And then, all at once, a thistledown-slender figure was coming rapidly at him, and a heart-shaped face surrounded with strawberry curls was turned up toward his.
“Oh, Damon, there you are!” Bonnie cried. “Did they have a lot of questions?”
Damon hesitated, realizing that he had no idea what she was talking about. He turned his telepathy reception higher, but Bonnie was already speaking again.
“The police,” she clarified. Her large brown eyes were full of tears and light. “Were they mean to you? Did they think you had something to do with it all?”
Mean to me? thought Damon. Good gods.
Bonnie was looking as if she would burst into sobs if he didn’t answer.
“Of course not,” he said at last. “They weren’t—um—mean in the least. I believe they’ve gone now.” He had watched the cruisers glide away and disperse.
Damon was just about to go for a barracuda smile regarding the absent police officers, when a small explosion went off at the level of his chest and slim arms clutched at him desperately. He looked down, alarmed and surprised.
It was Bonnie who had exploded. She was keening. More, she had hold of him very, very tightly indeed. Damon tried to remember another time when she’d reacted this way but came up blank.
He forgot about the barracuda smile. He realized that everyone in the room was moving—slowly but inevitably—toward him. It would have been disconcerting if it hadn’t been for the timid, pained look on all their faces.
“What?” he said. He wished just fleetingly that he could say, “Where the hell is Stefan?” and then expect to get overemotional but reasonably thorough information from his brother, like in the old days of twenty minutes ago.
“What’s happened?” he tried again. And then, in sheer panic: “Elena—?”
“No, no, son,” said Robert Gilbert-Maxwell, Elena’s uncle by marriage. He put a hand on Damon’s shoulder.
Ye gods and little fishes, Damon thought, trying not to flinch as claustrophobia kicked in. They’re going to surround me as if I were a spare queen bee and smother me! I’ll be swarmed to death!
But Aunt Judith, leaving a trail of tissues in her wake, stopped in front of him without touching him. “Elena just keeps getting better and better,” she said, and blew her nose. “It’s like a miracle. The doctors can’t figure it out at all!”
“Oh, good,” Damon said. His ribs were beginning to hurt and he was sure he could feel his black silk shirt getting wet, but he couldn’t seem to find a way to make Bonnie let go of him. “I think I’ll go see her now—Elena, that is,” he added to the room in general. He wanted to gauge reactions.
Sympathetic smiles everywhere. Margaret peeked out from behind a pair of legs with a face like a flower. But: “A new group of doctors has just gone in,” said Dr. Alpert. “And they’ve promised to alert us if Elena regains consciousness.”
“She’s still unconscious?” Damon asked, not so much because he was surprised, but because it was clearly what everyone expected him to say.
“Yes, but her blood pressure has stabilized—at least that was their last report,” Meredith said. She was standing disturbingly close to Damon, closer than he could ever remember her standing before. But then she put her hands on Bonnie’s shoulders and somehow accomplished what Damon had not been able to do. She got the sobbing girl to loosen her grip.
“Now, now,” Damon heard her murmuring. “Everything is going to be all right. You shouldn’t make Damon worry like that.”
Damon frowned in the privacy of his own mind. There was something wrong with the way Meredith was treating Bonnie. Not condescendingly, not cruelly, but with a sort of lighthearted dismissal of Bonnie’s emotional state that struck him as distinctly odd. After all, when a witch got that upset, she often dropped into spontaneous trance.
All Bonnie was saying, though, was: “I’m sorry . . . I’m an idiot . . . I’m just so sorry.”
Better keep an eye on your little redbird, a snarky voice whispered in Damon’s mind. Maybe this crisis has sent her into some sort of ultimate meltdown.
Maybe it’s sent them all into meltdown, was all Damon could think to say back as Matt Honeycutt gave him a medium-heavy punch on the biceps. Usually Matt had better coordination and judgment of force—and a strike toward the jaw would be far more in character.
“You’re holding up really well,” Matt said, looking directly at Damon with eyes that were true blue, several shades lighter and less complex than Elena’s. “Good job, bud. You’re taking it unbelievably well.”
Bud? Bud? I have fallen down the rabbit hole and taken all these human creatures with me, Damon thought, knowing he looked harried by now and not giving Tinker Bell’s damn. Matt is complimenting me, he thought, and, I do believe, it’s for not bursting into tears like Bonnie.
And I’m just standing here and letting them do as they like.
At that moment he saw the figure of sanity and it was shaped like a little white-haired lady drinking a cup of steaming herbal tea. Damon forged his way through the crowd to her and muttered, “What’s going on?” He added nonverbally, And please don’t try to B.S. me because I have had that up to he
re. He pointed at the large spot on his chest where the silk was still wet with Bonnie’s tears.
“Why, Damon,” Mrs. Flowers said in her most fluttery little-old-lady tones. “I’m sure I don’t know a thing that’s wrong, now that Elena is doing so well. Why don’t you let me make you a nice cup of tea? It’s raspberry—quite a lovely red, I think.”