The War of Roses (The Vampire Diaries 21)

Elena thought of something else. “The X on the circle stands for Damon’s body. He was staked to the ground beside the trunk of the Tree.”

Bonnie was still looking at her. Now Elena looked back steadily, with a tiny, encouraging smile. Below the table her hands were clenched together so hard that her fingernails bit into skin.

Bonnie focused on the map again, taking a deep breath. She moved the necklace so that it just touched the bottom of the circle, then slowly moved over the white space inside.

The pendulum was motionless, swinging from side to side a little as Bonnie’s hand shook.

Mrs. Flowers leaned forward.

Bonnie moved the crystal toward the left and then traced out

a pattern, a slow sweep of the bottom of the circle. The quartz didn’t respond. She moved up an inch and swept a path going the opposite way.

She kept doing this, back and forth, inch by inch getting closer to the X. At last she was tracing the circle directly below the mark.

Elena stopped breathing.

Bonnie moved the pendulum up and approached the X slowly. Her hand began to tremble badly and the pendulum swung more and more wildly, but not in a circle. She approached the X.

Damon let his aura flare. He used all the Power he could extract from the droplets around him and his own body. He concentrated on showing the most amount of Power over the largest space possible. Here I am! he thought.

Bonnie reached the X.

Elena gasped. Stefan stood abruptly, his chair scraping on the tile floor. Mrs. Flowers’s hand flew to her heart.

“What’s happening?” Bonnie cried. Elena glanced at her quickly. Bonnie’s eyes were shut. “What’s it doing?” she demanded again.

“Open your eyes, my dear,” Mrs. Flowers said in a breathless voice. Elena couldn’t have spoken for worlds. Stefan never even looked up from the map, where the pendulum was moving in large steady circles around the X at its center.

Bonnie opened her eyes. She stared at the quartz crystal as it revolved in neat circles around and around. The circles became ovals as her hand began to shake.

Elena stood and cupped Bonnie’s hand in both her own, trying to keep it still. But Elena’s hands were none too steady, either. It took Stefan, who put his hands around Elena’s, to make the trembling stop and the ovals go back to circles.

Bonnie was staring at the crystal in amazement. “I’m not doing it,” she said. “I swear I’m not.”

“You’re not doing it,” Stefan assured her. “Your hand is still.”

“But that means—he’s there, where his body is. His spirit is right beside his body!”

Elena and Stefan exchanged looks. They both glanced at Mrs. Flowers.

“I think,” Stefan said judiciously, “that that would be too much of a fluke.”

“I’m afraid, dear Bonnie, that it would be asking a great deal of coincidence,” Mrs. Flowers said in a faint, soft voice.

Elena still couldn’t say a word. Her voice was stuck.

“You mean . . .” Bonnie started over. “Are you saying . . . ”

“His soul isn’t beside his body,” Stefan said, all at once sounding quiet and flat. Elena noticed how dark his green eyes seemed. “His soul is inside his body.”

“But that means—that means that—he came back from being dead!” Bonnie’s voice was thin.

“We don’t come back,” Stefan said, still quietly. He hesitated a moment, and then spoke in a rush. “I didn’t want to say it before, because I didn’t want to crush your hope all at once. And after a while, I just . . . I didn’t know how to say that all the work you’d done was pointless. But I never believed he could come back. Sage told him that it was the whole reason Sage had become a vampire. It was so that when he died, he wouldn’t be sent back to his father’s Infernal Court. ‘One lifetime is enough,’ was what he said. Vampires . . . just don’t . . . come back.”

“But then—” Bonnie looked at Elena for help.

Elena didn’t have any help in her. She thought, personally, that she might faint at any second.