Contents 9 страница

“You can make a Plan A and Plan B and all,” Elena said. “But it

won’t help. Shinichi took his memories away. Meredith, I’m sorry—you

don’t know how sorry. But I swore that nobody would ever know.” She

looked up at the taller girl, feeling tears pool in her eyes. Can’t you

just—once—let me leave it that way?”

Meredith sank bank. “Elena Gilbert, the world is lucky there is

only one of you. You are the…” She paused, as if deciding whether to

say the words or not. Then she said, “It’s time to get to bed. Dawn is

going to come early and so is the Demon Gate.”

“Merry?”

“What now?”

“Thank you.”

T he Demon Gate.

Elena glanced over her shoulder at the backseat of the Prius.

Bonnie was blinking sleepily. Meredith, who’d gotten much less sleep

but heard much more alarming news, was looking like a razor blade:

keen, sharp as ice, and ready.

There was nothing else to see except Damon with his paper bags

on the seat beside him, driving the Prius. Out the windows, where an

arid Arizona dawn should be blinding its way across the horizon, was

nothing but fog.

It was frightening and disorienting. They had taken a small road

off Highway 179 and, gradually, the fog had crept in, sending tendrils of

mist around the car, and finally engulfing it whole. It seemed to Elena

that they were being deliberately cut off from the old ordinary world of

McDonald’s and Target, and were crossing a border into a place they

weren’t meant to know about, much less go.

There was no traffic in the other direction. None at all. And as hard

as Elena peered out of her window, it was like trying to look through

fast-moving clouds.

“Aren’t we going too fast?” Bonnie asked, rubbing her eyes.

“No,” Damon said. “It would be—a remarkable coincidence—if

anyone else were on the same route at the same time we are.”

“It looks a lot like Arizona,” she said, disappointed.

“It may be Arizona, for all I know,” Damon replied. “But we

haven’t crossed the Gate yet. And this isn’t anywhere in Arizona you

could just accidentally walk into. The path always has its little tricks and

traps. The problem is that you never know what you’ll be facing.

“Now listen,” he added, looking at Elena with an expression she

had gotten to know. It meant: I’m not joking around; I’m talking to you

as an equal; I’m serious.

“You’ve gotten very good at showing only a human-sized aura,”

Damon said. “But that means that if you can learn one more thing before

we go in, you can actually use your aura, make it do you some good

when you want it to, instead of just hiding it until it pops up out of

control and lifts three-thousand-pound cars.”

“Like what kind of good?”

“Like what I’m going to show you. First of all just relax and let me

control it. Then, little by little, I’ll slacken the controls and you’ll take

them up. By the end, you should be able to send your Powers to your

eyes—and see much better; to your ears—and hear much better; to your

limbs—and move much more quickly and precisely. All right?”

“You couldn’t have taught me this before we started on this little

excursion?”

He smiled at her, a wild, reckless smile that made her smile, too,

even if she didn’t know what it was about. “Until you showed how well

you could control your aura throughout the path—the way here—I

didn’t think you were ready,” he said bluntly. “Now I do. There are

things in your mind just waiting to be unlocked. You’ll understand when

we unlock them.”

And we unlock them—with what? A kiss? Elena thought

suspiciously.

“No. No. And that’s the other reason you’ve got to learn this. Your

telepathy is getting out of hand. If you don’t learn how to keep from

projecting your thoughts, you’ll never make it past the checkpoint at the

Gate as a human.”

Checkpoint. That sounded ominous. Elena nodded and said, “All

right; what do we do?”

“What we did before. Like I said, relax. Try to trust me.”

He put his right hand just to the left of her breastbone, not touching

the cloth of her deep gold top. Elena could feel herself flushing, and she

wondered what Bonnie and Meredith must think of this if they were

watching.

And then Elena felt something else.

