The War of Roses (7 page)

Elena tried to think of an answer as she brought the
heavy globe down.  It was heavy because its surface was made of semiprecious jewels.  The dark blue of the deep oceans was lapis lazuli.  The continents were malachite and citrine, abalone, black opal, agate, jade, garnet, peridot, amethyst and carnelian.  The shallows were blue topaz.

“How beautiful, my dear,” Mrs. Flowers said, beholding it.

“Those lovely stones won’t interfere with Bonnie’s dowsing at all.  They may even enhance it.”

“Good,” Elena said
. 

Bonnie
took a deep breath, with her eyes shut, clearly trying to compose herself for a second trial.

“Can you turn the globe so that different parts of it face upwards—so they’re at the top, I mean?”
she asked when she opened her eyes.

The globe, fortunately, was o
ne that allowed this, and Elena, out of wishful thinking undoubtedly, put the United States exactly at the top of the sphere.

And then Bonnie began to work.

She started with the United States, being careful with the quartz pendulum, holding it exactly one inch above whichever state was directly under the trembling crystal.  Soon a sheen of perspiration formed on her brow, and several little strawberry curls stuck to her forehead.

Elena tried to be patient, waiting for Bonnie to finish—to be certain that she’d finished—with an area before moving the sphere a tiny fraction of an inch so that another state appeared below the pendulum.

Soon Elena was sweating, too.   Eventually she wanted to scream.  This was madness.  They were sure to make a mistake, to miss some area.  The world was just too big, and the globe was too small.

“Do you know, my dear, I believe I must have an old
school geography book somewhere,” Mrs. Flowers said at last, just when Elena had sunk her teeth into her lower lip to keep an impatient shriek from exploding from her throat.

“Really?  But—well, won’t it
be a bit dated?” she asked, trying not to sound too eager to get up and stretch and use her legs and arms to some purpose.

“Yes, it will,” Mrs. Flowers replied composedly.
  “But it will be better than this globe.  Why don’t you look in the storage room, and if it’s not there you might try the second floor bedroom closets.  I don’t believe I ever gave it away, and I know I didn’t
throw
it away.”

“I’ll go and look for it,” Elena said.  Then, as Bonnie glanced up and managed a tiny, preoccupied smile
, she added: “Um—if it’s really okay.  Is it okay?”

“
It’s fine, if Mrs. Flowers doesn’t mind moving the globe for me,” Bonnie said valiantly.

“Not at all, dear, not at all.”  Mrs. Flowers touched the great multicolored sphere very gently, moving it an infinitesimal amount to the right.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.  Call me if you find anything!”  Elena had to shout as she hurried into the front hallway.  “Don’t forget to try Italy—especially Florence.  Maybe sometimes lightning strikes twice!”

What
Elena found in the storage room was . . . everything.  Lamps, rugs, mirrors, baskets, candles, preserves, trays, empty boxes, full boxes, lawn furniture, throw pillows, old VHS tapes, a tangled forest of Christmas lights, dolls in costumes from around the world, vases of every shape and size, scarves, umbrellas, bells, coats, music boxes, silk flower arrangements, frying pans of assorted sizes, stationery, shoes—usually singletons rather than pairs—pewter goblets, doorstops, pieces of slate roofing, real cameos, outrageous costume jewelry, a feather boa, a container of assorted tools, a broken ceiling fan, frames for paintings (some with paintings in them; some without), a file cabinet full of very old papers, a first aid kit, a wedding dress carefully folded away in a square package that smelled of lavender and mothballs, a large statue of a rearing horse, and a small bust of Alexander the Great.  There was more—a lot more, and all of it dusty and cobwebby—but Elena’s brain refused to catalogue it. 

There were also many books, some
hardbacks with no jackets and very dusty spines of the shape and size that meant they
might
be an old school geography text.  But although Elena rubbed and blew away the dust on each candidate, no geography manifested itself.

