The War of Roses (9 page)

“What? 
What?”
Bonnie almost wailed.  “That globe is no good, Elena, you know that—”

“I need a pen,” Elena murmured, fumbling in the
messenger pouch she carried now instead of a purse.  She’d taken it off when she’d first arrived this morning and it now rested on the kitchen table next to Bonnie’s.  “I have an idea.”  She found a pen.

“What
are you—talking about?” Bonnie had to sniffle in the middle of the sentence.  “That globe—whatever you’re thinking—it’s just impossible to work with, and . . .”

Elena shook her head.
Using the pen, she traced a large circle on the white paper by going around the base of the globe with the pen.

Then she took the gemstone globe and put it on the floor.
  She marked an X approximately in the middle of the circle she’d traced.

Bonnie looked at the stark circle on the paper in front of her in bewilderment.  “What’s that
even supposed to be?” she demanded as Elena sat down again.

“It’s half of the
Nether World moon,” Elena said.  Her heart was pounding hard in her chest and throat and fingertips.  “It’s blank because the Tree is gone, but that X is for Damon’s body.  I remember that there were pools of water in several places, but I can’t draw them and I don’t think they matter.”  She dared to look at Mrs. Flowers as she said this, and she realized that she was flushed with emotion.

Mrs. Flowers was looking
pensive.  She murmured, “I’ll get us some fresh tea,” and fluttered off.

Elena’s eyes went to Stefan’s.  He was looking more than thoughtful.  He was looking startled and shocked—electrified, even.

“But that’s the one place we know that—
he
—isn’t,” Bonnie argued, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Just try it,” Elena said
, looking at Stefan again.

“I mean his—his poor body might be there, but that’s all!” 
More tears traced their way down Bonnie’s pale cheeks.

“Give it a try,” Elena suggested gently.

“But—”

Just DO it!
thought Damon, startling himself.

“All right!  You don’t have to shout!” Bonnie cried.

Elena stared at her. Damon could feel her heart beating hard.  Strangely, he could also feel his own heart beating.  He hadn’t been able to do that before.

Bonnie picked up the crystal
by its gold chain with trembling fingers.  She held it up gingerly, positioning the translucent quartz over the bottom of the circle, about an inch from the vellum.

Stefan leaned forward.  Mrs. Flowers came quickly back to the table with a
fragrant pot of tea. She put the teapot down without attempting to pour anything into the four cups that sat at four different places on the table.

Elena leaned forward, her eyes on the quartz crystal.

“Bonnie, my dear, you might want to name that map.  Aloud, I mean: just say what it represents, so that there’s no question about what you’re looking at,” Mrs. Flowers advised.

Bonnie hesitated.  Elena gave her a few seconds and then said, “The circle I drew on this piece of vellum”—she touched it—“is a map of the smallest moon of the Nether World, the one on which the great Tree existed until I destroyed it
: root, branch and leaf.”

Bonnie glanced at her sideways with wide brown eyes.
  Elena’s voice had been quiet, but not repentant.  She wasn’t sorry for destroying the tree.  It had already killed Damon and had been in the process of trapping Stefan, Bonnie and herself permanently in a prison of wooden branches when she’d used Wings of Destruction on it.

Elena thought of something else.  “The X on the circle stands for Damon’s body.  He was staked to the ground beside the trunk of the Tree.”

Bonnie was still looking at her.  Now Elena looked back steadily, with a tiny, encouraging smile.  Below the table her hands were clenched together so hard that her fingernails bit into skin.

Bonnie focused on the map again, taking a deep breath.  She moved the necklace
so that it just touched the bottom of the circle, then slowly moved over the white space inside.

The pendulum was motionless, swinging
from side to side a little as Bonnie’s hand shook. 

Mrs. Flowers leaned forward.

Bonnie moved the crystal toward the left and then traced out a pattern, a slow sweep of the bottom of the circle.  The quartz didn’t respond.  She moved up an inch and swept a path going the opposite way.

She kept doing this,
back and forth, inch by inch getting closer to the X.  At last she was tracing the circle directly below the mark.

Elena stopped breathing. 

Bonnie moved the pendulum up and approached the X slowly.  Her hand began to tremble badly and the pendulum swung more and more wildly, but not in a circle.  She approached the X.

Damon let his aura flare.  He used all the Power he could extract from the droplets around him and his own body.  He c
oncentrated on showing the most amount of Power over the largest space possible. 
Here I am!
he thought.

Bonnie reached the X
.

Elena gasped.  Stefan stood abruptly, his chair scraping on the tile floor.
  Mrs. Flowers’s hand flew to her heart. 

“What’s happening?” Bonnie cried.  Elena glanced at her quickly.  Bonnie’s eyes were shut.  “What’s it doing?” she demanded again.

“Open your eyes, my dear,” Mrs. Flowers said in a breathless voice.  Elena couldn’t have spoken for worlds.  Stefan never even looked up from the map, where the pendulum was moving in large steady circles around the X at its center.

Bonnie opened her eyes.  She stared at the quartz crystal as it revolved in neat circles around and around.  The circles became ovals as her hand began to shake.

Elena stood and cupped Bonnie’s hand in both her own, trying to keep it still.  But Elena’s hands were none too steady, either.  It took Stefan, who put his hands around Elena’s, to make the trembling stop and the ovals go back to circles.

