The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Shadow Souls (14 page)

Well, maybe the kitsune and the demons need them, Elena reasoned, shuddering at the idea of what a demon might want to eat. On the street corners were hard-faced, scantily clad girls and boys, and tattered, haggard people holding pathetic signs:
A MEMORY FOR A MEAL
.

“What do they mean?” Elena asked Damon, but he didn’t answer her immediately.

“This is how the free humans of the city spend most of their time,” he said. “So remember that, before you start going on one of your crusades—”

Elena wasn’t listening. She was staring at one of the holders of such a sign. The man was horribly thin, with a straggly beard and bad teeth, but worse was his look of vacant despair. Every so often he would hold out a trembling hand on which there was a small, clear ball, which he balanced on his palm, muttering, “A summer’s day when I was young. A summer’s day for a ten-geld piece.” As often as not there was no one near when he said this.

Elena slipped off a lapis ring Stefan had given her and held it toward him. She didn’t want to annoy Damon by getting out of the litter, and she had to say, “Come here, please,” while holding the ring toward the bearded man.

He heard, and came to the litter quickly enough. Elena saw something move in his beard—lice, perhaps—and she forced herself to stare at the ring as she said, “Take it. Quickly, please.”

The old man stared at the ring as if it were a banquet. “I don’t have change,” he moaned, bringing up his hand and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He seemed about to drop to the ground unconscious. “I don’t have change!”

“I don’t want change!” Elena said through the huge swelling that had formed in her throat. “Take the ring. Hurry or I’ll drop it.”

He snatched it from her fingers as the litter bearers started forward again. “May the
Guardians
bless you, lady,” he said, trying to keep up with the litter bearer’s trot. “Hear me who may! May
They
bless you!”

“You really shouldn’t,” Damon said to Elena when the voice had died away behind them. “He’s not going to get a meal with that, you know.”

“He was hungry,” Elena said softly. She couldn’t explain that he reminded her of Stefan, not just now. “It was
my
ring,” she added defensively. “I suppose you’re going to say he’ll spend it on alcohol or drugs.”

“No, but he won’t get a meal with it, either. He’ll get a banquet.”

“Well, so much the—”

“In his imagination. He’ll get a dusty orb with some old vampire’s memory of a Roman feast, or someone from the city’s memory of a modern one. Then he’ll play it over and over as he slowly starves to death.”

Elena was appalled. “Damon! Quick! I have to go back and find him—”

“You can’t, I’m afraid.” Lazily, Damon held up a hand. He had a firm grip on her rope. “Besides, he’s long gone.”

“How can he do that? How could anyone do that?”

“How can a lung cancer patient refuse to quit smoking? But I agree that those orbs can be the most addictive substances of all. Blame the kitsune for bringing their star balls here and making them the most popular form of obsession.”

“Star balls? Hoshi no tama?” Elena gasped.

Damon stared at her, looking equally surprised. “You
know
about them?”

“All I know is what Meredith researched. She said that kitsune were often portrayed with either keys”—she raised her eyebrows at him—“or with star balls. And that myths say they can put some or all of their power in the ball, so that if you find it, you can control the kitsune. She and Bonnie want to find Misao’s or Shinichi’s star balls and have control over them.”

“Be still, my unbeating heart,” Damon said dramatically, but the next second he was all business. “Remember what that old guy said? A summer’s day for a meal? He was talking about
this
.” Damon picked up the little marble that the old man had dropped on the litter and held it to Elena’s temple.

The world disappeared.

Damon was gone. The sights and sounds—yes, and the smells—of the bazaar were gone. She was sitting on green grass which rippled in a slight breeze and she was looking at a weeping willow that bent down to a stream that was copper and deep, deep green at once. There was some sweet scent in the air—honeysuckle, freesia? Something delicious that stirred Elena as she leaned back to gaze at picture-perfect white clouds rolling in a cerulean sky.

She felt—she didn’t know how to say it. She felt young, but somewhere in her mind she knew that she was actually younger than this alien personality that had taken hold of her. Still, she felt excited that it was springtime and every golden-green leaf, every springy little reed, every weightless white cloud seemed to be rejoicing with her.

Then suddenly her heart was pounding. She had just caught the sound of a footfall behind her. In one, springing joyous moment she was on her feet, arms held out in the extremity of her love, the wild devotion she felt for this…

…this young girl? Something inside the sphere user’s brain seemed to fall back in bewilderment. Most of it, though, was taken up with cataloguing the perfections of the girl who had crept up so lightly in the waving grass: the clustering dark curls at her neck, the flashing green eyes below arching brows, the smooth glowing skin of her cheeks as she laughed with her lover, pretending to run away on feet as light as any elf’s…!