At last, covered in dust
, with scratches on her arms and one ankle, she got up and walked like a very old woman until she was outside the storage room.  Then she could stretch her arms and legs and roll her head on her neck to relax it. 

The August sun was hot on her
face as she exhaled, knowing that sweat was running down the back of her neck and had collected in between her breasts, darkening her camisole and T-shirt. 

She was glad that Damon wasn’t around to see her right
this moment.  No, she couldn’t be glad he was gone, but she could just imagine his expression . . . she surprised herself by bursting into laughter at the same time as tears welled up in her eyes.  She fought hard to blink the tears away and make them go back to where they’d come from, but they trickled out and slid down her dusty cheeks.  There was no point in smearing her face by trying to wipe them away with equally dusty hands.

Elena’s cellphone was silent in
her cutoff jeans’ pocket.  Bonnie hadn’t called.  She hadn’t located . . . anything.  Elena sighed, and then, forcing herself to concentrate, she deliberately took up an aikido stance that Meredith had taught her.  She imagined an opponent coming toward her, reaching for her, and she seized its hand, twisting so that the phantom’s forearm turned the wrong way against its elbow.  Then, with a sudden, vicious pressure, she did what Meredith had expressly told her never to do, and snapped both the radius and the ulna of her invisible attacker’s arm, tearing muscles and tendons.  She finished by giving a savage kick with her right knee to the groin, a move that Meredith had
not
taught her, but was purely Elena’s invention.

Then she sagged. 
In her mind’s eye she could see Meredith sadly shaking her head over her student’s lack of restraint. The tall, dark-haired girl who’d been born a hunter-slayer of vampires, werewolves and other evil supernatural creatures had learned that discipline was everything.  But right at this moment Elena felt no self-control at all. 

Even as she thought this,
Elena’s head jerked up.  A footfall had sounded quite near her.  For an instant she stared blindly and then she made a soft noise of pure longing.  Stefan had just stepped out of the shadow of a clump of cherry trees and was standing in the sunlight.

She ran to him as if
she hadn’t seen him in weeks.  When he saw how she was moving he hurried to meet her.  They came together and each clutched fiercely at the other.  Elena was crying quietly and after a moment she realized that Stefan was, too.

“Bonnie can’t
find him,” Elena said.  “She’s been dousing everywhere with a quartz crystal.  But he’s not in the Dark Dimension . . . and I can’t even find Mrs. Flowers’s old school geography book so that we can see if he’s been reincarnated on Earth!”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?
  Looking for a school book?  I thought maybe you’d been coalmining.” Stefan first dashed his own tears away and then, very gently, used his thumbs to wipe away hers. 

T
his small kindness almost undid Elena.  She squeezed Stefan as hard as she could.  This was his cue to squeeze her back, not with any significant proportion of his true strength, but much harder than he would normally do.

Elena felt better
for being tightly held.  Strange, but she had never wondered at all about Stefan’s expression should he see her looking as if she’d “gone coalmining.”  She knew that he saw beneath the dust and beneath her fair skin as well.  He saw her heart, and that was the end of his searching.

Just now he was rubbing his chin against the top of her head in a very comforting way.
  Elena’s last tears fell when she blinked and she was able to keep back any new ones.  The coolness of Stefan’s body permeated hers even as the sun beat down on both of them, and his touch soothed all her knotted muscles and relaxed her aching joints.  The only pain that was left was in her heart.

“I . . . miss him,” Elena confided abruptly, without having planned to speak at all.

“So do I.”—very softly, but with a deep component, because he was speaking with his jaw against her scalp, and she could hear him through bone conduction.  He kissed her hair, so lightly that she could barely feel it.

Elena felt that there was nothing more to be said.  They understood one another.  They both ached to see Damon, and
Stefan was not going to allow anything as petty as jealousy to break the deep and lasting communion that she and he shared.

