The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Nightfall (15 page)

Fifty yards west and thirty feet straight up, Damon was struggling to keep awake.

Shinichi reached up to brush fine hair the color of night and flames licking upward off his forehead. Under his lowered lids he was watching Damon intently.

Damon meant to be watching him as intently, but he was simply too drowsy. Slowly, he imitated Shinichi’s motion, brushing a very few strands of silky black hair off his own forehead. His lids drooped inadvertently, just a little more than before. Shinichi was still smiling at him.

“So we have our deal,” he murmured. “We get the town, Misao and I, and you don’t stand in our way. We get the rights to the power of the ley lines. You get your girls safely out…and you get your revenge.”

“Against my sanctimonious brother and that…that Mutt!”

“Matt.” Shinichi had sharp ears.

“Whatever. I just won’t have Elena hurt, is all. Or the little red-headed witch.”

“Ah, yes, sweet Bonnie. I wouldn’t mind one or two like her. One for Samhain and one for the Solstice.”

Damon snorted drowsily. “There aren’t two like her; I don’t care where you look. I won’t have her hurt either.”

“And what about the tall, dark-haired beauty…Meredith?”

Damon woke up.
“Where?”

“Don’t worry; she’s not coming to get you,” Shinichi said soothingly. “What do you want
done
with her?”

“Oh.” Damon lounged back again in relief, easing his shoulders. “Let her go her own way—as long as it’s far away from mine.”

Shinichi seemed to deliberately relax back against his branch. “Your brother will be no problem. So it’s really just that other boy down there,” he murmured. He had a very insinuating murmur.

“Yes. But my brother—” Damon was almost asleep now, in the exact position that Shinichi had taken.

“I told you, he’ll be taken care of.”

“Mm. I mean, good.”

“So we have a deal?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“We have a deal.”

This time, Damon didn’t respond. He was dreaming. He dreamed that Shinichi’s angelic golden eyes snapped open suddenly to look at him.

“Damon.” He heard his name, but in his dream it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He could see without opening them, anyway.

In his dream, Shinichi leaned over him, hovering directly over his face, so that their auras mixed and they would have shared breath if Damon had been breathing. Shinichi stayed that way a long time, as if he were testing Damon’s aura, but Damon knew that to an outsider he would appear to be out on all channels and frequencies. Still, in his dream Shinichi hung over him, as if he were trying to memorize the crescent of dark lashes on Damon’s pale cheek or the subtle curve of Damon’s mouth.

Finally, the dream-Shinichi put his hand under Damon’s head and stroked the spot where the mosquito bite had itched.

“Oh, growing up to be a fine big lad, aren’t you?” he said to something Damon couldn’t see—to something
inside
him. “You could almost take full control against his own strong will, couldn’t you?”

Shinichi sat for a moment, as if watching a cherry blossom fall, then shut his eyes.

“I think,” he whispered, “that that’s what we’ll try, not too long from now. Soon. Very soon. But first, we have to gain his trust; get rid of his rival. Keep him blurred, angry, vain, off balance. Keep him thinking of Stefan, of his hatred for Stefan, who took his angel, while
I
take care
of what needs to be done here.”

Then he spoke directly to Damon. “Allies, indeed!” He laughed. “Not while I can put my finger on your very soul. Here. Do you feel it? What I could make you do…”

And then again he seemed to address whatever creature was already inside Damon: “But right now…a little feast to help you grow up much faster and get much stronger.”

In the dream, Shinichi made a gesture, and lay back, encouraging previously invisible malach to come up the trees. They slunk up and slid up the back of Damon’s neck. And then, hideously, they slipped inside him, one by one, through some cut he hadn’t known he had. The feeling of their soft, flabby, jellyfish-like bodies was almost unbearable…slipping inside of him….

Shinichi sang softly.

In his dream, Damon was angry. Not because of the nonsense about malach inside him. That was ludicrous. He was angry because he knew that the dream-Shinichi was watching Elena as she began to pack up the remains
of the picnic. He was watching every motion she made with an obsessive closeness.

