The War of Roses (6 page)

In the sweet darkness
of the last hours of night, Damon settled down in bed.  He was holding the newly-Influenced Elena’s hand, was bathed in the warm radiance of Elena’s aura.  He put up wards about the perimeter of Soto hall, to ensure that if anyone who didn’t have business in the dormitory was sniffing around the entryway, windows, or exits of the building they would trip an eldritch wire and he Damon, would be wakened out of the soundest sleep.

Then he settled his head on the pillow.  In just minutes, h
e had fallen asleep.

D
amon dreamed.

*
* *

He was paralyzed and covered with ash
: ash and tiny droplets of Power.  However, the Power didn’t seem to be enough to allow him movement except in one hand, and that hand was weak; its movements restricted.

Damon
slept and woke and slept again.  Even with the huge stake no longer pushing him into both intolerable agony and true extinction, the wooden fibers that had spread from his circulatory system to his nerve and muscle cells were trying to make his body a seedbed for a new great Tree.  The droplets of Power that slowly soaked into his skin only sufficed to keep the fibers from accomplishing their purpose.  Perhaps in time enough drops would accumulate to kill the wooden fibers off completely, but Damon was somehow certain that even this would not allow him to get up and walk around freely.  He would need . . . some kind of help from outside to drag him back from the shadowy world of death that was all he could perceive around him.  Some sort of, ah,
jump-start.

Meanwhile, he was bored.  The shadowy world of near-death was incredibly dull.  Lying and clenching his left hand into a fist over and over, Damon tried to keep himself from watching events in his life parade over
the inner movie screen of his mind’s eye.  He felt that introspection right now would only lead to him slipping into depression and a darkness from which there was no return.

Eventually, he struck on the idea to ask the Power to do something different.  He had been wondering what was happening with Elena and Bonnie and Stefan and Sage.  Were they even alive?

To his astonishment, when he thought about them, it seemed that he could see them.  He could see the gold of Elena’s hair.  If he concentrated, he could even see out of her lapis lazuli eyes, and hear what was going on in that convoluted mind of hers.

Elena was grieving. 

It wasn’t as if the Celestial Court hadn’t done all that it had promised.  Fell’s Church was restored.  There wasn’t a possessed girl or a malach in sight.  Houses which had been burned to the ground by children acting under evil influences were whole again—and nobody remembered a damned thing about the holocaust which had swept through the town.

On top of which, Elena had been given a second chance to live her life as an ordinary human.  She ought to have been ecstatic over that.

But she couldn’t do more than summon up a quivering, watery smile.

Damon was dead.  He was gone; his soul diffused into nothingness.  Vampires didn’t go to the Dark Dimension when they died.  They certainly didn’t go to the Celestial Court.  They just . . . went out.

She would never see him again.

The first thing she did
on the day she woke up and realized all this was to call Bonnie’s mobile.  When no one answered she called Bonnie’s mother, who told her that Bonnie was home, but sick in bed.

Elena knew what kind of sickness it was.  It was grief and guilt and fear.  Bonnie held herself responsible for what had happened to Damon. 

“Just give her the phone for one moment,” she said.   And when Bonnie was listening, she said quickly, “I’m going to Mrs. Flowers’s house.  I want to know what Ma
ma
and Grandmama have to say about Damon’s soul.”

Bonnie said in a whisper that was
hoarse and choked with repressed emotion, “Take me, too!  Please?”

When Elena picked her up, Bonnie’s small face was piteous, marred with hours of weeping in the night.  Elena blinked back her own tears as she drove to Mrs. Flowers’ house.  Together, they had raised their hands to knock at the door, and together they had started as the door opened before they could touch it.

“Mrs. Flowers,” Elena began, only to be met by a quick and cheerful voice saying,

“Tea?  It’s peppermint and lemongrass.  Good for enhancing psychic abilities.  And I imagine we’ll need plenty of those today.”