It wasn’t cold; it wasn’t heat, but it was something like the furthest

extremities of both of them. It was pure Power. It would have knocked

her over if Damon hadn’t been holding her by the arm with his other

hand. She thought, he’s using his own Power to prime mine, to do

something—

—something that hurt —

No! Elena tried, vocally and telepathically, to tell Damon that the

Power was too much, that it hurt. But Damon ignored her pleas even as

he ignored the tears that spilled onto her cheeks. His Power was leading

hers now, painfully, throughout her body. It was in her bloodstream,

dragging her own Power behind it like a comet’s tail. It was forcing her

to take the Power to different parts of her body and let it build and build

there, not letting her exhale it, not letting her move it on.

I’m going to burst—

All this time her eyes had been fixed on Damon’s, broadcasting her

feelings to him: from indignant anger to shock to agonized pain—and

now…to…

Her mind exploded.

The rest of her Power went on circling, without causing any pain.

Each new breath she drew added more Power to it, but it simply

circulated through her bloodstream, not increasing her aura, but

increasing the Power that was inside her. After two or three more quick

breaths she realized that she was doing it effortlessly.

Now Elena’s Power wasn’t simply sliding around smoothly inside

her, looking from the outside like any other human’s. It was also filling

several burst swollen nodes inside her and where it did that, it changed

things. She realized that she was looking at Damon with round eyes. He

might have told her about how this would feel, rather than letting her go

into it blind.

You really are a total bastard, aren’t you? Elena thought, and,

amazingly, she could feel Damon receive the thought, and could feel his

automatic response, which was pleased agreement, rather than

otherwise.

Then Elena forgot about him in the dawning of a new

understanding. She was realizing that she could keep circulating her

Power inside her, and even build it higher and higher, getting ready for a

truly explosive burst, and show nothing of what it was doing on the

surface.

And as for the nodes…

Elena looked around her at what a few minutes ago had been

barren wilderness. It was like taking bullets of light through both her

eyes. She was dazzled; she was enthralled. Colors seemed to come to

life in a painful glory. She felt that she could see much farther than she

ever had, on and on into the desert, and at the same time, she could

distinguish Damon’s pupils from his irises.

Why, they’re both black, but different shades of black, she thought.

Of course, they go together—Damon would never have irises that didn’t

complement his pupils. But the irises are more velvety, where his pupils

are more silky and shiny. And yet it’s a velvet that can hold light inside

it—almost like the night sky with stars—like those kitsune star balls that

Meredith told me about.

Right now those pupils were wide and set unyieldingly on her face,

as if Damon didn’t want to miss a moment of her reaction. Suddenly, the

corner of his lip quirked in a faint smile.

“You did it. You learned to channel your Power to your eyes.” He

spoke in a bare whisper that she could never have detected before.

“And to my ears,” she whispered back, listening to the amazing

symphony of tiny sounds around her. High in the air, a bat squeaked on

a frequency too high for any ordinary human ear to notice. As for the fall

of grains of sand around her, they formed something like a tiny concerto

as they struck rock and bounced with a tiny ping before falling to the

ground below.

This is amazing, she told Damon, hearing the smugness in her own

telepathic voice. And I can talk to you this way any time now? She

would have to watch out for that—telepathy threatened to reveal more

than she might want to send to a recipient.

It’s best to be careful, Damon agreed, confirming her suspicions.

She’d sent more than she’d meant to.

But Damon—can Bonnie do this, too? Should I try to show her?

“Who knows?” Damon replied aloud, making Elena wince.

“Teaching humans how to use Power isn’t exactly my forte.”

And what about my different Wings Powers? Will I be able to

control them, now?

“About those I have absolutely no idea. I’ve never seen anything

like them.” Damon looked thoughtful for a moment and then shook his

head. “I think you’d need someone with more experience than I have to

learn to control those.” Before Elena could say anything else, he added,

“We’d better get back to the others. We’re almost at the Gate.”

“And I suppose I shouldn’t be using telepathy then.”

“Well, it is a rather obvious giveaway—”

“But you’ll teach me later, won’t you? As much as you know

about controlling Power?”

