Phantom (18 page)

“There has to be another way,” she insisted.

“Well, then we’d better find it, and soon,” Damon answered grimly. “Otherwise the entire world will be at risk.”

Damon was saturated with Elena. Her sweet, rich scent in his nostrils, the throbbing beat of her heart in his ears, the silk of her hair and the satin of her skin against his fingers. He wanted to kiss her, to hold her, to sink his fangs into her and taste the heady nectar of her blood, that vibrant blood that tasted like no one else’s.

But she made him go, although he knew she didn’t really want to.

She didn’t say it was because of his little brother that she pushed him away, but he knew anyway. It was always Stefan.

When he left her, he transformed gracefully into a large black crow again and flew from her bedroom window to the quince tree nearby. There, he folded his wings and shifted from one foot to another, settling in to watch over her. He could sense her through the window, anxious at first, her thoughts churning, but soon her pulse slowed, her breathing deepened, and he knew she was asleep. He would stay and guard her.

There was no question: He had to save her. If Elena wanted a chivalrous knight, someone who would protect her nobly, Damon could do that. Why should that weakling Stefan have all the glory?

But he wasn’t sure what came next. Despite Elena’s begging him not to go, heading into the Dark Dimension seemed like the logical next step in fighting this phantom. But how to get there? There were no easy paths. He didn’t have the time to journey to one of the gates again, nor did he want to leave Elena’s side long enough to travel there. And he couldn’t expect to find something as useful as a star ball again by chance.

Plus, if he did get there, being in the Dark Dimension would have special dangers for him now. He didn’t think the Guardians knew he had come back from the dead, and he didn’t know how they would react when they did. He’d rather not find out. The Guardians didn’t care for vampires much, and they tended to like things to stay the way they ought to be. Look at how they had stripped Elena’s Powers when she came to their attention.

Damon hunched his shoulders and fluffed out his iridescent feathers irritably. There had to be another way.

There was the slightest rustle underfoot. No one without the sensitive ears of a vampire would have heard it, it was so cautious, but Damon caught it. He snapped to attention and peered sharply around. No one would get to his princess.

Oh.
Damon relaxed again and clicked his beak in vexation.
Stefan.
The shadowy figure of his little brother stood beneath the tree, head tilted back, gazing in devotion at Elena’s darkened window. Of course he was there, standing by to defend her against all the horrors of the night.

And just like that, Damon knew what he had to do: If he wanted to learn more about the phantom, he’d have to give himself over to it.

He closed his eyes, allowing every negative feeling he’d ever had about Stefan to wash over him. How Stefan had always taken everything Damon wanted, had stolen it, if he needed to.

Damn Stefan, Damon thought bitterly. If his brother hadn’t come to town earlier than him, Damon would have had a chance to make Elena fall in love with him first, to be the one to reap the utter devotion he saw in her eyes when she looked at Stefan.

Instead, here he was, second-best. He hadn’t been enough for Katherine either; she had wanted his brother, too. Elena, tiger to the kitten Katherine had been, would have been the perfect mate for Damon. Beautiful, strong, wily, capable of great love, they could have ruled the night together.

But she had fallen for his lily-livered weakling of a little brother. Damon’s claws clenched the branch he sat on.

“Isn’t it sad,” a quiet voice beside him suggested, “how you try and try, but you’re never enough for the women you love?”

A cool tendril of fog touched his wing. Damon straightened and looked around. Dark fog was winding around the quince tree, just at Damon’s level. Below, Stefan stood unaware. The fog had come for Damon alone.

With a private smile, Damon felt the fog envelop him, and then all was darkness.

T
he next morning was another hot one. The air was so thick and humid that just walking down the street felt unpleasantly like getting slapped with a warm, damp washcloth. Even inside the car with the air-conditioning on, Elena could feel her usually sleek hair frizzing from the humidity.

Stefan had turned up at her house just after breakfast, this time with a list of herbs and magical supplies Mrs. Flowers wanted them to find in town for new protection spells.

As they drove, Elena gazed out the window at the neat white houses and trim green lawns of residential Fell’s Church as they gradually gave way to the brick buildings and tasteful store windows of the shopping district at the center of town.

