“You’re right,” Stefan said when eye-contact had been achieved once more. It took Damon several long seconds to realize that he wasn’t commenting on the clouds or something in Damon’s head but on Damon’s story. “You did bite Elena and take so much blood that she needed a transfusion, and she did forgive you. But it was completely different from what I did tonight.”
“Different how?”
“In two ways. First of all, you’d lost so much blood yourself that you were like a starving animal. You weren’t yourself; you were in the bloodlust. That’s something that happened by a freak accident and will never happen again. But Elena and I were just kissing, that’s all. We can’t be around each other and not kiss. And I wasn’t a starving animal; I was myself. Elena makes you want to be the very best person you can be all the time—and I was. I loved her so much . . . it was love that did it. And that makes me far too dangerous for her to remember.”
Damon opened his mouth; shut it again and tried to kick his brain into gear. Reply hazy; reply hazy; reply hazy.
Stefan didn’t wait for him to comment. “Secondly, you didn’t kill the one and only girl you love in all the worlds.”
“Neither did you,” Damon said automatically. “Or else we both did—a little. I put her into a sort of coma, and it sounds as if you did, too.”
“That’s not what I mean. I said the one and only girl in all the worlds.”
Damon opened his mouth to snarl, “And now you’re going to judge how much I love Elena?” when suddenly he stopped, frozen. He saw quite clearly the picture that Stefan was projecting of wide brown eyes in a heart-shaped face and tumbled strawberry curls, and he felt all the defensive fury of being trapped in the wrong.
Wait a minute—he was always in the wrong, as far as Stefan was concerned. All he needed to do was what he normally did. It took an effort but after a moment he flashed Stefan a blinding 500 kilowatt smile and then turned it off instantly.
“Granted,” he said, “I may be guilty of loving too much. It’s the way my delicate nature is constituted, I’m afraid.” And he lightning-flashed the smile again, this time with eyes as hard as steel.
Stefan maintained his eerie calm. “Then you may be able to hold her gently enough,” he said. He cocked his head the other way. “Not so tightly that she shatters into fragments, all sapphire and pomegranate and jonquil yellow.”
Damon was about to respond ominously that any girl he held shattered into rainbow fragments whenever he wanted her to, when suddenly his brain caught up with his testosterone.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, waitaminute, it told him. Listen to what he’s saying. He’s saying that basically he’s never met Elena now. That she’s not had time to see him, to fall in love with him, to set her heart on him.
He’s saying that right now Elena is up for grabs. And you’ve been trying to talk him out of it. Who’s the craziest madman on this roof tonight?
A shiver raised the hairs at the back of his neck again, but this was a delicious shiver. He, Damon, could go to Elena as soon as modern medicine had healed her. His face could be the first thing she saw when she woke. He could court her in any way he chose; he could ask her on bended knee if she would be his princess of darkness. And there would be no memory of Stefan to come between them when the air began to crackle with electricity. There would be no shadow to darken Elena’s lapis lazuli eyes when she found she was responding to the wild call of his blood to hers.
Elena, heart-ravishing, star-scintillating Elena, would at last be entirely his.
Damon felt something like Stefan’s preternatural calm settle over him. He knew he was smiling a faint and very dangerous smile.
“But what are you planning to do next, little brother?” he asked, his voice light and almost mocking.
“I’m going to finish what I started. I’m going to Influence Elena’s family and the other two who came here with them.” Stefan’s eyes were touched with silver in the starlight.
Damon scanned the building below, seeing the life-signs of the five Stefan was talking about. “Ah. You’re going to bite them, too, then. You know, despite what you say, you’re getting the hang of things quite nicely—and only five centuries overdue.”
Stefan’s lip quirked, the only sign of emotion he’d shown so far. “I don’t bite children, Damon—but of course you wouldn’t know that.”
Damon, who had never bitten a child in his life, narrowed his eyes and murmured, “You don’t know what you’ve missed. You know how humans have those candy wax bottles with just a sweet sip of juice inside? You bite off the wax tops and drink: one, two, three!”
Stefan said expressionlessly, “Do remember to tell Elena about biting off children’s lids: one, two, three! I’m sure there’s something in it for you.”
Yes, like a knee in the groin, Damon thought and flashed a genuine smile. Elena was as fierce at heart as he was—which made her perfect in his eyes.
Stefan was ignoring him while still looking at him; a rather handy trick that Damon couldn’t help but admire. “The adults she brought are either so easy that I can Influence them from this roof or so difficult that . . . well, how would you feel about setting fang to Mrs. Flowers’ throat?”
“The old biddy? Too tough for my taste.”
“Mrs. Theophilia Flowers, who just weeks ago shed fifty years and saved Matt and Meredith and the entirety of Fell’s Church. The real town witch, with hair the color of starlight falling down to her hips.”
“Well, she’s put fifty years on again,” Damon pointed out pragmatically. “And every day of it shows. I’d leave her alone.”
“I can’t do that. I have to talk with her. And then I have to wake Matt and Bonnie and Meredith up.”
“Whatever floats your boat.” Actually, Damon thought that the latter was a good idea. The three waxwork figures standing, sitting, and lying down in the ICU room with the lights turned off were starting to weigh on his mind. More specifically, the one delicate figure lying utterly motionless on the bed was weighing on him. The other two could doubtless fend for themselves.