The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Shadow Souls (16 page)

“We’re not doing this right,” he said, and her thoughts flashed at once to her disobedience as a slave, and Bonnie and Meredith’s less serious infractions. But his voice was like dark velvet, and her body responded to it more accurately than her mind. It shivered.

“How…do we do it right?” she asked, and then she made the mistake of opening her eyes. She found that he was stooping over her as she sat on the chair, stroking—no, just touching—her hair so softly that she hadn’t even felt it.

“Vampires know how to take care of wounds,” he said confidently, and his great eyes that seemed to hold their own universe of stars caught and held her. “We can clean them. We can start them bleeding again—or stop them.”

I’ve felt like this before, Elena thought. He’s talked to me like this before, too, even if he doesn’t remember. And I—I was too frightened. But that was before…

Before the motel. The night when he’d told her to run, and she hadn’t. The night that Shinichi had taken, just as he’d taken the first time they’d shared Black Magic together.

“Show me,” whispered Elena. And she knew that something else in her mind was whispering too, whispering different words. Words that she would never have said if she had for a moment thought of herself as a slave.

Whispering,
I’m yours…

That was when she felt his mouth lightly brush her mouth.

And then she just thought,
Oh!
and
Oh, Damon
…until he moved to gently touch her cheek with his silky soft tongue, manipulating chemicals first to make cleansing blood flow, and finally when the impurities had all been so softly swept away, to stop the blood and to heal the wound. She could feel his Power now, the dark Power that he had used in a thousand fights, to inflict hundreds of mortal wounds, being held tightly in check to concentrate on this simple, homely task, to heal the mark of a whiplash on a girl’s cheek. Elena thought it was like being stroked with the petals of that Black Magic rose, its cool smooth petals gently sweeping away the pain, until she shivered in delight.

And then it stopped. Elena knew that she’d once again had too much wine. But this time she didn’t feel sick. The deceptively light drink had gone to her head, making her tipsy. Everything had taken on an unreal, dreamlike quality.

“It will finish healing well now,” Damon said, again touching her hair so softly that she could barely feel it. But this time she did feel it, because she sent out fingers of Power to meet the sensation and enjoy every moment of it. And once again he kissed her—so lightly—his lips barely brushing hers. When her head fell back, though, he didn’t follow, even when, disappointed, she tried to put pressure on the back of his neck. He simply waited until Elena thought things out…slowly.

We shouldn’t be kissing. Meredith and Bonnie are right next door. How do I get myself in situations like this? But Damon isn’t even trying to kiss…and we’re supposed to be—oh!

Her other wounds.

They really hurt now. What cruel person had thought up a whip like that, Elena thought, with a razor-thin lash that cut so deeply it didn’t even hurt at first—or not that much…but got worse and worse over time? And kept bleeding…we’re supposed to be stopping the bleeding until the doctor can see me….

But her next wound, the one that burned like fire now, was diagonally across her collarbone. And the third was near her knee….

Damon started to get up, to get another cloth from the sink and cleanse the cut with water.

Elena held him back. “No.”

“No? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“All I want to do is cleanse it….”

“I know.” She did know. His mind was open to hers, all its turbulent power running clear and tranquilly. She didn’t know why it had opened to her like this, but it had.

“But let me advise you, don’t go donating your blood to some dying vampire; don’t let anyone sample it. It’s worse than Black Magic—”

“Worse?” She knew he was complimenting her, but she didn’t understand.

“The more you drink, the more you want to drink,” Damon answered, and for a moment Elena saw the turbulence she had caused in those calm waters. “And the more you drink, the more Power you can absorb,” he added seriously. Elena realized that she had never even thought of this as a problem, but it was. She remembered the agony it had been to try to absorb her own aura before she had learned how to keep it moving with her bloodstream.

“Don’t worry,” he added, still serious. “I know who you’re thinking about.” He made a move again to get a cloth. But without knowing it, he had said too much, presumed too far.

“
You
know who I’m thinking about?” Elena said softly, and she was surprised at how dangerous her own voice could sound, like the soft padding of heavy tigress feet. “Without asking me?”

Damon tried to finesse his way out. “Well, I assumed….”