“Maybe your boyfriend should be doing that,” Damon said almost

roughly.

He’s afraid, Elena thought, trying to keep her thoughts hidden

under a wall of white noise so that Damon wouldn’t pick them up. He’s

just as afraid that he’ll reveal too much to me as I am afraid of him.

“A ll right,” Damon said as he and Elena reached Bonnie and Meredith.

“Now comes the hard part.”

Meredith looked up at him. “ Now comes…?”

“Yes. The really hard part.” Damon had finally unzipped his

mysterious black leather bag. “Look,” he said in a bare murmur, “this is

the actual Gate that we have to get through. And while we’re doing it,

you can have all the hysterics you want because you’re supposed to be

captives.” He pulled out a number of pieces of rope.

Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie had drawn together in an automatic

show of velociraptor sisterhood.

“What,” Meredith said slowly, as if to give Damon the final benefit

of some lingering doubt, “are those ropes for?”

Damon put his head to one side in an oh-come-on gesture.

“They’re for tying your hands.”

“For what?”

Elena was amazed. She had never seen Meredith so obviously

angry. She herself couldn’t even get a word in. Meredith had walked up

and was looking at Damon from a distance of about four inches.

And her eyes are gray! some distant part of Elena’s mind

exclaimed in astonishment. Deep, deep, deep, clear gray gray. All this

time I’ve thought they were brown, but they’re not.

Meanwhile Damon was looking faintly alarmed at Meredith’s

expression. A T. rex would have looked alarmed at Meredith’s

expression, Elena thought.

“And you expect us to walk around with our hands tied up? While

you do what?”

“While I act as your master,” Damon said, suddenly rallying with a

glorious smile that was gone almost before it was there. “The three of

you are my slaves.”

There was a long, long silence.

Elena waved the entire pile of objects away with a gesture. “We

won’t do that,” she said simply. “We won’t. There has to be some other

way—”

“Do you want to rescue Stefan or not?” Damon demanded

suddenly. There was a searing heat in the dark eyes he had fixed on

Elena.

“Of course I do!” Elena flashed back, feeling heat in her cheeks.

“But not as a slave, dragged along behind you!”

“That’s the only way humans get into the Dark Dimension,”

Damon said flatly. “Tied or chained, as a vampire’s or kitsune’s or

demon’s property.”

Meredith was shaking her head. “You never told us—”

“I told you that you wouldn’t like the way in!”

Even while answering Meredith, Damon’s eyes never left Elena.

Underneath his outward coldness, he seemed to be pleading with her to

understand, she thought. In the old days, she thought, he’d have just

lounged against a wall and raised his eyebrows and said, “Fine; I didn’t

want to go anyway. Who’s for a picnic?”

But Damon did want them to go, Elena realized. He was desperate

for them to go. He just didn’t know any honest way of conveying that.

The only way he knew was to—

“You have to make us a promise, Damon,” she said, looking him

directly in the eyes. “And it has to be before we make the decision to go

or not.”

She could see the relief in his eyes, even if to the other girls it

might seem as if his face was perfectly cold and impassive. She knew he

was glad she wasn’t saying that her previous decision was final, and that

was that. “What promise?” Damon asked.

“You have to swear—to give your word—that no matter what we

decide now or in the Dark Dimension, you won’t try to Influence us.

You won’t put us to sleep by mind control, or nudge us to do what you

want. You won’t use any vampire tricks on our minds.”

Damon wouldn’t be Damon if he didn’t argue. “But, look, suppose

the time comes when you want me to do that? There are some things

there that it might be better for you to sleep through—”

“Then we’ll tell you we’ve changed our minds, and we’ll release

you from the promise. You see? There’s no downside. You just have to

swear.”

“All right,” Damon said, still holding her gaze. “I swear I won’t

use any kind of Power on your minds; I won’t Influence you in any way,

until you ask me to. I give my word.”