“Mrs. Flowers, we’ve come—”

“Yes, yes.  I know.  What else could it be?  Bonnie, I’ve got a cold rosewater compress for your eyes.  Just hold it on while you drink your tea.”

The tea cleared Elena’s sinuses and her brain both.  “Isn’t Stefan up yet?” she asked, feeling a little ripple of alarm.  Normally, Stefan would have come downstairs at the sound of her car approaching the house, even if he couldn’t make out her aura from a distance any longer.

“Up and gone before dawn,” Mrs. Flowers said succinctly.  “He went to—well, what used to be the Old Wood.”

“Hunting?”

“I wasn’t able to ask him, dear.  I wouldn’t fret over it, though.  Sometimes young male creatures just have to be out on their own.  When they’ve experienced a loss . . .”  Mrs. Flowers let the sentence trail off discreetly.

Elena drank the last of her tea, her mind whirling.  She was trying to figure out what it would take for Stefan to stay in the Old Wood after hunting, knowing all the time that she and Bonnie would be devastated with grief today.

Devastated . . . but not prostrated.

Stefan wasn’t stupid.  He’d know what Elena would do today.  This morning.  As soon as she woke up.  And he probably knew that she’d bring Bonnie with her.

He was giving her space
; grieving alone so that she could speak to Mrs. Flowers without embarrassment.

“So . . . why have we come this morning?” she asked the white-haired woman carefully.

“To find out what I’ve been trying to find out since late last night.  Whether a certain poor vampire’s soul is drifting through the æther, or reincarnated, or if it has . . . simply disappeared.”

Elena’s heart sank.  “None of those possibilities sound like very good ones.”

“Well, we shall see, we shall see.  I’ve already spoken to dear Ma
ma
about this and she said, ‘Let the young witch try her hand at dowsing with a crystal pendulum.’”

Bonnie took the rosewater compress off her face.  Her eyes were much less swollen, Elena noted.  “I thought dowsing was something you did with a stick to find water
,” she said, still almost whispering.

“It can be—though most people are fooling themselves with that stick.  It twists when tiny muscular movements tell it to.  However, there is another kind of dowsing.  You use a
quartz crystal over a map . . . and this can be quite effective, whether you are looking for a lost object or for your heart’s desire.”

Elena spotted the flaw.  “But, Mrs. Flowers, we don’t have a map of the Dark Dimension.  I mean, that’s what we would need, isn’t it?
  Souls that don’t go to the Celestial Court usually wind up there, don’t they?”

“Yes, my dear
—although
very
wicked souls go much, much farther down, I’m sorry to say.  However, I don’t believe that we need to worry about that possibility with Damon.”

“But a map—”

“I’m afraid that my artistic skills leave something to be desired, but I’ve been working on something since the wee hours of the morning,” Mrs. Flowers said complacently.  

On the half of the kitchen table that was empty of tea cups sat a rolled-up scroll of
what looked like paper.  Bonnie and Elena reached it from opposite directions at the same time.  Elena held her breath as together they carefully unrolled what turned out to be thin, creamy-colored vellum.

When Bonnie saw the full extent of the map, she dropped her end with a squeak.  Elena held it partially unrolled, but she could tell that her
own eyes were wide.

There seemed to be more ink
than white space on the scroll. Mrs. Flowers had seemingly drawn in microscopic detail the entirety of the Dark Dimension: no labels on anything, but thousands of tiny polygons that might be buildings, and hundreds of sinuous lines that might be roads. There was even a river, crossed by dozens of different bridges.

“But how—even if you’ve been drawing since last night—how did you manage to get this finished?  Bonnie, it won’t bite you; hold out the other side of it,” Elena added, so that she could admire the masterpiece all at once.

“Of course I wasn’t conscious while I did it,” Mrs. Flowers said matter-of-factly.  “Dear Grandmama took over my mind and I wasn’t aware of doing anything until the entire process was over.  Rather like automatic writing, you see.”  Mrs. Flowers coughed delicately.  “I . . . er, was just a little alarmed at how familiar Grandmama seemed to be with the place.  I hope she herself is not a resident.”