“Extraordinary girl, your Elena,” the dream-Shinichi added. “If she lives, I think she’ll be mine for a night or so.” He stroked the remaining strands of hair off Damon’s forehead gently. “Extraordinary aura, don’t you think? I’ll make sure her death is beautiful.”

But Damon was in one of those dreams where you can neither move nor speak. He didn’t answer.

Meanwhile, dream-Shinichi’s dream-pets continued to climb the trees and pour themselves, like Jell-O, inside him. One, two, three, a dozen, two dozen of them.
More
.

And Damon could not wake, even though he sensed more malach coming from the Old Wood. They were neither dead, nor living, neither man nor maiden, mere capsules of Power that would allow Shinichi to control Damon’s mind from far away. Endlessly, they came.

Shinichi kept watching the flow, the bright sparkle of internal organs sparkling into Damon. After a while he sang again,

Damon dreamed that he heard the word “forget” as if whispered by a hundred voices. And even as he tried to remember what to forget, it dissolved and disappeared.

He woke up alone in the tree, with an ache that filled his entire body.

S
tefan was surprised to find Mrs. Flowers waiting for them when they returned from their picnic. And, also unusually, she had something to say that didn’t involve her gardens.

“There is a message for you upstairs,” she said, jerking her head toward the narrow staircase. “It came from a dark young fellow—he looked somewhat like you. He wouldn’t leave a word with me. Just asked where to leave a message.”

“Dark fellow? Damon?” Elena asked.

Stefan shook his head. “What would he want to be leaving me messages for?”

He left Elena with Mrs. Flowers and hastened up the crazy, zigzagging stairs. At the top he found a piece of paper stuffed under the door.

It was a Thinking of You card, sans envelope. Stefan, who knew his brother, doubted that it had been paid for—with money, at least. Inside, in heavy black felt-tipped pen, were the words:

That was all…except for a Web address.

Stefan was about to throw the note in the wastebasket when curiosity assailed him. He turned on the computer, directed it to the proper website, and watched. For a while, nothing happened. Then very dark gray letters on a black screen appeared. To a human, it would have appeared to be a completely blank screen. To vampires, with their higher visual acuity, the gray on black was faint but clear.

Stefan started to close the page, but something stopped him. He sat and stared at the inconspicuous little ad beneath the poem until he heard Elena at the door. He quickly closed the computer and went to take the picnic basket from her. He said nothing about the note or what he’d seen on the computer screen. But as the night went on, he thought more and more.

“Oh! Stefan, you’ll break my ribs! You squeezed all my breath out!”

“I’m sorry. I just need to hold you.”

“Well, I need to hold you, too.”

“Thank you, angel.”

Everything was quiet in the room with the high ceiling. One window was open, letting the moonlight through. In the sky, even the moon seemed to creep stealthily along, and the shaft of moonlight followed it on the hardwood floor.

Damon smiled. He had had a long, restful day and now he meant to have an interesting night.

Getting through the window wasn’t quite as easy as he’d expected. When he arrived as a huge, glossy black crow, he was expecting to balance on the windowsill and change to human form to open the window. But the window had a trap on it—it was linked by Power to one of the sleepers inside. Damon puzzled over it, preening himself viciously, afraid to put any tension on that thin
link, when something arrived beside him in a flutter of wings.

It looked like no respectable crow ever registered in the sighting book of any ornithologist. It was sleek enough, but its wings were tipped with scarlet, and it had golden, shining eyes.

Shinichi?
Damon asked.

Who else?
came the reply as a golden eye fixed on him.
I see you have a problem. But it can be fixed. I’ll deepen their sleep so that you can cut the link.

Don’t!
Damon said reflexively.
If you so much as touch either of them, Stefan will—

The answer came in soothing tones.
Stefan’s just a boy, remember? Trust me. You do trust me, don’t you?

And it worked out exactly as the demonically colored bird said it would. The sleepers inside slept more deeply, and then more deeply still.