Pursued and pursuer both fell down together on the soft carpet of long grass…and then things quickly got so steamy that Elena, the distant mind in the background, began wondering how on earth you made one of these things
stop
. Every time she put her hand to her temple, groping, she was caught and kissed breathless by…Allegra…that was the girl, Allegra. And Allegra was certainly beautiful, especially through this particular viewer’s eyes. The creamy soft skin of her…

And then, with a shock just as great as she’d felt when the bazaar disappeared, it appeared again. She was Elena; she was riding on the litter with Damon; there was a cacophony of sounds around her—and a thousand different smells, too. But she was breathing hard and part of her was still resounding with John—that had been his name—with John’s love for Allegra.

“But I
still
don’t understand,” she almost keened.

“It’s simple,” Damon said. “You put a blank star ball of the size you like to your temple and you think back to the time you want to record. The star ball does the rest.” He waved off her attempted interruption and leaned forward with mischief in those fathomless black eyes of his. “Perhaps you got an especially
warm
summer day?” he said, adding suggestively, “These litters do have curtains you can draw closed.”

“Don’t be silly, Damon,” Elena said, but John’s feelings had sparked her own, like flint and tinder. She didn’t want to kiss Damon, she told herself sternly. She wanted to kiss Stefan. But since a moment ago she had been kissing
Allegra
, it didn’t seem as strong an argument as it could be.

“I don’t think,” she began, still breathless, as Damon reached for her, “that this is a very good…”

With a smooth flick of the rope, Damon untied her hands completely. He would have pulled it off both wrists, but Elena immediately half-turned, supporting herself with that hand. She needed the support.

In the circumstances, though, there was nothing more meaningful—or more…exciting…than what Damon had done.

He hadn’t drawn the curtains, but Bonnie and Meredith were behind them on their own litter, out of sight. Certainly out of Elena’s mind. She felt warm arms around her, and instinctively nestled into them. She felt a surge of pure love and appreciation for Damon, for his understanding that she could never do this as a slave with a master.

We’re both of us unmastered
, she heard in her head, and she remembered that when cooling down most of her psychic abilities she had forgotten to set the volume on low for this one. Oh, well, it might just come in handy….

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?”

D
amon 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.

“Well? What do you think?” Damon seemed to be trying to placate her.

“I still think it looks like Hell,” Elena said slowly. “I’d hate to live here.”

“Ah, but whoever said that we should live here, my Princess of Darkness? We’ll go back home, where the night is velvet black and the moon shines down, making everything silver.” Slowly, Damon traced one finger from her hand, up her arm to her shoulder. It sent an inner shiver through her.

She tried holding the veil up as a barrier against him, but it was too transparent. He still flashed that brilliant smile at her, dazzling through the diamond-dotted white—well, shell pink, of course, because of the light—that was on her side of the veil.

“Does this place have a moon?” she asked, trying to distract him. She was afraid—afraid of him—afraid of herself.

“Oh, yes: three or four of them, I think. But they’re very small and of course the sun never goes down, so you can’t see them as well. Not…romantic.” He smiled at her, again, slowly this time, and Elena looked away.

And in looking, she saw something in front of her that captured her entire attention. In a side street a cart had overturned, spilling large rolls made out of fur and leather. There was a thin, hungry-looking old woman attached to the cart like a beast, who was lying on the ground, and a tall angry man standing over her, raining down blows with a whip on her unprotected body.

The woman’s face was turned toward Elena. It was contorted in a grimace of anguish, as she tried ineffectually to roll into a ball, her hands over her stomach. She was naked from the waist up, but as the whip lashed into her flesh, her body from throat to waist was being covered by a coating of blood.

Elena felt herself swelling with Wing Powers, but somehow none would come. She willed with all her circulating life-force for something—
anything
—to break free from her shoulders, but it was no good. Maybe it had something to do with wearing the remains of slave bracelets. Maybe it was Damon, beside her, telling her in a forceful voice not to get involved.

To Elena, his words were no more than punctuation to the heartbeat pounding in her ears. She jerked the rope sharply out of his hands, and then scrambled out of the litter. In six or seven leaps she was beside the man with the whip.

