.
But if he refused, Elena would
genuinely hate him. Or she might not even waste her time hating him, but simply
go straight to whatever Plan B that was percolating in the busy little mind
behind those malachite-blue eyes.
He wanted her to want him. But if
she wouldn’t of her own accord . . . frankly, Damon was frightened. Of what he
might do if the feelings inside him got too strong, Of what he might take that
Elena didn’t want to give.
“You can turn around. I’m ready
now,” Elena said in the quiet, carefully controlled voice she used for him ever
since he’d jerked away from her touch in the car. He turned, and saw that her
eyes were wet but also carefully expressionless. Because she thought he didn’t
like her. Because she had wanted to be friends, and he had pushed her away.
As ironically as possible, he
gestured to the ladder that was the way out of the hayloft. He noted that Elena
was wearing her thickest clothes, garments that covered her up from throat to
heels against enemies—or cold-blooded allies.
They reached the car and, after
Damon had burned the stray malach on the seats and floor mats to ash, got in. They
buckled up carefully, using the greatest caution to avoid touching each other
by mistake. Then Damon swung the car around savagely, taking his anger out on
the gravel road. He swung out onto the cross street and drove like a madman, as
if he could leave behind everything he had seen and heard and felt back at the
barn. It was many, many miles before Elena spoke.
“I don’t suppose,” she said
unsteadily, “that we could really sleep at a motel—just for tonight?”
“A motel?” Damon repeated blankly,
and then he thought. The two of them . . . just
the two of them, together, with all of his magical do-not-disturb wards on
the outside, and them both inside. Elena, full of stress and nervous energy,
her aura pulsing with her tension, her blood singing. She’d forgotten to be
afraid of him lately. Maybe it was time to show her why she had been before.
Suddenly Damon realized that he was
smiling brilliantly. Dazzlingly. Madly, in fact. He stopped it and said, “Why
not? After all—why the hell not?”
The beginning of
a legendary night . . .