“You know,” he said
after a few minutes, speaking as calmly as before, “I have a globe in my bedroom, and—”

Elena didn’t even try to keep the words back.  “I already got it,” she whispered.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t want to bother you by calling you, and I knew you wouldn’t mind.  But it’s no good; a globe isn’t.  It’s too small.  If Bonnie had fo
und anything, she’d have called me.  That’s why I was looking for Mrs. Flowers’s old geography book.”

Stefan kissed her hair again.  “I was going to say, ‘and there’s an outdated world atlas under my bed
.’  It won’t be accurate about some countries’ names, but it’s better than that heavy, just-for-decoration globe or even an ancient geography book.”

“
An atlas?  You’re kidding!”  Elena squeezed Stefan even more tightly and was hugged breathless in return.  “Stefan, that’s fantastic!  Let’s go get it before Bonnie exhausts herself completely using the globe.”

“Yes, let’s go.”  But Stefan still hugged her hard and Elena made no move to release him from her arms.

Instead, she tipped her face up, cautiously, so as not to knock into his jaw and make him bite his tongue.  Stefan tipped his face down.  And then the outside world was swept away entirely and for Elena there was only joy and the sensation of floating in a cool sunrise, with myriad pastel colors all around her.

At last
, reluctantly, Elena released Stefan and felt his grip ease.  She took his hand and pressed it once firmly. Then they hurried back to the front door of the boardinghouse.

In the kitchen,
Bonnie was leaning back in her chair with her eyes shut, drinking iced tea with a chunk of lemon in it from a tall glass.  She opened her eyes just as Elena approached and sputtered, spraying Stefan’s globe and Mrs. Flowers’s tablecloth with tea, narrowly missing Mrs. Flowers herself.

“
Oh, my God, Elena!  You look—”

“I know.  I’m going to wash in the sink.  I didn’t find the geography book in the storage room, but Stefan has an old world atlas for us.
”

“Oh.”  Bonnie stopped hiccupping and sniffled, clearly trying to look
refreshed and ready to get back to work.  “Well, good,” she finished staunchly.  “Because this globe is just impossible to work with.  The only place where the pendulum even reacted
was in the Pacific Ocean, and then it just swung back and forth.”

“Which means exactly nothing,” Mrs. Flowers said, looking genteelly distressed.  “Dear Stefan, I’m so glad
you have an atlas.  That will make the dousing much easier on Bonnie.  I’m afraid that it’s difficult to maintain absolute spiritual concentration for so long a time.”

“Oh, I can do it,” Bonnie said, managing a shaky smile.
Her eyes met Elena’s and Elena realized that Bonnie would kill herself trying rather than stop while getting negative results.

“Stefan, will you run up and get the atlas?” she asked as unemotionally as possible.  “I’m going to look at Mrs. Flowers’s encyclopedia set, if that’s all right with her.”

“Of course it’s all right, my dear.  But what will you be looking for?”

“Oh—well, I thought I might as well see if there’s a picture of Dante’s nine circles
of Hell,” Elena said, still without expression.  “I mean, we’re looking everywhere else for Damon.  And there are other worlds down there, aren’t there?  I mean the Nether World is below the Dark Dimension, and there are still more worlds beneath it, right?” 

“Ye-es,” Stefan replied slowly.  “Sage’s father is at the very bottom, I think.  I don’t have any idea how the worlds above it are ordered, and I doubt that it’s much like Dante’s
Inferno
described, but the pendulum might take our intentions into account and react.”

“Good,” Elena said briskly, although she could see that both Bonnie and Stefan were horrified at the idea that Damon
might be in some deep hell undergoing the tortures of the damned.  She was as determined as Bonnie to find Damon, wherever he was, and that included marching into hell if necessary.

Once she’d had a chance to wash and drink some
lemony iced tea, she thumbed through the musty volumes of Mrs. Flowers’s antique Encyclopædia Britannica until she found a suitable painting done by Hieronymus Bosch, who had been born around the year 1450.              

“Might as well get it over with before you start on the
Earth,” she said to Bonnie, putting the heavy book on the table as Stefan returned with his old atlas.