“Bonnie can’t find him,” Elena said. “She’s been dousing everywhere with a quartz crystal. But he’s not in the Dark Dimension . . . and I can’t even find Mrs. Flowers’s old school geography book so that we can see if he’s been reincarnated on Earth!”
“Is that what you’ve been doing? Looking for a school book? I thought maybe you’d been coalmining.” Stefan first dashed his own tears away and then, very gently, used his thumbs to wipe away hers.
This small kindness almost undid Elena. She squeezed Stefan as hard as she could. This was his cue to squeeze her back, not with any significant proportion of his true strength, but much harder than he would normally do.
Elena felt better for being tightly held. Strange, but she had never wondered at all about Stefan’s expression should he see her looking as if she’d “gone coalmining.” She knew that he saw beneath the dust and beneath her fair skin as well. He saw her heart, and that was the end of his searching.
Just now he was rubbing his chin against the top of her head in a very comforting way. Elena’s last tears fell when she blinked and she was able to keep back any new ones. The coolness of Stefan’s body permeated hers even as the sun beat down on both of them, and his touch soothed all her knotted muscles and relaxed her aching joints. The only pain that was left was in her heart.
“I . . . miss him,” Elena confided abruptly, without having planned to speak at all.
“So do I.”—very softly, but with a deep component, because he was speaking with his jaw against her scalp, and she could hear him through bone conduction. He kissed her hair, so lightly that she could barely feel it.
Elena felt that there was nothing more to be said. They understood one another. They both ached to see Damon, and Stefan was not going to allow anything as petty as jealousy to break the deep and lasting communion that she and he shared.
“You know,” he said after a few minutes, speaking as calmly as before, “I have a globe in my bedroom, and—”
Elena didn’t even try to keep the words back. “I already got it,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to bother you by calling you, and I knew you wouldn’t mind. But it’s no good; a globe isn’t. It’s too small. If Bonnie had found anything, she’d have called me. That’s why I was looking for Mrs. Flowers’s old geography book.”
Stefan kissed her hair again. “I was going to say, ‘and there’s an outdated world atlas under my bed.’ It won’t be accurate about some countries’ names, but it’s better than that heavy, just-for-decoration globe or even an ancient geography book.”
“An atlas? You’re kidding!” Elena squeezed Stefan even more tightly and was hugged breathless in return. “Stefan, that’s fantastic! Let’s go get it before Bonnie exhausts herself completely using the globe.”
“Yes, let’s go.” But Stefan still hugged her hard and Elena made no move to release him from her arms.
Instead, she tipped her face up, cautiously, so as not to knock into his jaw and make him bite his tongue. Stefan tipped his face down. And then the outside world was swept away entirely and for Elena there was only joy and the sensation of floating in a cool sunrise, with myriad pastel colors all around her.
At last, reluctantly, Elena released Stefan and felt his grip ease. She took his hand and pressed it once firmly. Then they hurried back to the front door of the boardinghouse.
In the kitchen, Bonnie was leaning back in her chair with her eyes shut, drinking iced tea with a chunk of lemon in it from a tall glass. She opened her eyes just as Elena approached and sputtered, spraying Stefan’s globe and Mrs. Flowers’s tablecloth with tea, narrowly missing Mrs. Flowers herself.
“Oh, my God, Elena! You look—”
“I know. I’m going to wash in the sink. I didn’t find the geography book in the storage room, but Stefan has an old world atlas for us.”
“Oh.” Bonnie stopped hiccupping and sniffled, clearly trying to look refreshed and ready to get back to work. “Well, good,” she finished staunchly. “Because this globe is just impossible to work with. The only place where the pendulum even reacted was in the Pacific Ocean, and then it just swung back and forth.”
“Which means exactly nothing,” Mrs. Flowers said, looking genteelly distressed. “Dear Stefan, I’m so glad you have an atlas. That will make the dousing much easier on Bonnie. I’m afraid that it’s difficult to maintain absolute spiritual concentration
for so long a time.”
“Oh, I can do it,” Bonnie said, managing a shaky smile. Her eyes met Elena’s and Elena realized that Bonnie would kill herself trying rather than stop while getting negative results.
“Stefan, will you run up and get the atlas?” she asked as unemotionally as possible. “I’m going to look at Mrs. Flowers’s encyclopedia set, if that’s all right with her.”
“Of course it’s all right, my dear. But what will you be looking for?”
“Oh—well, I thought I might as well see if there’s a picture of Dante’s nine circles of Hell,” Elena said, still without expression. “I mean, we’re looking everywhere else for Damon. And there are other worlds down there, aren’t there? I mean the Nether World is below the Dark Dimension, and there are still more worlds beneath it, right?”
“Ye-es,” Stefan replied slowly. “Sage’s father is at the very bottom, I think. I don’t have any idea how the worlds above it are ordered, and I doubt that it’s much like Dante’s Inferno described, but the pendulum might take our intentions into account and react.”
“Good,” Elena said briskly, although she could see that both Bonnie and Stefan were horrified at the idea that Damon might be in some deep hell undergoing the tortures of the damned. She was as determined as Bonnie to find Damon, wherever he was, and that included marching into hell if necessary.
Once she’d had a chance to wash and drink some lemony iced tea, she thumbed through the musty volumes of Mrs. Flowers’s antique Encyclopædia Britannica until she found a suitable painting done by Hieronymus Bosch, who had been born around the year 1450.
“Might as well get it over with before you start on the Earth,” she said to Bonnie, putting the heavy book on the table as Stefan returned with his old atlas.
Bonnie gulped but picked up the piece of quartz by its golden chain. Her small hand shook so badly at first that the crystal bobbed and swung in all different directions.