Oh, what the hell?
* * *
Stefan
’s cold anger had melted as soon as Damon left the room. Now he was standing where he thought he would never stand again, directly in front of Elena, looking into her eyes. The problem was that those eyes were open but unseeing. He could see the flecks of gold in the dark blue, steady as the inclusions in a piece of lapis lazuli since she was simply staring without blinking.
That worried him suddenly. He’d held more people than this frozen at Mercy Havenwick ICU, but he hadn’t wondered if they were able to blink. There was probably something bad that could happen if you stared for fifteen minutes—twenty more likely, if he knew his brother—without blinking.
Stefan tossed out a tendril of Influence and everyone: Elena, Meredith, Bonnie, Matt, and Caroline all blinked at once. Then they all shut their eyes, as Stefan had an inspiration.
He focused on Elena again.
It wasn’t so bad to watch her standing still when her eyes were shut. He had marveled over Elena asleep often enough that this didn’t seem unnatural.
It was dangerous, though. Looking led to the desire to touch. He only wanted to trace the curve of her cheek with one finger, he bargained. Just that—and perhaps to kiss her
warm lips.
Madness. He wasn’t stupid enough to start
a domino effect like that. This was a hunger that grew when you fed it. That was Shakespeare, wasn’t it? “But she makes hungry, where she most satisfies . . .” Antony and Cleopatra. Oh, right. Hamlet, too. “As if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on . . .”
He was dully surprised at how much he missed her already. Images and sensations whirled through his mind: moments that they’d shared; the flash of her eyes as she glanced back at him, pointing out a joke that no one else besides Stefan could comprehend; the taste of rusty iron when she kissed him after holding a mouthful of nails;
her expression as tears traced white paths on her dusty, sweaty face when she was mourning Damon’s death; the way her hair whipped into a thousand priceless silk snakes in the wind. The warmth of her lissome body when they slept curled together, and—even more delicious than that—the knowledge that she trusted him absolutely to take no liberty with her while she was at her most vulnerable.
That was what had been ineffably precious: her faith in his love for her. Each time they had embraced had been a unique encounter; each had been a distinct and separate paradise. She had slain him with a thousand butterfly kisses; resurrected him with the swift arch of her throat. Afterward, with their souls still joined mysteriously through the gift of her blood, joy had dizzied him until he trembled when she’d held him with his cheek against the softness of her silk-clad breast. How could a creature be so yielding, so yearningly tender and yet have the fierce and questing spirit of a medieval knight?
Automatically, Stefan put one hand to his throat and touched the talisman hanging there: Elena’s lapis ring, long abandoned, and—even longer abandoned—the apricot ribbon that had once bound her hair.
He r
ealized suddenly that he had his eyes tightly shut in sheer emotional pain. He opened them while trying to keep his jaw and chin stiff, afraid that his mouth would begin to tremble
He had just decided on how to settle the
desperate question of how to kiss Elena without actually kissing her, when the door opened. Stefan instinctively tried to freeze in place the person entering and got a withering look from Damon
“Done pawing her?” Damon
asked, after deliberately turning away and making a show of not watching.
“Yes,” Stefan said emptily
. He’d thought of kissing his fingers and then pressing them—gently—to Elena’s lips, but of course he couldn’t do anything of the kind while Damon was here.
“I don’t suppose,” Damon said dourly, “that you used any of the time I was gone in re-Influencing them—or even
her?”
Stefan was startled into staring
at his brother. He answered the sentiment beneath the question.
“How can you be jealous of me?” he
breathed. “I have nothing, and you have everything.”
Damon
had found a wall to lounge against, while examining Bonnie with narrowed eyes. “Oh, yes? Let me tell you about this everything I have. Do you know about salmon, little brother? No, I’m not crazy—I remain an entire millimeter away from insanity. Just shut up and listen.”
Stefan shut up. He wondered how many girls Damon had got to while he
himself had been sentimentalizing over Elena, and whether his older brother had even taken the basic precaution of walking upstairs a floor to keep Elena’s immediate neighbors from getting suspicious.
“Salmon
,” Damon said, with every indication of being fascinated, “are curious creatures. They’re born in rivers, but early on they swim out to sea and there in the ocean they grow up—if they’re not eaten first. But then one day when they’re mature and ready to be mommy and daddy salmon, they just turn around and swim back to the rivers to spawn. And the thing is that they usually manage to find—with
eerie
precision, yes?—not just the river, but the actual spawning ground where they were born.”
“And the bit of this that every kindergartner doesn’t know is?”
“They home, salmon do. Just like pigeons. And so do your friends. Your coterie is
homing
. Bonnie’s not just trancing; she’s getting flashes of who I really am—and how I’m different from you. I think she can see auras. It was pure dumb luck that I was starving and didn’t
have
an aura when she took a good look at me a little while ago. In fact, earlier, while she was sleepwalking—well, never mind that. But she’s definitely being uncanny.”
Stefan was shocked.
He’d known that things were going wrong tonight; of course; that was why he’d left his tree and come to investigate the chaos he’d sensed around Elena. But Bonnie shouldn’t be regaining her witch powers with anything like the speed Damon had described.
“What do you mean ‘while she was sleepwalking?’ Where did she go?”
“To her morning class, I believe—and I said, never mind about that. Elena’s even worse than Bonnie. She more or less called me out on not being human before we went to bed. I didn’t have enough Power to Influence her—and before you ask why, it’s because I couldn’t leave her to feed, right?—until I burned life energy and even then what did she do? She apparently had an inspired dream—
in somnis veritas
—in which she decided that
I
somehow made her missing blood disappear.”