“
No one
knows what I’m thinking about,” Elena said. “Until I tell them.” She moved and made him kneel to look at her, questioningly. Hungrily.

Then, just as it was she who had made him kneel, it was she who drew him to her wound.

E
lena came back to the real world slowly, fighting it all the way. She sank her nails into the leather of Damon’s jacket, found herself wondering briefly if removing it would help, and then her mood was shattered again by that sound—a sharp, imperative knock.

Damon raised his head and snarled.

We
are
a pair of wolves, aren’t we? Elena thought. Fighting nail and tooth.

But, another part of her mind supplied, that isn’t stopping the knocking. He warned those girls….

Those girls! Bonnie and Meredith! And he’d said not to interrupt unless the house was on fire!

But, the doctor—oh, God, something’s happened to that poor, wretched woman! She’s dying!

Damon was still snarling, a trace of blood on his lips. It was only a trace, because her second wound had really been healed just as thoroughly as the first, the one across her cheekbone. Elena had no idea how long it had been since she had pulled Damon to her to kiss this cut. But now, with her blood in his veins and his pleasure interrupted, he was like an untamed black panther in her arms.

She didn’t know whether she could stop him or even slow him down without using raw Power on him.

“Damon!” she said aloud. “Out there—those are our friends. Remember? Bonnie and Meredith and the healer.”

“Meredith,” Damon said, and again his lips peeled back, exposing terrifyingly long canines. He still wasn’t in reality. If he saw Meredith now, he wouldn’t be frightened, Elena thought—and, oh yes, she knew how her logical, thoughtful friend made Damon uneasy. They saw the world through such different eyes. She irked him like a pebble in his shoe. But right now he might deal with that unease in a way that would leave Meredith a savaged corpse.

“Let me go see,” she said, as the knock came again—couldn’t they
stop
that? Didn’t she have enough to deal with?

Damon’s arms merely tightened around her. She felt a flash of heat, because she knew that, even as he restrained her, he was holding back so much of his strength. He didn’t want to crush her, as he could if he used a tenth of the power in his hard muscles alone.

The wave of feeling that washed over her made her shut her eyes briefly, helplessly, but she knew she had to be the voice of sanity here.

“Damon! They could be warning us—or Ulma may have died.”

Death
got through to him. His eyes were slits, the bloodred light from the kitchen shutters throwing bars of scarlet and black across his face, making him look more handsome—and more demonic—than ever.

“You’ll stay here.” Damon said it flatly, with no idea of being a “master” or a “gentleman.” He was a wild beast protecting his mate, the only creature in the world that wasn’t competition or food.

There was no arguing with him, not in this state. Elena would stay here. Damon would go to do whatever needed to be done. And Elena would stay for as long as he thought necessary.

Elena truly didn’t know whose thoughts these last were. She and Damon were still trying to untangle their emotions. She decided to watch him and only if he really got out of control…

You don’t want to see me out of control.

Feeling him snap from raw animal instinct to icy, perfect mental dominance was even scarier than the animal alone. She didn’t know whether Damon was the sanest person she had ever met or just the one best able to cover up his wildness. She held her torn blouse together and watched as he moved with effortless grace to the door and then, suddenly, violently, wrenched it almost off its hinges.

No one fell; no one had been listening in on their private conversation. But Meredith stood, restraining Bonnie with one hand, and with the other hand raised, ready to knock again.

“Yes?” Damon said in glacial tones. “I thought I told you—”

“You did, and there is,” Meredith said, interrupting
this
Damon in an unusual attempt to commit suicide.

“There is what?”
Damon snarled.

“There’s a mob outside threatening to burn the whole building down. I don’t know if they’re upset about Drohzne, or about us taking Ulma, but they’re enraged about something, and they’ve got torches. I didn’t want to interrupt Elena’s—treatment—but Dr. Meggar says they won’t listen to him. He’s a human.”

“He used to be a slave,” Bonnie added, wresting free of the chokehold that Meredith had on her. She looked up at Damon with streaming brown eyes, hands outstretched. “Only you can save us,” she said, translating the message of her gaze aloud—which meant that things were really serious.

“All right, all right. I’ll go take care of them. You take care of Elena.”