Stefan parked on the main street, outside a cute little café where they had sipped cappuccinos together last fall, shortly after she’d learned what he was. Sitting at one of the tiny tables, Stefan had told her how to make a traditional Italian cappuccino, and that had led to his reminiscing about the great feasts of his youth during the Renaissance: aromatic soups sprinkled with pomegranate seeds; rich roasts basted with rosewater; pastries with elder flowers and chestnuts. Course after course of sweet, rich, heavily spiced foods that a modern Italian would never recognize as part of his country’s cuisine.

It had awed Elena when she realized how different the world had been the last time Stefan had eaten human food. He had mentioned in passing that forks had just been coming into fashion when he was young, and that his father had derided them as a foppish fad. Until Katherine had brought a more fashionable and ladylike influence into their home, they had eaten with only spoons and sharp knives for cutting. “It was elegant, though,” he’d said, laughing at the expression on her face. “We all had excellent table manners. You’d hardly have noticed.”

At the time, she’d thought his differences from the boys she’d known—the scope of all the history he’d witnessed—was romantic.

Now . . . well, now she didn’t know what she thought.

“It’s down here, I think,” said Stefan, taking her hand and returning her to the present. “Mrs. Flowers said a New Age store has opened up and that they should have most of the things we need.”

The shop was called Spirit and Soul, and it was tiny but vibrant, cluttered with crystals and unicorn figurines, tarot cards and dream catchers. Everything was painted in shades of purple and silver, and silky wall hangings blew in the breeze from a little windowsill air conditioner. The air conditioner wasn’t strong enough to put much of a dent in the stickiness of today’s heat, though, and the birdlike little woman with long curling hair and clattering necklaces who emerged from the back of the shop looked tired and sweaty.

“How can I help you?” she said in a low, musical voice that Elena suspected she adopted to fit in with the atmosphere of the store.

Stefan pulled out the scrap of paper covered in Mrs. Flowers’s tangled handwriting and squinted at it. Vampire vision or not, deciphering Mrs. Flowers’s writing could be a challenge.

Oh, Stefan.
He was earnest, and sweet, and noble. His poet’s soul shone through those gorgeous green eyes. She couldn’t regret loving Stefan. But sometimes she secretly wished that she had found Stefan in a less complicated form, that the soul and the intelligence, the love and the passion, the sophistication and the gentleness had somehow been possible in the form of a real eighteen-year-old boy; that he had been what he had pretended to be when she first met him: mysterious, foreign, but human.

“Do you have anything made of hematite?” he asked now. “Jewelry, or maybe knickknacks? And incense with . . .” He frowned at the paper. “Althea in it? Does althea sound right?”

“Of course!” said the shopkeeper enthusiastically. “Althea’s good for protection and security. And it smells great. The different kinds of incense are over here.”

Stefan followed her deeper into the shop, but Elena lingered near the door. She felt exhausted, even though the day had barely begun.

There was a rack of clothing by the front window, and she fiddled distractedly with it, pushing hangers back and forth. There was a wispy pink tunic studded with tiny mirrors, a little hippieish but cute.
Bonnie might like this,
Elena thought automatically, and then flinched.

Through the window, she glimpsed a face she knew, and turned, the top hanging forgotten in her hand.

She searched her mind for the name. Tom Parker, that was it. She’d gone out on a few dates with him junior year, before she and Matt had gotten together. It felt like a lot more than a year and a half ago. Tom had been pleasant enough and handsome enough, a perfectly satisfactory date, but she hadn’t felt a spark between them and, as Meredith had said, “practiced catch and release” with him, “freeing him to swim back into the waters of dating.”

He had been crazy about
her
, though. Even after she set him loose, he’d hung around, looking at her with puppy-dog eyes, pleading with her to take him back.

If things had been different, if she had felt anything for Tom, wouldn’t her life be simpler now?

She watched Tom. He was strolling down the street, smiling, hand in hand with Marissa Peterson, the girl he had started dating near the end of last year. Tom was tall, and he bent his shaggy dark head down to hear what Marissa was saying. They grinned at each other, and he lifted his free hand to gently, teasingly tug on her long hair. They looked happy together.

Well, good for them. Easy to be happy when they were uncomplicatedly in love, when there was nothing more difficult in their lives than a summer spent with their friends before heading off to college. Easy to be happy when they couldn’t even remember the chaos their town had been in before
Elena
had saved them. They weren’t even grateful. They were too lucky: They knew nothing of the darkness that lurked on the edges of their safe, sunlit lives.