He was a vampire, his fangs elongated at the sight of the blood before him, but never stopping his frenzied lashing. He was too strong for Elena to handle, but…

With one more step Elena was straddling the woman, both her arms flung out in the universal gesture of protection and defiance. Rope dangled from one wrist.

The slave owner was not impressed. He was already launching the next whiplash, and it struck Elena across the cheek and simultaneously opened a great gap in her thin summer top, slicing through her camisole and scoring the flesh underneath. As she gasped, the tail of the whip cut through her jeans as if denim were butter.

Tears formed involuntarily in Elena’s eyes, but she ignored them. She had managed not to make a sound other than that initial gasp. And she still stood exactly where she had first landed in protection. Elena could feel the wind whip at her tattered blouse, while her untouched veil waved behind her, as if to protect the poor slave who had collapsed against the ruined cart.

Elena was still desperately trying to bring out any kind of Wings. She wanted to fight with real weapons, and she had them, but she couldn’t force them to save either her or the poor slave behind her. Even without them Elena knew one thing. That bastard in front of her wasn’t going to touch his slave again, not unless he cut Elena into pieces first.

Someone stopped to stare, and someone else came out of a shop, running. When the children who’d been trailing her litter surrounded her, wailing, a crowd of sorts gathered.

Apparently it was one thing to see a merchant beating his worn-out drab—the people around here must have seen that almost daily. But to see this beautiful new girl having her clothes slashed away, this girl with hair like golden silk under a veil of gold and white, and eyes that perhaps reminded some of them of a barely remembered blue sky—that was quite another thing. Moreover, the new girl was obviously a fresh barbarian slave who had clearly humiliated her master by tearing the lead ropes from his hands and was standing now with her sanctity veil made into a mockery.

Terrific street theater.

And even given all of that, the slave owner was preparing for another stroke, raising his arm high and preparing to put his back into it. A few people in the crowd gasped; others were muttering indignantly. Elena’s new sense of hearing, turned up high, could catch their whispering. A girl like
this
wasn’t meant for the slums at all; she must have been destined for the heart of the city. Her aura alone was enough to show that. In fact, with that golden hair and those vivid blue eyes, she might even be a Guardian from the Other Side. Who knew—?

The lash that was raised never descended. Before it could, there was a flash of black lightning—pure Power—that sent half the crowd scattering. A vampire, young in appearance and dressed in the clothing of the upper world, Earth, had made his way to stand between the golden girl and the slave owner—or rather to loom over the now cringing slave owner. The few in the crowd not stirred by the girl immediately felt their hearts pulse at the sight of
him
. He was the girl’s owner, surely, and now he would see to the situation.

At that instant, Bonnie and Meredith arrived on the scene. They were reclining on their litter, decorously draped in their veils, Meredith in starry midnight blue and Bonnie in soft pale green. They could have been an illustration for
The Arabian Nights
.

But the moment they saw Damon and Elena, they most indecorously jumped off the litter. By now the crowd was so thick that working their way to the front required using elbows and knees, but in only seconds they were at Elena’s side, hands defiantly unbound or trailing rope that hung defiantly free, veils floating in the wind.

When they did arrive beside Elena, Meredith gasped. Bonnie’s eyes opened wide and stayed that way. Elena understood what they were seeing. Blood was flowing freely from the cut across her cheekbone and her blouse kept opening in the wind to reveal her torn and bloody camisole. One leg of her jeans was rapidly turning red.

But, drawn up into the protection of her shadow, was a far more pitiful figure. And as Meredith raised Elena’s diaphanous veil to help keep her blouse closed and once more enshroud her in decency, the woman herself raised her head, to look at the three girls with the eyes of a dumb and hunted animal.

Behind them, Damon said softly, “I shall quite enjoy this,” as he lifted the heavy man into the air with one hand and then struck his throat like a cobra. There was a hideous scream, which went on and on.

No one tried to interfere, and no one tried to cheer the slave owner on to make a fight.

Elena, scanning the faces of the crowd, realized why. She and her friends had become used to Damon—or as used as you could become to his half-tamed air of ferocity. But these people were getting their first look at the young man dressed all in black, of medium height and slim build, who made up for his lack of bulging muscle with a supple and deadly grace. This was enhanced by the gift of somehow dominating all the space around him, so that he effortlessly became the focal point of any picture—the way a black panther might become the focal point if it were walking lazily down a crowded city street.

Even here, where menace and an aspect of outright evil were commonplace, this young man exuded a quality of danger that made people want to stay out of his line of sight, much less his way.