“Right.” At last Elena broke the stare down with the tiniest of

smiles and nods. And Damon gave her an almost imperceptible nod in

return.She turned away to find herself looking into Bonnie’s searching

brown gaze.

“Elena,” Bonnie whispered, tugging on her arm. “Come here for a

sec, okay?” Elena could hardly help it. Bonnie was strong as a small

Welsh pony. Elena went, casting a powerless look over her shoulder at

Damon as she did.

“What?” she whispered when Bonnie finally stopped dragging her.

Meredith had come along as well, figuring it might be sisterhood

business. “Well?”

“Elena,” Bonnie burst out, as if unable to hold the words back any

longer, “the way you and Damon act—it’s different than it used to be.

You didn’t used to…I mean, what really happened between you two

when you were alone together?”

“This is hardly the time for that,” Elena hissed. “We’re having a

big problem here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“But—what if—”

Meredith took up the unfinished sentence, pushing a dark lock of

hair out of her eyes. “What if it’s something Stefan doesn’t like? Like

‘what happened with Damon when you were alone in the motel that

night’?” she finished, quoting Bonnie’s words.

Bonnie’s mouth fell open. “What motel? What night? What

happened? ” she almost shrieked, causing Meredith to try to quiet her

and get bitten for her pains.

Elena looked at first one and then the other of her two friends—the

two friends who had come to die with her if necessary. She could feel

her breath come short. It was so unfair, but…“Can we just discuss this

later?” she suggested, trying to convey with her eyes and eyebrows

Damon can hear us!

Bonnie merely whispered, “What motel? What night? What—”

Elena gave up. “ Nothing happened,” she said flatly. “Meredith is

only quoting you, Bonnie. You said those words last night while you

were asleep. And maybe sometime in the future you’ll tell us what

you’re talking about, because I don’t know. ”

She finished by looking at Meredith, who just raised one perfect

eyebrow. “You’re right,” Meredith said, completely undeceived. “The

English language could use a word like ‘sa.’ It would make these

conversations so much shorter, for one thing.”

Bonnie sighed. “Well, then, I’ll find out for myself,” she said.

“You may not think I can, but I will. ”

“Okay, okay, but meanwhile does anyone have anything helpful to

say about Damon’s rope stuff?”

“Such as, do we tell him where to stuff it?” Meredith suggested

under her breath.

Bonnie was holding a length of rope. She ran a small, fair-skinned

hand over it.

“I don’t think this was bought in anger,” she said, her brown eyes

unfocusing and her voice taking on the slightly eerie tone it always did

when she was in trance. “I see a boy and a girl, over a counter at a

hardware store—and she’s laughing, and the boy says, ‘I’ll bet you

anything that you’re going to school next year to be an architect,’ and

the girl gets all misty-eyed, and says, yes, and—”

“And that’s all the psychic spying I care to hear today.” Damon

had come right up to them without making a sound. Bonnie jumped

violently, and almost dropped the rope.

“Listen,” Damon continued harshly, “just a hundred meters away

is the final crossing. Either you wear these and you act like slaves or you

don’t get in to help Stefan. Ever. That’s it. ”

Silently, the girls conferred with their eyes. Elena knew that her

own expression said clearly that she wasn’t asking either Bonnie or

Meredith to go with her, but that she herself was going if it required

crawling behind Damon on her hands and knees.

Meredith, looking directly into Elena’s eyes, slowly shut her own

and nodded, letting out her breath. Bonnie was nodding her head

already, resigned.

In silence, Bonnie and Meredith let Elena tie their wrists in front of

them. Elena then let Damon tie her wrists and thread a long rope

between the three of them, as if they were a chain gang of prisoners.

Elena could feel a flush coming up from below her chest to burn in

her cheeks. She couldn’t meet Damon’s eyes, not this way, but she knew

without asking that Damon was thinking about the time that Stefan had

dismissed him from his apartment like a dog, in front of just this

audience, plus Matt.

