“And after you wake her—them?” he murmured.
“Then I’ve got to go back to Dalcrest College and clean up the physical evidence. Tangible things that Elena can’t ever see again. Photos in her dorm room and on her computers. I’ve already reprogramed her phone. She doesn’t have many photos of me anyway, and Bonnie and Meredith shouldn’t have any.”
“Yes, we shadow souls don’t much like to have our images captured, do we?” Damon brooded. Then suddenly he was exclaiming and hearing Stefan exclaiming in chorus with him.
“Her diaries!”
“It’s all right,” Stefan added after a tense moment, eldritch tranquility settling over him again. “I know all the very secret places she very secretly hides them. I’ll take out of her mind everything about them from the summer before her senior year in high school on. Then I’ll plant a memory in her that she stopped keeping a diary after that. I can do it right now from right here.”
“You’d better plant it deep,” Damon advised, serious for once. “She scribbles absolutely everything in those silly books. If anything could trigger her memory—”
“Damon.”—tightly. Stefan looked up, eyes dark beneath the fall of his hair. “There are no memories left to trigger. I told you that; you just never listen. I am saying that I physically blasted away each neuron in Elena’s brain that connected to me. I eliminated a finite amount of her gray matter to do it.”
Damon felt slightly queasy, but he made himself smile urbanely. “Then the diaries would only drive her insane—words in her own writing about loving someone she’s never met. You say I’m mad often enough—but I’d prefer a princess of darkness who isn?
?t one bat short of a belfry.”
There was a pause. At last Stefan said, distantly, “Damon?”
“Yes?”
“You have absolutely no idea what that’s supposed to mean, do you?”
“No,” Damon admitted, unabashed. “Studying their little quirks of language really isn’t Me,” he added. “I’m more about puncturing them like orange juice cartons, except that fortunately they don’t ever come with pulp.”
“Well, you’re going to have to learn—”
“What? Well, what?”
“You’re going to have to learn the way they talk if you want to spend serious time with Elena.”
It wasn’t what Stefan had intended to say and they both knew it. But at the mention of Elena, Damon felt at a flush of pure greed that started in his jaws and spread outward. He decided to let whatever was bothering St. Stefan go, so that he himself could start getting along with Elena as soon as possible.
“All right—and what will you do after you clean out the dorm rooms?” he asked, at his most polite, gently urging Stefan on his way.
“After I take care of everything and everyone at Dalcrest—including taking my name out of the college mainframe—I’ll move on to Fell’s Church. You’ll want to use my dorm room for at least a few days, so people see someone who looks vaguely like me moving out. I had a key made for Elena; here it is.”
“Why should I use your squalid little dorm room for even one day’s sleep?”
“Because the ED staff and police think I came from there to Elena’s room in Soto Hall. You’ll have to say the same, or else Influence them to believe some different story—and make sure that there is no suspicion of a crime. You should know the story I told, anyway. I said that I went to Elena’s room—where there won’t be any evidence for themto find. I said that I was a little late, and that I found the door ajar and Elena lying on the floor unconscious. I knew that she needed a good hospital, so I drove her here as fast as I could, collecting some patrol cars on the way.”
“All right, all right,” said Damon, who had already decided that this basic story was too boring, and was now wondering what he could use to spice it up. Some werewolves, he thought, or maybe some pirates. He added absently, “While you’re doing the dorm rooms, don’t forget Caroline.”
The truth was that Damon was secretly placing bets every day on how long it would take for Caroline to betray Elena and Elena’s friends. Right now, after the Celestial Court had cleaned up Fell’s Church and its inhabitants, they were on friendly terms, but Caroline had shown her true nature over and over before. Damon was just watching for the egg of animosity to be hatched by the setting hen of resentment—ha! And Stefan thought he couldn’t do metaphors!—to reveal the baby chicken of doom.
“I was saying,” Stefan said in patient tones, “that then I go and take care of everyone and everything in Fell’s Church and the towns around it. A few teachers, a few students, a few parents who knew me.”
“Don’t forget Elena’s desktop in her room back on Maple Street—or the secret opening in the floorboards in her closet.”
“I will not forget anything or anyone.”—flatly.
“And when everything is taken care of? Just what are you going to do when you’ve finished everything, everywhere?”
“I don’t know,” Stefan said, disturbingly enigmatic, his eyes utterly opaque. “Maybe I’ll go back home—back to Florence, I mean. Or somewhere else in Europe. After all, it’s been said that ‘the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.’ ”
“Yes, and it’s also been said that ‘all the world is a stage and . . . if you forget your lines . . . well, basically you’re screwed.’” A pause, then: “No?”
“No, Damon.”