The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Shadow Souls (19 page)

A light went on in Elena’s mind.

“Of course,” she said. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

“Think of what before?” Damon said desperately.

“We don’t fight the war—now. I haven’t even mastered my basic Powers, much less my Wings Powers. And this way they won’t even wonder about them.”

“Elena?”

“We come back,” Elena explained to him excitedly. “When I can control all my Powers. And we bring allies with us—strong allies we’ll find in the human world. It may take years and years but someday we come back and finish what we started.”

Damon was staring at her as if she’d gone mad, but that didn’t matter. Elena could feel Power coursing through her. This was one promise, she thought, that she would keep if it killed her.

Damon swallowed. “Can we talk about—about the present now?” he asked.

It was as if he had hit a bull’s-eye.

The present. Now.

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Elena looked at the ash cane contemptuously. “Of course, I’ll do it, Damon. I don’t want anyone else hurt because of me before I’m ready to fight. Dr. Meggar is a good healer. If they allow me to come back to him.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Damon said, holding her gaze. “But I do know one thing. You won’t feel a single blow, I promise you that,” he said quickly and earnestly, his dark eyes very big. “I’ll take care of that; it’ll all be channeled away. And you won’t even see a trace of a mark by morning. But,” he finished much more slowly, “you’ll have to kneel to apologize to me, your owner, and to that filthy, scrofulous, abominable old—” Damon’s imprecations carried him away for a moment so that he lapsed into Italian.

“To who?”

“To the leader of the slums, and possibly to Old Drohzne’s brother, Young Drohzne, as well.”

“Okay. Tell them I’ll apologize to as many Drohznes as they want. Tell them quick, in case we lose our chance.”

Elena could see the look he gave her, but her mind was turned inward. Would she let Meredith or Bonnie do this? No. Would she allow it to happen to Caroline if by any means she could stop it? Again, no. No, no, no. Elena’s feelings about brutality toward girls and women had always been exceedingly strong. Her feelings about the worldwide second-class citizenship of females had become remarkably clear since her return from the afterlife. If she had been returned to the world for any purpose, she had decided, helping to free girls and women from the slavery that many of them could not even see, was part of it.

But this wasn’t just about a vicious slaveholder and faceless oppressed women and men. It was about Lady Ulma, and keeping her and her baby safe…and it was about Stefan. If she gave in, she would be just an impudent slave who caused a small ruckus in the road, but was firmly put back into her place by authorities.

Otherwise, if their party was scrutinized…if someone realized that they were here to release Stefan…if Elena was the one who caused the order to come: “Move him into stricter security—get rid of that silly kitsune-key thing….”

Her mind was ablaze with images of ways that Stefan could be punished, could be taken away, could be
lost
if this incident in the slums took on undue proportions.

No. She would not abandon Stefan now to fight a war that could not be won. But she wouldn’t forget, either.

I’ll come back for all of you, she promised. And then the story will have a different ending.

She realized that Damon still hadn’t left. He was watching her with eyes as keen as a falcon’s. “They sent me to bring you,” he said quietly. “They never thought of a no for an answer.” Elena could briefly feel the fierce rage of his fury at them and she took his hand and squeezed it.

“I’m coming back with you in the future, for the slaves,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Elena, and her quick kiss became a longer kiss. She hadn’t really absorbed what Damon had said about channeling away the pain. She felt she was due just one kiss for what she was about to endure, and then Damon stroked her hair and time meant nothing until Meredith knocked at the door.

The bloody-red dawn had taken on a bizarre, almost dreamlike quality by the time Elena was led to an open-air structure where the slumlords in charge of this area were seated on piles of once fine, now threadbare cushions. They were passing back and forth bottles and jeweled leather flasks filled with Black Magic, the only wine vampires could really enjoy, smoking hookahs and occasionally spitting into the darker shadows. This was regardless of the huge audience of street people dizzily attracted by word of a beautiful young human’s public punishment.

Elena had been rehearsed in her lines. She was marched, gagged, hands manacled, before the hawking and spitting authorities. Young Drohzne was sitting in somewhat uncomfortable glory on a golden couch, and Damon was standing between him and the authorities, looking tense. Elena had never been so tempted to improvise a part since her junior play, when she had thrown a flowerpot at Petruchio and brought down the house in the last scene of
The Taming of the Shrew.

But this was deadly serious business. Stefan’s freedom, Bonnie’s and Meredith’s lives might depend upon it. Elena moved her tongue around inside her mouth, which was bone dry.