“But you didn’t!”
“Which was just as well, because Bonnie was able to sense the truth about
that,
too. Meanwhile, Meredith is going crazy for lack of kata to do—”
“
Of who?”
“Her aikido and judo exercises
—although I think for judo you need another person to practice with. Plus, probably half a dozen other martial arts forms that I don’t know the names of. Anyway, she’s going loony trying to make sense of the other loons. And Matt can’t remember a single reason to actually trust me, which puts him more than a millimeter on the wrong side of sanity. He’s started just making random remarks about crazy things.”
Stefan didn’t ask about Caroline. Caroline
knew the truth about herself, in any case. Caroline would look after Caroline.
“
And
why
is this all happening?” Damon continued relentlessly. “Because
you
didn’t give them enough of a reality to believe in. You took away their identities, but you didn’t give them anything new to identify with. Also possibly because you relied on a neuro-virus rather than doing all the work by hand.”
“I didn’t have time—” Stefan began, but then he stopped and shook his head. “I couldn’t stand to make time,” he said slowly. “I didn’t want to see them—watch their eyes—while I was taking their memories away.”
“Well, they all have their eyes shut now,” Damon said, with a grim shadow of his most glorious smile. “And you and I are going to finish what you started. But first, since you’ve been holding them all frozen for this long, you’re going to go out and find yourself a nice girl and settle down for about a quarter of an hour.”
It took Stefan several seconds to interpret this. By the time he was finished he was
barely even angry anymore. Exasperated, however: yes.
“I know this is difficult for you to understand,” he
told Damon. “And I can explain it
to
you, but I can’t comprehend it
for
you. Not feeding on humans is more than just a quirk. It is an ethical decision I made
half a millennium ago
. Not feeding on unconscious, un-consenting donors is a choice that I would still hold to if I were dying—”
“Blah, blah, blah,
yes, and in your spare time you cast out devilled ham and walk on watercress.” Damon yawned like the sleek and well-fed predator he was. “But you’ve been holding all of these people frozen for a long time and you need to be realistic—” He broke off.
Stefan
was smiling, shaking his head. He allowed himself the luxury of several seconds of this, which was all the time Damon was prepared to give him before physically atacking.
“They’re not frozen,”
he said just as Damon went from utter relaxation to a bundle of coiled potential energy. “They’re asleep. It’s nighttime, and they’re not at a hospital in the middle of a huge crisis, and I haven’t been alarming them by meddling with their memories. I just put them to sleep on their feet.”
Damon’s muscles uncoiled slowly, like a cobra
flaring out its hood—a position which kept it from striking. He still radiated menace, but at least the physical threat was over.
“
Well, you’re going to have to meddle now,” Damon said. “What have you got?”
Stefan let his full aura loose
around him, undiminished since he’d caught the twelve-point red-brown buck. He hadn’t needed to use Power to spy on Elena and her friends; they’d been projecting so loudly that he’d worried the forest werewolves might decide to investigate.
Damon raised his eyebrows
a fraction. Stefan knew that he didn’t entirely believe that such Power could come from an animal, but there was no question that it was enough. Stefan reined it in to forestall Damon’s otherwise inevitable demonstration of how his own newly-acquired store of Power was greater.
“
All right,” Damon said. “We get to work. We need them to understand that there are no such things as auras; that I have no supernatural powers; that I am above suspicion. Besides which, Matt needs to have a dozen memories of why he trusts me, and Meredith needs to know that she’s a fitness nut. You see? For all that you’ve taken, we give a little back to each of them.”
Stefan thought that it all sounded depressingly like foul play. But who was he to judge? Damon was right: Elena and Bonnie were on the brink of madness already. And they . . .
“And they need the most work of all,” Damon said, without apologizing for hijacking Stefan’s thoughts. “Bonnie needs to stop obsessing over any of her witch powers that may appear within the next few days. She has to be convinced she’s not going insane. And finally,” he muttered half under his breath, “she has to give up the idea that she’s keeping a big white dog for a pet.”
Stefan was too intently focused on
his own thoughts to ask questions. He was gazing at Elena; at the pulse that beat in her soft, slim throat. He felt ill at the notion of invading her mind again.
“And . . .
Elena?” he got out.
“
Elena needs to be more logical and less intuitive. She needs to forget whatever she dreamed tonight, and to know I had nothing to do with her blood loss. She needs to remember—with specific incidents—some good days spent with me as her boyfriend. She also has to accept that I’m sleeping on her bed, and that she has no objection to me moving in. She has to know that although she may not be keeping to the letter of her word to her Aunt Judith, she’s still keeping to the spirit. That’s all.”
“
Oh, that’s
all
, is it? And you imagine that
I’m
going to persuade her of that little list?”
Damon flashed him a
chilling smile. “No, I’ll do it, if you prefer. I’m already taking care of Bonnie. You may work on Matt and Meredith.”
*
* *
The new Influencing was done
, although it had required both Stefan’s effort and Damon’s assistance to fine-tune Elena’s fond “memories”
of days she and Damon had spent together as the seasons had turned.
Stefan had
at last gone back to Dyer Wood, tired and with only a quarter of the aura he’d had when he arrived. Damon privately predicted that he would be hunting white-tailed deer in this new forest before dawn.
All
the humans but Elena had departed, befuddled by sleep, to their own rooms.