“Of course, but—”

“No.” Damon had either gone reckless with the blood—and the memories that were still keeping Elena from forming a coherent sentence—or he had somehow overcome all his fear of Meredith. He put a hand on each of her shoulders. He was only one and a half or two inches taller than she was, so he had no trouble holding her eyes. “You, personally, take care of Elena. Tragedies happen here every minute of the day: unforeseeable, horrible,
deadly
tragedies. I do
not
want one happening to Elena.”

Meredith looked at him for a long moment, and for once didn’t consult Elena with her eyes before answering a question involving her. She simply said, “I’ll protect her,” in a low voice that nevertheless carried. From her stance, from her tone, one could almost hear the unspoken addition, “with my life”—and it didn’t even seem melodramatic.

Damon let go of her, strode out the door, and without a backward glance disappeared from Elena’s sight. But his mental voice was crystalline in her mind:
You’ll be safe if there is any way to save you. I swear it.

If
there was any way to save her. Wonderful. Elena tried to kickstart her brain.

Meredith and Bonnie were both staring at her. Elena took a deep breath, automatically sucked for a moment back into the old days, when a girl fresh from a hot date could expect a long and serious debriefing.

But all Bonnie said was, “Your face—it looks much better now!”

“Yes,” Elena said, using the two ends of her blouse to tie a makeshift top around her. “My leg’s the problem. We didn’t—didn’t finish it yet.”

Bonnie opened her mouth, but closed it determinedly, which from Bonnie was a display of heroics similar to Meredith’s promise to Damon. When she opened it again it was to say, “Take my scarf and tie it around your leg. We can fold it sideways and then tie a bow over the side that got hurt. That’ll keep pressure on it.”

Meredith said, “I think Dr. Meggar has finished with Ulma. Maybe he can see you.”

In the other room, the doctor was once again washing his hands, using a large pump to get more water into the basin. There were deeply red-stained cloths in a pile and a smell that Elena was grateful the doctor had camouflaged with herbs. Also in a large, comfortable-looking chair there sat a woman whom Elena did not recognize.

Suffering and terror could change a person, Elena knew, but she could never have realized how much—nor how much relief and freedom from pain could change a face. She had brought with her a woman who huddled until she was almost child-size in Elena’s mind, and whose thin, ravaged face, twisted with agony and unrelenting dread, had seemed almost a sort of abstract drawing of a goblin hag. Her skin had been sickly gray in color, her thin hair had scarcely seemed enough to cover her head, and yet it had hung down in strands like seaweed. Everything about her screamed out that she was a slave, from the iron bands around her wrists, to her nakedness and scarred, bloody body, to her bare and rusty feet. Elena could not even have told you the color of the woman’s eyes, for they had seemed as gray as the rest of her.

Now Elena was confronted by a woman who was perhaps in her early-to mid-thirties. She had a lean, attractive, somehow aristocratic face, with a strong, patrician nose, dark, keen-looking eyes, and beautiful eyebrows like the wings of a flying bird. She was relaxing in the armchair, with her feet up on an ottoman, slowly brushing her hair, which was dark with occasional streaks of gray that lent an air of dignity to the simple deep blue housecoat she was wearing. Her face had wrinkles that lent it character, but overall one sensed a sort of yearning tenderness about her, perhaps because of the slight bulge in her abdomen, which she now gently laid a hand on. When she did this her face bloomed with color and her whole aspect glowed.

For an instant Elena thought this must be the doctor’s wife or housekeeper and she had a temptation to ask whether Ulma, the poor wreck of a slave, had died.

Then she saw what one cuff of the deep blue housecoat could not quite conceal: a glimpse of an iron bracelet.

This lean dark aristocratic woman was Ulma. The doctor had worked a miracle.

A healer, he had called himself. It was obvious that, like Damon, he could heal wounds. No one who had been whipped as Ulma had could have come round to this state without some powerful magic. Trying to simply stitch up the bloody mess that Elena had brought in had obviously been impossible, and so Dr. Meggar had healed her.

Elena had never experienced a situation like this, so she fell back upon the good manners that had been bred into her as a Virginian.

“It’s nice to meet you, ma’am. I’m Elena,” she said, and held out her hand.