And, oddly, she found Damon’s eyes, the man with the stick, uplifting her. He seemed to be telling her
courage and indifference
without using telepathy at all. Elena wondered if he himself had ever been in a similar situation.

She was kicked by one of her escorts and remembered where she was. She’d been loaned an “appropriate” costume from the discarded wardrobe of Dr. Meggar’s married daughter. It was pearl-colored indoors, which meant it was mauve in the everlasting crimson sunlight. Most important, worn without its silken undershirt, its back plunged to below Elena’s waistline, leaving Elena’s own back completely bare. Now, in accordance with custom, she knelt in front of the elders, and bowed until her forehead rested on an ornate and very dirty carpet at the feet of the elders, but several steps lower. One of them spat on her.

There was excited, appreciative chattering, and ribaldry, and thrown missiles, mostly in the form of garbage. Fruit was too precious here to think of wasting. Dried excrement, however, was not, and Elena found the first tears coming to her eyes as she realized what she was being pelted with.

Courage and indifference, she told herself, not even daring to sneak a look up at Damon.

Presently, when the crowd was felt to have had its due playtime, one of the hookah-smoking civic elders stood up. He read words Elena couldn’t understand from a creased scroll. It seemed to go on forever. Elena, on her knees, with her forehead against the dusty carpet, felt as if she were smothering.

At last the scroll was put away and Young Drohzne leaped up and described in a high, almost hysterical voice, and flamboyant language, the story of a slave who attacked her own master (Damon, Elena noted mentally) to tear herself free of his supervision, and then attacked the head of his family (Old Drohzne, Elena thought) and his poor means of living, his cart, and his hopeless, impudent, slothful slave, and how all this had resulted in the death of his brother. To Elena’s ears, at first, he seemed to be blaming Lady Ulma for the entire incident because she had fallen under her load.

“You all know the kind of slave I mean—she wouldn’t bother to wave away a fly walking across her eye,” he shrieked, appealing to the crowd, which responded with fresh insults and a renewed pelting upon Elena, since Lady Ulma wasn’t there to punish.

At last, Young Drohzne finished recounting how this bold-faced hussy (Elena) who, wearing trousers like a man, had caught up his brother’s own ne’er-do-well slave (Ulma) and had carried away this valuable property bodily away (all by myself? Elena wondered ironically) and had taken her to the home of a highly suspicious healer (Dr. Meggar), who now refused to give her, the original slave, back.

“I knew when I heard this that I would never see my brother or his slave again,” he cried, in the shrieking wail that he had somehow been able to maintain throughout the entire narrative.

“If the slave was so lazy, you should have been glad,” a joker in the crowd called out.

“Nevertheless,” said a very fat man whose voice reminded Elena irresistibly of Alfred Hitchcock’s: the lugubrious delivery and the same pauses before important words, which served to make the mood more grim and entire business even more serious than anyone had heretofore thought. This was a man with power, Elena realized. The ribaldry, the pelting, even the hawking and spitting had fallen silent. The large man was undoubtedly the local equivalent of a “godfather” to these painfully poor residents of the slums. His word would be that which determined Elena’s fate.

“And since then,” he was saying slowly, crunching with every few words some irregularly shaped, golden-colored sweetmeat from a bowl reserved for himself, “the young vampire Damien has made reparation—and most generously, too—for all the property damage.” Here there was a long pause as he stared at Young Drohzne. “Therefore, his slave, Aliana, who started all this mischief will not be seized and put up for public auction, but will make her humble obeisance and surrender, here, and of her own will, receive the punishment she knows is her due.”

Elena found herself dazed. She didn’t know whether it was from all the smoke that had floated down to her level before curling away, but the words “put up for public auction” had sent a shock through her that almost led her to black out. She had had no idea that
that
could happen—and the pictures it brought to mind were extremely unpleasant. She also noticed her new alias, and Damon’s. It was actually quite fortunate, she thought since it would be nice if Shinichi and Misao never heard about this little adventure.

“Bring the slave to us,” the fat man concluded, and sat back down on a great pile of cushions.

Elena was lifted off her feet and roughly marched upward until she could see the man’s gilded sandals, and remarkably clean feet, as she kept her eyes down in the manner of an obedient slave.

“Have you heard these proceedings?” The Godfather-type was still munching on his delicacies and a waft of breeze brought a heavenly smell to Elena’s nose, and suddenly all the saliva she could ask for flooded to her dry lips.

“Yes, sir,” she said, not knowing what title to give him.