Bonnie was staring at the crystal in amazement.  “I’m not doing it,” she said.  “I swear I’m not.”

“You’re not doing it,” Stefan assured her.  “Your hand is still.”

“But that means—he’s there, where his body is.  His spirit is right beside his body!”

Elena and Stefan exchanged looks. They both glanced at Mrs. Flowers.

“
I think,” Stefan said judiciously, “that that would be too much of a fluke.”

“
I’m afraid, dear Bonnie, that it would be asking a great deal of coincidence,” Mrs. Flowers said in a faint, soft voice.

Elena
still couldn’t say a word.  Her voice was stuck.

“You mean . . .”  Bonnie started over.  “Are you saying . . . ”

“His soul isn’t beside his body,” Stefan said, all at once sounding quiet and flat.  Elena noticed how dark his green eyes seemed.  “His soul is
inside
his body.”

“But that means—that means that—
he came back from being dead!” Bonnie’s voice was thin.

“We don’t come back,” Stefan said, still quietly.  He hesitated a moment, and then
spoke in a rush.  “I didn’t want to say it before, because I didn’t want to crush your hope all at once.  And after a while, I just . . . I didn’t know how to say that all the work you’d done was pointless.  But I never believed he could come back.  Sage told him that it was the whole reason Sage had become a vampire.  It was so that when he died, he wouldn’t be sent back to his father’s Infernal Court.  ‘One lifetime is enough,’ was what he said.  Vampires . . . just don’t  . . . come back.”

“But then—”  Bonnie looked at Elena for help. 

Elena didn’t have any help in her.  She thought, personally, that she might faint at any second.

Bonnie turned back to Stefan.  All the while, her hand remained hovering over the X, while the quartz crystal described circles around it, smaller and smaller circles, as if a signal w
as dying away.

“That means,” Bonnie choked, seeming to understand that she was going to have to speak her thought aloud by herself, “that we left him there—we left him . . .
alive
.”

Stefan said,
“Yes.”

“We just—we abandoned him—and he was still alive!”

“Yes.”

“But how could we do that?
”

“Bonnie, dear . . .”

“It’s my fault,” Stefan said.  “I closed his eyes.  I said he was gone.”

“What difference does it make whose fault it
is?” Elena blurted, startling herself, because she hadn’t realized she was going to speak until she heard her own voice.  It was almost as if someone had said it
through
her.

Just get the hell back out here,
Damon thought in conclusion, allowing his aura to shrink back to normal dimensions.

In the boardinghouse kitchen, Bonnie had
whirled on Elena.  Before, she had been sobbing or wailing her concerns.  Now, she seemed to Elena like a small animal at bay.

“You can’t say anything about it,” she shrilled.  “You weren’t even conscious!  It was Stefan and I who—we should have waited longer!”

“Bonnie, we were suffocating in falling ash,” Stefan said—gallantly, Elena thought.

“You weren’t suffocating!  You don’t need to breathe. 
I
was suffocating!”  Bonnie turned her trapped-animal look on him.

“And so was Elena,” Stefan said.
  “She needed to breathe even though she was unconscious.”

“But we left him
when he was alive!”

Stefan laughed.  For a moment the sound was uncertain, but then it became more positive, more natural.

“Yes.  Yes, Bonnie!  And because he was alive then, he’s alive now and we can find him!”

Bonnie stopped in mid-wail with her mouth open.
  “Oh. 
Oh!
  Oh, my God!”

“Yes,” said Stefan.

“Yes, my dears,” said Mrs. Flowers.

“Oh, my God!”  Bonnie jumped up in excitement.  “We need to tell Meredith and Matt!”  She grimaced after a moment.  “Maybe Matt won’t be as excited as we are, but still . . .”

“Yes, let’s tell them,” Stefan said.  His eyes were sparkling spring green again.

Far away, on the tiny moon of the Nether World, Damon thought
, I’m saved.  I’m really saved this time.  Hooray
.

He should have known better.

Elena, who hadn’t spoken in a long while, but who was now being examined by three pairs of eyes: one of brown, one of green, and one of blue, said bluntly, “But how do we find him?  How do we
get
there?”

Damon thought
:
I’m doomed. Alas.  Woe is me.

Damn.

He slumped, exhausted from advertising his aura so flagrantly.  Ash continued to pile up over him, burying him with layer out of layer of darkness.

Doomed, he thought again, with a gloomy
sort of satisfaction.

Damon went to sleep.

* * * * *

Damon woke with a start.  He’d been dreaming a long time
, like a sated predator after gorging on a kill. 

Automatically, he checked the wards and spells of warning he’d placed around the room after Stefan had left.

Nothing.  No creature, supernatural or human, had been sniffing around the perimeter of the building

Damon
tested the air, casting about with tendrils of Power to see who else was stirring.  It was just after dawn; pale light shone in through the window.  In dorm rooms all around, alarms were sounding and students were groaning.  Time for Elena to wake up, too.  But not to go to classes.

Damon wanted to see the girl
at Beckley Memorial Hospital in Heron.  If they could only talk to her, he was certain that they would get the answers to some very puzzling questions.

And
, just maybe, the questions to some very puzzling answers.

A sepal, petal, and a thorn
Upon a common summer's morn—
A flask of Dew—A Bee or two—
A Breeze—a caper in the trees—
And I'm a Rose!

—
Emily Dickinson

To be continued in the next scenes from

Evensong

Part Two:

The War of Roses