The brush fell onto the chair. The woman reached out with both hands to take Elena’s into hers. Those keen dark eyes seemed to devour Elena’s face.

“You’re the one,” she said, and then, swinging her slippered feet off the ottoman, she went down on her knees.

“Oh, no, ma’am! Please! I’m sure the doctor told you to rest. It’s best to sit quietly now.”

“But you
are
the one.” For some reason, the woman seemed to need confirmation. And Elena was willing to do anything to pacify her.

“I’m the one,” Elena said. “And now I think you should sit down again.”

Obedience was immediate, and yet there was a sort of joyful light about everything Ulma did. Elena understood it after only a few hours of slavery. Obeying when one had a choice was entirely different from obeying because disobedience could mean death.

But even as Ulma sat, she held out her arms. “Look at me! Dear seraph, goddess, Guardian—whatever you are: look at me! After three years of living as a beast I have become human again—because of you! You came like an angel of lightning and stood between me and the lash.” Ulma began to weep, but they seemed to be tears of joy. Her eyes searched Elena’s face, lingering on the scarred cheekbone. “But you’re no Guardian; they have magicks that protect them and they never interfere. For three years, they never interfered. I saw all my friends, my fellow slaves, fall to
his
whip and
his
rage.” She shook her head, as if physically unable to say Drohzne’s name.

“I’m so sorry—so sorry….” Elena was fumbling. She glanced back and saw that Bonnie and Meredith were similarly stricken.

“It doesn’t matter. I heard your mate killed him on the street.”

“I told her that,” Lakshmi said proudly. She had entered the room without anyone noticing her.

“My mate?” Elena faltered. “Well, he’s not my—I mean, he and I—we—”

“He’s our master,” Meredith said bluntly, from behind Elena.

Ulma was still looking at Elena with her heart in her eyes. “Every day, I will pray for your soul to ascend from here.”

Elena was startled. “Souls can ascend from here?”

“Of course. Repentance and good deeds may accomplish it, and the prayers of others are always taken into consideration, I think.”

You sure don’t talk like a slave, Elena mused. She tried to think of a way to put it delicately, but she was confused and her leg hurt and her emotions were in turmoil. “You don’t sound like—well, like what I’d expect from a slave,” she said. “Or am I just being an idiot?”

She could see the tears form in Ulma’s eyes.

“Oh, God! Please, forget I asked. Please—”

“No! There is no one I would rather tell. If you wish to hear how I came to this degraded state.” Ulma waited, watching Elena—it was clear that Elena’s least wish was to Ulma, a command.

Elena looked at Meredith and Bonnie. She couldn’t hear any more noises of yelling outside on the street and the building certainly didn’t seem to be on fire.

Fortunately, at that moment, Dr. Meggar wandered in again. “Everybody getting acquainted?” he asked, his eyebrows working in opposition now; one up, one down. He had the remnants of a bottle of Black Magic in his hand.

“Yes,” Elena said, “but I was just wondering if we should be trying to evacuate or anything. Apparently there was a mob—”

“Elena’s mate is going to give them something to think about,” Lakshmi said with relish. “They’ve all gone to the Meeting Place to resolve the stuff about Drohzne’s property. I bet
he’ll
bash a few heads in and be back in no time,” she added cheerfully, leaving no doubt as to
he
was. “Wish I was a boy so I could see it.”

“You were braver than the boys; you were the one who led us here,” Elena told her. Then she consulted Meredith and Bonnie with her eyes. It sounded as if the commotion had moved on elsewhere, and Damon was a master at getting himself out of commotions. He might also…
need
to fight, to rid himself of excess energy from Elena’s blood. A commotion might actually be good for him, Elena thought.

She looked at Dr. Meggar. “Will my—will our master be all right, do you think?”

Dr. Meggar’s eyebrows went up and down. “He’ll probably have to pay Old Drohzne’s relatives a blood price, but it shouldn’t be too high. Then he can do what he likes with the old bastard’s property,” he said. “I’d say the safest place for you right now is here, away from the Meeting Place.” He went on to enforce that opinion by pouring them all glasses—liqueur glasses, Elena noted—of Black Magic wine. “Good for the nerves,” he said and took a sip.