“You address me as Your Excellence. And do you have anything to add in your defense?” the man asked, to Elena’s astonishment. Her automatic response of: “Why ask me, since it’s all been fixed up beforehand?” was stilled on her lips. This man was somehow—
more
—than any of the others she had met in the Dark Dimension—in fact, in her entire life. He listened to people. He would listen to me if I told him all about Stefan, Elena thought suddenly. But then, she thought, regaining her normal level-headedness, what could he do about it? Nothing, unless he could do some good
and
turn a profit out of it—or gain some power, or take down an enemy.

Still, he might make for an ally when she returned to level this place and freed the slaves.

“No, Your Excellence. Nothing to add,” she said.

“And you are willing to prostrate yourself and beg my forgiveness and that of Master Drohzne?”

This was Elena’s first scripted line. “Yes,” she said, and she managed to get through her prefabricated apology clearly and with just the hint of a gulp at the end. Up close she could see flecks of gold on the large man’s face, in his lap, in his beard.

“Very well. A penalty of ten ash rod strokes is laid upon this slave as an example to other mischief-makers. The punishment will be delivered by my nephew Clewd.”

P
andemonium. Elena whipped her head up, confused as to whether she was supposed to be the repentant slave any longer. The community leaders were all babbling at one another, pointing fingers, throwing up their hands. Damon had physically restrained the Godfather, who seemed to regard his part in the ceremony as concluded.

The crowd was hooting and cheering. It looked as if there would be another fight; this time between Damon and the Godfather’s men, especially the one called Clewd.

Elena’s head was whirling. She could catch only disjointed phrases.

“—only six strokes and promised me that
I
could administer—” Damon was shouting.

“—really think that these little flunkies tell the truth?” someone else—probably Clewd—was shouting back.

But isn’t that exactly what the Godfather was, too? Just a bigger, more frightening, and, undoubtedly, more efficient flunky who reported to someone higher up, and didn’t cloud his mind with dope-smoke? Elena thought; and then ducked her head hastily as the fat man glanced toward her.

She could hear Damon again, this time clearly above the hubbub. He was standing by the Godfather. “I had believed that even here there was some honor once a bargain was struck.” His voice made it obvious that he no longer thought negotiations were possible and that he was about to go on the attack. Elena tensed, horrified. She had never heard such open menace in his speaking voice.

“Wait.” It was in the Godfather’s lackadaisical tones, but it caused an instant of silence in the babble. The fat man, having removed Damon’s hand from his arm, turned his head back toward Elena.

“I will waive, for my part, the participation of my nephew Clewd. Diarmund, or whoever you were, you are free to punish your own slave with your own tools.”

Suddenly, surprisingly, the old man was brushing bits of gold out of his beard and speaking directly to Elena. His eyes were ancient, tired, and surprisingly discerning. “Clewd is a master at whipping, you know. He has his own little invention. He calls it the cat’s whiskers and one blow can flay the skin from neck to hip. Most men die from ten lashes. But I’m afraid he’ll be disappointed today.” Then exposing surprisingly white and even teeth, the Godfather smiled. He extended to her the bowl of golden sweetmeats he’d been eating. “You might as well taste one before your Discipline. Go on.”

Afraid to try one, afraid not to, Elena took one of the irregular pieces and popped it in her mouth. Her teeth crunched pleasantly. A walnut half! That’s what the mysterious sweets were. A delicious half walnut dipped in some kind of sweet lemon syrup, with bits of hot pepper or something like that clinging to it, all gilded with that edible gold stuff. Ambrosia!

The Godfather was saying to Damon, “Do your own ‘discipline,’ boy. But don’t neglect to teach the girl how to cover her thoughts. She has too much wit to be wasted here in a slum-brothel. But then why do I not think she wishes to become a famous courtesan at all?”

Before Damon could answer or Elena look up from her genuflection, he was gone, carried by palanquin bearers to the only horse-drawn carriage Elena had seen in the slums.

By now the arguing, gesticulating civic leaders, egged on by Young Drohzne, had come to a sullen agreement. “Ten lashes, and she need not strip, and you may give them,” they said. “But our final word is ten. The man who negotiated with you has no more power to argue.”

Almost casually, one lifted by a tuft of hair a bodiless head. Absurdly, it was crowned with dusty leaves in anticipation of the banquet after the ceremony.

Damon’s eyes flared with true rage that set objects around him vibrating. Elena could feel his Power like a panther rearing back against a leash. She felt as if she were speaking against a hurricane which cast every word back into her throat.

