Paradise Lost (The Vampire Diaries 20)

Elena still had her eyes shut. She wasn’t weeping; she was weighing options. She didn’t have Meredith’s book smarts but she was the finest general since Charlemagne, and she was literate, which the old emperor hadn’t been. She thought in terms of enfilade and defilade quite naturally.

She could certainly outthink Damon. She’d started doing it the second time they’d met. Only overwhelming superior force or sheer serendipitous accident could defeat her.

Elena opened her eyes. She’d fallen into a stance that Meredith had undoubtedly taught her in the last weeks. Her expression was not confident, but it was stone-cold determined.

But she had no idea of his speed or strength or dexterity. Despite her accusations, she had only mortal creatures for comparison. Now, she’d finished her calculations and decided on a gambit. The truth was that he’d be hard put not to hurt her if she wanted to fight that way. She always fought as dirty as he did; often trying to force him to break her bones or cut her throat just to make a point.

“Well?” she asked. “J’accuse! Are you going to tell me? Or do you want me to start guessing?”

Switches flipped in Damon’s brain. The conversation had gone out of control when she’d started talking about God not making Tygers and he hadn’t called a mental health helpline. He no longer had a choice.

“No,” he said, and left her for a moment, doubtless wondering “No” to what? He drank the rest of the Black Magic and prepared to burn his life energy.

“I’ll guess. You are—”

“Princess, I’m sorry, but you need to forget this whole conversation.”

“Oh, don’t say sorry. You were doing really well until you said sorry.”

“You are now forgetting our entire conversation,” he repeated, expressionlessly because she was going to forget whatever he said and the way he said it. “You are forgetting everything that happened since I came in the door and Matt left. You’re remembering that we ate pizza together and watched TV and then we fell asleep. Both of us, lying on your bed with our clothes on.”

“Liar!”

Damon took the Power he’d worked up, coiled it, and cast a tendril of Influence around her like a cowboy roping a recalcitrant heifer. Except that, since the energy was still part of him, it hurt like hell. He ignored the pain. He couldn’t outsmart her, so he was going with the overwhelming force route.

“You’re forgetting right . . . now.” He pulled the tendril tight, and it held. It felt like restraining someone by using your own entrails.

“No! Stop it! What are you doing?”

“You’re forgetting that I told you to forget.”

“No,” she keened, drawing out the syllable. She tried one last stratagem: flirting. “Damon, please, no . . .”

“It’s for your own mental stability, princess. Besides, I owe you. There is—ah—blood red in my ledger.” He laughed a little. He was used to amusing himself alone around and about Fell’s Church while Stefan and Elena did whatever they liked together. He was a loner by disposition; a lover by necessity.

Elena was still fighting. “I can’t—I need to write down—”

He put himself in the way of her desk and whiteboard. “What would you write? You don’t keep a diary any longer, you know. We ate pizza; we watched some old movie on your new TV. We fell asleep on the bed.”

Elena shut her eyes and swayed. Damon locked his teeth and drew out another long filament of life-energy. He tossed it around her, pulled it taut. Simultaneously he held her still with both hands on her shoulders.

“We ate microwaved pizza and watched TV. What old movie did we watch?” He shut his own eyes, wincing, devoutly hoping he hadn’t just made a fatal mistake. She was perfectly capable of saying Dracula.

“We watched . . . Jurassic Park.”

“What was it about?”—suspiciously. He wasn’t some pervert who fondled girls in the darkness of movie theaters.

He liked to see his conquests clearly, and amplified soundtracks hurt his exquisite hearing.

“Dinosaurs, of course. What rock do you live under? But, A, the special effects were old-fashioned; and, Two, Michael Crichton’s misogyny spoiled it a bit. The T-Rex was quite nice, though.”

“Forget that I asked what it was about; also the ‘ what rock’ line. And . . . A and Two?” If her thinking was genuinely disordered he might have to start again from scratch. He didn’t know how he could live through that without biting her.

“A and Two? I already told—somebody—about that. You; it had to be. I’ve got déjà vu going on.”

“Okay. That’s fine. What did we do after the movie?”

“We . . . got tired.”