Vengeful cad, Elena thought as hard as she could in Damon’s

direction. She knew the last word would hurt the most. Damon prided

himself on being a gentleman…

But “gentlemen” don’t go into the Dark Dimension, Damon’s

voice in her head said mockingly.

“All right,” Damon added aloud, and took the lead rope in one

hand. He started walking briskly into the darkness of the cave, the three

girls crowding and stumbling behind him.

Elena would never forget that brief journey, and she knew neither

Bonnie nor Meredith would either. They walked across the shallow

opening of the cave and into the small opening in the back, which gaped

like a mouth. It took some maneuvering to get the three of them into it.

On the other side the cavern flared out again, and they were in a large

cavern. At least that was what Elena’s enhanced senses told her. The

everlasting fog had returned and Elena had no idea which way they were

going.

Only a few minutes later a building reared up out of the thick fog.

Elena didn’t know what she had been expecting from the Demon

Gate. Possibly huge ebony doors, carved with serpents and encrusted

with jewels. Maybe a rough-hewn, weathered colossus of stone, like the

Egyptian pyramids. Perhaps even some sort of futuristic energy field that

flickered and flashed with blue-violet lasers.

What she saw instead looked like a ramshackle depot of some

kind, a place for holding and shipping goods. There was an empty pen,

heavily fenced, topped with barbed wire. It stank, and Elena was glad

that she and Damon had not channeled power to her nose.

Then there were people, men and women in fine clothes, each with

a key in one hand, murmuring something before opening a door in one

side of the building. The same door—but Elena would bet anything that

they weren’t all going to the same place, if the keys were like the one

she had briefly “borrowed” from Shinichi’s house a week or so ago. One

of the ladies looked as if she were dressed for a fancy masquerade, with

fox ears that blended into her long auburn hair. It was only when Elena

saw under her ankle-length dress the swishing of a fox tail that she

realized that the woman was a kitsune making use of the Demon Gate.

Damon hastily—and none too gently—led them to the other side of

the building, where a broken-hinged door opened into a dilapidated

room that, strangely, seemed larger on the inside than on the outside. All

sorts of things were being bartered or sold here: many looked as if they

had to do with the management of slaves.

Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie looked at one another, round-eyed.

Obviously, people bringing wild slaves in from the outside considered

torture and terror all in a day’s work.

“Passage for four,” Damon said briefly to the slump-shouldered

but heavyset man behind the counter.

“Three savages all at once?” The man, eyes devouring what he

could see of the three girls, turned to look at Damon suspiciously.

“What can I say? My job is also my hobby.” Damon stared him

straight in the eyes.

“Yeh, but…” The man laughed. “Lately we bin gettin’ maybe one

or two a month.”

“They’re legally mine. No kidnappings. Kneel,” Damon added

casually to the three girls.

It was Meredith who got it first and sank to the ground like a ballet

dancer. Her dark, dark gray eyes were focused on something no one but

she could see. Then Elena somehow untangled the single syllable from

the others. She focused her mind on Stefan and pretended she was

kneeling to kiss him on his prison pallet. It seemed to work; she was

down.

But Bonnie was up. The most dependent, the softest, the most

innocent member of the triumvirate found that her knees had gone solid.

“Redheads, eh?” the man said, eyeing Damon sharply even as he

smirked. “Maybe you’d better buy a little tingler for that one.”

“Maybe,” Damon said tightly. Bonnie just looked at him blankly,

looked at the girls on the ground and then threw herself into a prostrate

position. Elena could hear her sobbing softly. “But I’ve found that a firm

voice and a disapproving look actually work better.”

The man gave up and slumped again. “Passage for four,” he

grunted and reached up and pulled on a dirty bell rope. By this time

Bonnie was weeping in fear and humiliation, but no one seemed to

notice, except the other girls.