“I agree to it.”

“What?”

“It’s over, Da—Master Damon. No more yelling. I agree.”

Now, as she prostrated herself on the carpets before Drohzne, there was a sudden keening of women and children and a fusillade of pellets aimed—sometimes badly—at the smirking slave owner.

The train of her dress was spread behind her like a bride’s, the pearl overskirt making the underskirt a shimmering burgundy in the eternal red light. Her hair had fallen free of its high knot, making a cloud around her shoulders that Damon had to part with his hands. He was shaking. From fury. Elena didn’t dare look at him, knowing that their minds would rush together. She was the one who remembered to say her formal speech before him and Young Drohzne so this entire farce would not have to be reenacted.

Say it with feeling, her drama teacher, Ms. Courtland, had always excoriated the class. If there was no feeling in you there could be none in the audience.

“Master!” Elena shouted in a voice that was loud enough to be heard above the women’s lamentations. “Master, I am but a slave, not fit to address you. But I have trespassed and I accept my punishment eagerly—yea, eagerly, if it will restore to you but one hairsbreadth of the respectability you enjoyed before my unwonted evildoing. I beg you to punish this disgraced slave who lies like discarded offal in your gracious path.”

The speech, which she had shouted in the unvarying glassy tones of someone who had been taught each word by rote, hadn’t actually needed to be more than four words, “Master, I beg forgiveness.” But no one seemed to have recognized the irony that Meredith had put into it, or to find it amusing. The Godfather had accepted it; Young Drohzne had already heard it once, and now it was Damon’s turn.

But Young Drohzne wasn’t finished yet. Smirking at Elena, he said, “Here’s where you find out, Missy. But I want to see that ash rod before you use it!”—stumbling to Damon. A few practice swishes and blows to the cushions surrounding them (which filled the air with ruby-colored dust) satisfied him that the rod was all that even he could want.

Mouth visibly watering, he settled on the gold couch, taking in Elena from head to toe.

And finally the time had come. Damon couldn’t put it off any longer. Slowly, as if every step was part of a play that he hadn’t rehearsed properly, he sidled alongside Elena to get an angle. Finally, as the gathered crowd became restless, and the women showed signs of losing themselves in drink, rather than in keening, he picked his spot.

“I ask forgiveness, my master,” Elena said in her no-expression voice. If left to himself, she thought, he wouldn’t even have remembered the necessities.

Now, indeed, was the time. Elena knew what Damon had promised her. She also knew that a lot of promises had been broken that day. For one thing, ten was almost twice six.

She wasn’t looking forward to this.

But when the first blow came, she knew that Damon wasn’t one of the promise-breakers. She felt a dull thud, and a numbness, and then, curiously, a wetness which had her glancing up through the latticework of boards above them for clouds. It was disconcerting to realize that the wetness was her own blood, spilled without pain, running down her side.

“Make her count them,” Young Drohzne slurred in a snarl, and Elena said “One” automatically, before Damon could put up a fight.

Elena went on counting in the same clear, unaffected voice. In her mind she wasn’t here, in this foul-smelling horrible gutter at all. She was lying with her elbows propped up to support her face, and looking down into Stefan’s eyes—those spring-green eyes that would never be old, no matter how many centuries he accumulated. She was dreamily counting for him, and
ten
would be their signal to jump up and begin the race. It was raining gently, but Stefan was giving her a handicap, and soon, soon she would scramble off him and run away through lush green grass. She would make this a fair race and really put her muscle into it, but Stefan, of course, would catch her. Then they would go down on the grass together, laughing and laughing as if they were having hysterics.

As for the vague, far-off sounds of wolflike leers and drunken snarls, even they were gradually changing. It all had to do with some silly dream about Damon and an ash rod. In the dream, Damon was swinging hard enough to satisfy the most exacting of onlookers, and the blows, which Elena could hear in the increasing silence, sounded more than hard enough, and made her feel a bit nauseated when she reflected that they were the sound of her own skin splitting, but she felt no more than dull cuffs up and down her back. And Stefan was drawing up her hand to kiss!

“I’ll always be yours,” Stefan said. “We belong together every time you dream.”

I’ll always be yours, Elena told him silently, knowing he would get the message. I may not be able to dream of you all the time, but I am always with you.

Always, my angel. I’m waiting for you, Stefan said.

Elena heard her own voice say “Ten,” and Stefan kissed her hand again and was gone. Blinking, bewildered, and confused by the sudden inrush of noises, she sat cautiously up, looking around.

