Damon shifted his grip to her upper arms. It was time for the ultimate inquisition. “And?”
“You said . . . you said, ‘Goodnight, princess.’”
As usual, Elena was dancing to the beat of her own self-selected orchestra.
Feeling chill and desiccated as the Dry Valleys in Antarctica, Damon was just deciding that he was going to have to Influence her again when she spoke in a whisper.
“You gave me a locket. You fastened it around my neck. I said, ‘It’s beautiful.’ And then we . . . got sleepy. I . . . fell . . .”
Elena fell.
Face turned up, eyes drifting shut, she collapsed toward him lips first. It was no particular trouble to guide her into a kiss.
Damon felt he deserved the kiss after everything he’d been through. He resisted his temptation to bite and enjoyed the warmth and sweetness that she seemed quite happy to share. For a born general, Elena was surprisingly cuddly.
When she fell asleep in the middle of the embrace, Damon automatically picked her up. Girls fell asleep all the time while he held them. Fangs were terrific tranquilizers.
He carried her to the lavender-sheeted bed and put her on it. He considered—just for a second—putting the rolled-up coverlet of Stefan’s beside her as a makeshift sword to separate them, but he hadn’t just put himself through hell to sleep without skin contact.
He draped the velvet coverlet over her instead. It clung to her every slim line and curve as if it adored her.
Damon fished the rose locket out again and carefully fastened it around her beautiful, exquisitely blue-veined neck. He took half the cold pizza out of the last of the square boxes and put it on a paper plate in the hallway. Eventually someone would come along and throw it away, or possibly eat it.
Finally, he dragged the lavender and turquoise bedspread over to his side of the bed. He had just enough strength to lie down and shake the flowered spread over both of them. Then, turning toward Elena, he slowly reached out and took her hand. She didn’t stir.
He’d won. Hoorah for him. He was so tired he couldn’t even think about being hungry.
He fell asleep.
* * *
Stefan was walking in Dyer Wood. He didn’t go too far in. He wanted to stay where he could watch Elena’s aura, which was easy right at the moment, but would become harder as his Power level dropped. He probed the forest automatically as he went, but found nothing of interest, not even a single malach. Certainly there were werewolves slinking around, but that was only natural, and they could be safely ignored.
No sign of anything like a baobhan sith.
He paused for a moment, wishing he’d pressed on and explained to Damon that the exotic name simply referred to a faery woman in Scottish folklore. It was something he’d come across deep in Bonnie’s memories, and which he’d promptly erased. The faery was supposed to have green eyes and a green dress, and to use her long fingernails to draw blood from her victims.
Damon had been in no frame of mind to listen in any case, he thought.
Satisfied that there was no danger in the wood as a whole, Stefan set out to find a tree. He inspected sturdy specimens of oak, black walnut, hickory, and elm. Almost none of the trees in the wood had yet begun to flare into their fall colors. They were all as green as the conifers, with only a straggling sapling here and there giving any promise of the conflagration to come.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Stefan thought as he stopped before an enormous oak and considered it. After several minutes of evaluation he began to climb the forest giant like a cat, looking for a flat and comfortable branch.
I’m actually sleeping in a tree, when there’s a perfectly decent mattress in my dorm room.
This was Damon’s bailiwick, or at least it had been when Damon had visited Fell’s Church. Damon had always enjoyed being on his own: lurking silently in the shadows; only emerging when prodigious danger threatened those he cared about, or when he thought he could stun the resident humans with some clever bit of flamboyance. Damon liked being invisible most of the time and wouldn’t tolerate simply walking through ordinary life when nothing much was happening.
Damon was a diva.
Stefan, on the other hand, had always preferred his simple but comfortable room in Mrs. Flowers’ boardinghouse. There he had stayed safely out of the elements—and later, had stayed with the reborn Elena.
I gave all that away, Stefan thought numbly. Damon has it now. He’s sleeping in Elena’s bed. Elena’s friends—my friends—think they’re his friends. And I did it all to myself, with the power of my own mind. There’s no one else to blame.
He could hear Mrs. Flowers reciting the words Mama had given her from Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus:
“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,