A moment later the window opened, and Damon changed form and was inside. His brother and…and
she
…the one he always
had
to watch…
she
was lying asleep, her golden hair lying across the pillow and lying across his brother’s body.

Damon tore his eyes away. There was a medium-sized, slightly outdated computer on the desk in the corner. He went over to it and without the slightest hesitation turned it on. The two on the bed never stirred.

Files…aha.
Diary.
How original a name. Damon opened it and examined the contents.

Damon’s eyes skimmed over these lines impatiently. He was looking for something quite different. Ah. Yes. This was more like it:

A traitor? That seemed a little strong, Damon thought, hurt, but also burning with an intense desire to get on with his task.

Oh damn, thought Damon. It was going to be hard to get that card without waking her. But he had to do it.

Carefully, Damon deleted the words in this file. Then, with one corner of his mouth quirked up, he carefully, silently typed in new words with a rather different meaning. He read them over. He smiled brilliantly. He’d always fancied himself a writer; no formal training of course, but he felt he had an instinctive flair for it.

And that was Step One accomplished, Damon thought, saving the file with his words instead of Stefan’s.

Then, noiselessly, he walked to where Elena was sleeping, spooned behind Stefan on the narrow bed.

Now for Step Two.

Slowly, very slowly, Damon slipped his fingers under the pillow on which Elena’s head rested. He could feel Elena’s hair where it spilled on her pillow in the moonlight, and the ache that it awoke was more in his chest than in his canines. Inching his fingers under the pillow, he searched for something smooth.

Elena murmured in her sleep and suddenly turned over. Damon almost jumped back into the shadows, but Elena’s eyes were shut, her lashes a thick inky crescent on her cheeks.

She was facing him now, but strangely Damon didn’t find himself tracing the blue veins in her fair, smooth skin. He found himself staring hungrily at her slightly parted
lips. They were…almost impossible to resist. Even in sleep they were the color of rose petals, slightly moist, and parted that way….

I could do it very lightly. She would never know. I could, I know I could. I feel invincible tonight.

As he bent toward her his fingers touched cardboard.

It seemed to jerk him out of a dream world. What had he been thinking? Risking everything, all his plans, for a
kiss
? There would be plenty of time for kisses—and other, much more important things—later.

He slipped the little card out from under the pillow and put it in his pocket.

Then he became a crow and vanished from the windowsill.

Stefan had long ago perfected the art of sleeping only until a certain moment, then awakening. He did this now, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece to confirm that it was four
A.M
. exactly.

He didn’t want to awaken Elena.

He dressed soundlessly and exited the window by the same route his brother had—only as a hawk. Somewhere, he was sure Damon was being made a fool by someone using malachs to make him their puppet. And Stefan, still pumped up with Elena’s blood, felt that he had a duty to stop them.

The note Damon had delivered had directed him to
the tree where the humans had crashed. Damon would also want to continually revisit that tree until he’d traced the malach puppets to their puppeteer.

He swooped, drifted, and once almost gave a mouse a heart attack by stooping down on it suddenly before rocketing skyward again.

And then, in midair, as he saw evidence of a car hitting a tree, he changed from a glorious hawk to a young man with dark hair, a pale face, and intensely green eyes.

He drifted, light as a snowflake, down to the ground and gazed in each direction, using all his vampire senses to test the area. He could feel nothing of a trap; no animosity, just the unmistakable signs of the trees’ violent fight. He stayed human to climb the tree that bore the psychic imprint of his brother.

He wasn’t chilly as he climbed the oak his brother had been lounging in when the accident had taken place at his feet. He had too much of Elena’s blood running through him to feel the cold. But he was aware that this area of the forest was particularly cold; that something was keeping it that way. Why? He’d already claimed the rivers and forests that ran through Fell’s Church, so why take up lodging here without telling him? Whatever it was, it would have to present itself before him eventually, if it wanted to stay in Fell’s Church. Why wait? he wondered, as he squatted on the branch.