“We met some very nice people there,” Elena said truthfully.  “And
here!
  This is Lady Ulma’s house.  I’m sure of it.  Do you see, Bonnie?”

“Ye-es, if you say so,
” Bonnie agreed doubtfully.  “But . . . well, what am I supposed to do with it, exactly?”

Mrs. Flowers explained and Bonnie’s brown eyes got
bigger and bigger.  She was desperate enough, though, Elena knew, to be willing to try anything.

After they had put four heavy weights at the corners of the map to hold it open, Bonnie solemnly took the
translucent white quartz crystal on a thin gold necklace chain that Mrs. Flowers gave her.  She held the necklace by the chain over the center of the map, and the crystal swung slightly from the motion of her shaking fingers.

“When you hold
it over the right spot, it should make a circle,” Mrs. Flowers explained.

While Elena watched
through narrow eyes, Bonnie made the attempt.  She started at the top left of the map, and, keeping the crystal about an inch above the map, she moved slowly all the way to the top right.  Then, as if she were mowing a lawn, she moved her hand down a bit and covered the area from the extreme right of the map to the far left.  Back and forth she went, although twice she was forced to rest her arm, the trembling of which had caused the crystal pendulum to shimmy.

But nowhere on the entire sheet of vellum did the quartz make anything like a circle.

“It’s no good,” she said at last, tears spilling over her cheeks.  “The crystal doesn’t react anywhere.  I don’t
sense
anything, either.”

Elena felt as tired as she knew that Bonnie was.  Her ner
ves were stretched like harpsichord strings about to snap.

“Why?  Why doesn’t it work?” she wondered
aloud.  “Unless”—blinking away tears of her own—“he’s been reincarnated already like you said, Mrs. Flowers.”  She couldn’t bring herself to say “or he’s just disappeared,” but the words were in her mind.             

I’m
not there!  I’m still here
, Damon thought helplessly, knowing that she couldn’t hear him, that not even Bonnie could hear him through the barrier of worlds. 
I’m exactly where you left me!

“If,” Mrs. Flowers said
thoughtfully, “he has already been reincarnated to some woman on earth, then we would need a globe.”

“To some woman?” Elena and Bonnie said almost in unison.

“Some pregnant woman,” Mrs. Flowers continued mildly.  “That is how reincarnation works, I believe.”

Elena looked sideways at Bonnie, but Bonnie was ju
st staring at Mrs. Flowers with brown eyes that seemed enormous in her small heart-shaped face. 

Damon
-as-a-baby-born-to-some-stranger didn’t sound right to Elena.  It would be eighteen years and some odd months before they could even approach him.  And would he be a vampire?  How
could
he be, in a new life?  He wouldn’t remember Elena or Bonnie or Stefan.

It didn’t sound like a very good proposition.  But . . .

“Stefan has a globe in his room,” Elena said.  “I’ll get it.”

Forget the globe!
Damon thought at her fiercely.
I’m not in some woman’s womb!  I’m here, buried under the ash!  I’m
exactly
where you left me!

Elena slowly climbed the rickety staircase to Stefan’s room.  It was a familiar route and she
would normally have no hesitation about entering his room unasked.  It had been
their
room for so long; for all the time that she had to hide from the people of Fell’s Church because they thought she was dead.

Still, she paused a moment and then knocked before opening the door.  Stefan had other ways of entering his room than via Mrs. Flowers’
s front door.  If he had enough Power he could fly on the wings of a falcon through the window.

She got no answer, and she
walked inside.  The bed was neatly made and had an air of not being slept on at all last night.

Suddenly Elena wished that Stefan
wasn’t the type of boyfriend to give her space.  She wished that he was here with her.  Come to think of it, if they were all grieving for the same person, why shouldn’t he be with her?  Why had he run away instead of staying to support her?