Young Drohzne was hunched into himself, blind with fury, disappointment, and more liquor than even he could stand up under. The wailing women had long ago gone silent, awed. The children were the only ones who still made any noise, climbing up and down on the boards, whispering to one another and running if Elena should happen to glance their way.

And then, with an entire lack of ceremony, it was over.

When Elena first stood up the world made a complete double circle around her and her legs folded. Damon caught her, and called to the few young men still conscious and inclined to look at him, “Give me a cape.” It wasn’t a request, and the best-dressed of the men, who seemed to have been slumming, tossed him a heavy cape, black, lined with greenish blue, and said, “Keep it. The performance—marvelous. Is it a hypnotist’s act?”

“No performance,” Damon snarled, in a voice that stopped the other slummers in the act of holding out business cards.

“Take them,” Elena whispered.

Damon snatched up the cards in one hand, ungraciously. But Elena forced herself to toss the hair off her face and smile slowly, heavy-lidded, at the young men. They smiled somewhat timidly back.

“When you—ah—perform again…”

“You’ll hear,” Elena called to them. Damon was already carrying her back to Dr. Meggar, surrounded by the inevitable entourage of children plucking at their cloaks. It was only then that it occurred to Elena to wonder why Damon had asked for a cloak from some strangers, when he, in fact, was already wearing one.

“They will be having ceremonies somewhere, now that there are this many of them,” Mrs. Flowers said in genteel distress as she and Matt sat and sipped herbal tea in the boardinghouse parlour. It was dinnertime, but still quite light outside.

“Ceremonies to do
what
?” Matt asked. He had never made it to his parents’ house since he’d left Damon and Elena more than a week ago to come back to Fell’s Church. He’d stopped by Meredith’s house, which was on the edge of town, and she’d convinced him to come by Mrs. Flowers’s first. After the conversation the three of them had had with Bonnie, Matt had decided it was best to be “invisible.” His family would be safer if no one knew that he was still in Fell’s Church. He would live at the boardinghouse, but none of the children who were making all the trouble would realize that. Then, with Bonnie and Meredith safely gone to meet Damon and Elena, Matt could be a sort of secret operative.

Now he almost wished he’d gone with the girls. Trying to be a secret operative in a place where all the enemies seemed to be able to hear and see better than you could, as well as to move much faster, hadn’t turned out to be nearly as helpful as it had sounded. He spent reading most of the time the Internet blogs that Meredith had marked, looking for clues that might do them some good.

But he hadn’t read of the need for any kind of ceremonies. He turned to Mrs. Flowers as she thoughtfully sipped her tea.

“Ceremonies for what?” he repeated.

With her soft white hair and her gentle face and vague, amiable blue eyes, Mrs. Flowers looked like the most harmless little old lady in the world. She wasn’t. A witch by birth, and a gardener by vocation, she knew as much about black magic herbal toxins as about white magic healing poultices.

“Oh, doing generally unpleasant things,” she replied sadly, staring into the tea leaves in her cup. “They’re partly like pep rallies, you know, to get everyone all worked up. They probably also do some small black magic there. Some of it is by way of blackmail and brainwashing—they can tell any new converts that they are guilty now by reason of attending the meetings. They might as well give in and become fully initiated…that sort of thing. Very unpleasant.”

“But what kind of unpleasant?” Matt persisted.

“I really don’t know, dear. I never went to one of them.”

Matt considered. It was almost 7:00, which was curfew for children under eighteen. Eighteen seemed to be the oldest that a child could be and become possessed.

Of course, it wasn’t an official curfew. The sheriff’s department seemed to have no idea of how to deal with the curious disease that was working its way through the young girls of Fell’s Church. Scare them straight? It was the police that were frightened. One young sheriff had come tearing out of the Ryan house to be sick after seeing how Karen Ryan had bitten off the heads of her pet mice and what she had done with the rest of them.

Lock them away? The parents wouldn’t hear of it, no matter how bad their child’s behavior was, how obvious it was that their kid needed help. Children who were towed off to the next town for an appointment with a psychiatrist sat demurely and spoke calmly and logically…for the entire fifty minutes of their appointment. Then, on their way back they took revenge, repeating everything their parents said in perfect mimicry, making startlingly real-sounding animal noises, holding conversations with themselves in Asian-sounding languages, or even resorting to the cliché but still chilling backward-talking routine.

Neither ordinary discipline nor ordinary medical science seemed to have an answer to the childrens’ problem.