Elena didn’t dare to try to comfort her telepathically; that wouldn’t

fit in with the aura of a “normal human girl” at all, and who knew what

traps or devices might be hidden here in addition to the man who kept

undressing them over and over with his eyes? She just wished she could

call up one of her Wings attacks, right here in this room. That would

wipe the smug look off the man’s face.

A moment later, something else wiped it off as completely as she

could have desired. Damon leaned across the counter and whispered

something to him that turned the slumped man’s leering face a sickly

color of green.

Did you hear what he said? Elena communicated this to Meredith

using her eyes and eyebrows.

Meredith, her own eyes crinkling, positioned her hand in front of

Elena’s abdomen, then made a twisting, ripping motion.

Even Bonnie smiled.

Then Damon led them to wait outside the depot. They had only

been standing a few minutes when Elena’s new vision spotted a boat

gliding silently through the mist. She realized that the building must be

on the very bank of a river, but even with Power directed solely to her

eyes she could barely make out where the nonreflective land gave way

to shining water, and even with Power directed solely to her ears she

could barely hear the sound of swift deep water running.

The boat stopped—somehow. Elena couldn’t see any anchor

dropped or anything to fasten it to. But the fact was that it did stop, and

the slumped man put down a plank, which stayed in place as they

boarded: first Damon, and then his bevy of “slaves.”

On board, Elena watched Damon wordlessly offer six pieces of

gold to the ferryman—two for each human who presumably wouldn’t be

coming back, she thought.

For a moment she was lost in the memory of being very

young—only three or so, she must have been—and sitting on her

father’s lap while he read to her from a wonderfully illustrated book

about the Greek myths. It told about the ferryman, Charon, who took

spirits of the deceased over the river Styx to the land of the dead. And

her father telling her that the Greeks put coins on the eyes of those who

died so they could pay the ferryman….

There’s no coming back from this journey! she thought suddenly

and violently. No escape! They might as well be truly dead….

Strangely, it was horror that saved her from this morass of terror.

Just as she lifted her head, perhaps to scream, the dim figure of the

ferryman turned from his duties briefly as if to look back over the

passengers. Elena heard Bonnie’s shriek. Meredith, shaking, was

frantically and illogically reaching for the bag in which her gun was

stowed. Even Damon didn’t seem to be able to move.

The tall specter in the boat had no face.

He had deep depressions where his eyes should be, a shallow

hollow for a mouth, and a triangular hole where his nose should have

protruded. The uncanny horror of it, on top of the stink from the depot

pens, was simply too much for Bonnie, and she slumped sideways, limp

against Meredith, in a faint.

Elena, in the midst of her terror, had a moment of revelation. In the

dim, moist, dripping twilight, she had forgotten to stop trying to use all

her senses to their fullest. She was undoubtedly better able to see the

inhuman face of the ferryman than, say, Meredith. She could also hear

things, like the sounds of long-dead miners tapping at the rock above

them, and the scurrying of enormous bats or cockroaches or something,

inside the stone walls all around them.

But now, Elena suddenly felt warm tears on her icy cheeks as she

realized that she had completely underestimated Bonnie for as long as

she’d known about her friend’s psychic powers. If Bonnie’s senses were

permanently open to the kinds of horrors Elena was experiencing now, it

was no wonder that Bonnie lived in fear. Elena found herself promising

to be a hell of a lot more tolerant the next time Bonnie faltered or started

screaming. In fact, Bonnie deserved some kind of an award for keeping

a grip on sanity this far, Elena decided. But Elena didn’t dare do any

more than gaze at her friend, who was completely unconscious, and

swear to herself that from now on Bonnie would find a champion in

Elena Gilbert.

That promise and the warmth of it burned like a candle in Elena’s

mind, a candle she pictured held by Stefan, the light of it dancing in his

green eyes and playing over the planes of his face. It was just enough to

keep her from losing her own sanity on the rest of the journey.

By the time the boat docked—at a place just slightly more traveled

than the one where they had embarked—all three of the girls were in a

state of exhaustion brought on by prolonged terror and wrenching