Elena’s stomach twisted. Vampires, demons, phantoms, star-crossed love. Why did
she
have to be the one to deal with it all?

She listened for a moment. Stefan was still consulting with the shopkeeper, and she heard him say worriedly, “Will rowan twigs have the same effect, though?” and the woman’s reassuring murmur. He would be busy for a while longer, then. He was only about a third of the way down the list Mrs. Flowers had given them.

Elena put the shirt back in its place on the rack and walked out of the store.

Careful not to be noticed by the couple across the street, she followed them at a distance, taking a good long look at Marissa. She was skinny, with freckles and a little blob of a nose. Pretty enough, Elena supposed, with long, straight dark hair and a wide mouth, but not especially eye-catching. She’d been nobody much at school, either. Volleyball team, maybe. Yearbook. Passable, but not stellar grades. Friends, but not popular. An occasional date, but not a girl who boys noticed. A part-time job in a store, or maybe the library. Ordinary. Nothing special.

So why did ordinary, nothing-special Marissa get to have this uncomplicated, sunlit life, while Elena had been through hell—literally—to get what Marissa seemed to have with Tom and yet she
still didn’t get to have it
?

A cold breeze touched Elena’s skin, and she shivered despite the morning’s heat. She looked up.

Dark, cool tendrils of fog were drifting around her, yet the rest of the street was just as sunny as it had been a few minutes before. Elena’s heart began to pound hard before her brain even caught up and realized what was happening.
Run!
something inside her howled, but it was too late. Her limbs were suddenly heavy as lead.

A cool, dry voice spoke close behind her, a voice that sounded eerily like the observational one inside her own head, the one that told her the uncomfortable truths she didn’t want to acknowledge. “Why is it,” the voice said, “that you can only love monsters?”

Elena couldn’t bring herself to turn around.

“Or is it that only monsters can truly love you, Elena?” the voice went on, taking on a softly triumphant tone. “All those boys in high school, they only wanted you as a trophy. They saw your golden hair and your blue eyes and your perfect face and they thought how fine they would look with you on their arm.”

Steeling herself, Elena slowly turned around. There was no one there, but the fog was growing thicker. A woman pushing a stroller brushed past her with a placid glance. Couldn’t she see Elena was being wrapped in her own private fog? Elena opened her mouth to cry out, but the words stuck in her throat.

The fog was colder now, and it felt almost solid, like it was holding Elena back. With a great effort of will, she forced herself forward, but could stagger only as far as the bench in front of a nearby store. The voice spoke again, whispering in her ear, gloating. “They never saw you, those boys. Girls like Marissa, like Meredith, can find love and be happy. Only the monsters bother to find the real Elena. Poor, poor Elena, you’ll never be normal, will you? Not like other girls.” It laughed softly, viciously.

The fog pressed thicker around her. Now Elena couldn’t see the rest of the street, or anything beyond the darkness. She tried to get to her feet, to move forward a few steps, to shake off the fog. But she couldn’t move. The fog was like a heavy blanket holding her down, but she couldn’t touch it, couldn’t fight it.

Elena panicked, tried once more to surge to her feet, opened her mouth to call,
Stefan!
But the fog swirled into her, through her, soaking into her every pore. Unable to fight back or call out, she collapsed.

It was still freezing cold.

“At least I have clothes on this time,” Damon muttered, kicking at a piece of charred wood as he trudged across the barren surface of the Dark Moon.

The place was beginning to get to him, he had to admit. He had been wandering this desolate landscape for what felt like days, although the unchanging darkness here made it impossible for him to know for sure how much time had passed.

When he had awakened, Damon had assumed he would find the little redbird next to him, eager for his company and protection. But he’d awoken alone, lying on the ground. No phantom, no grateful girl.

He frowned and poked one tentative foot into a heap of ash that might conceal a body, but was unsurprised to find nothing but mud beneath the ash, smearing more filth onto his once-polished black boots. After he’d arrived here and started searching for Bonnie, he’d expected that at any moment, he might stumble across her unconscious body. He’d had a powerful image of what she would look like, pale and silent in the darkness, long red curls caked with ash. But now he was becoming convinced that, wherever the phantom had taken Bonnie, she wasn’t here.

He’d come here to be a hero: defeat the phantom, save the girl, and ultimately save
his
girl.
What an idiot
, he thought, curling his lip at his own foolishness.

The phantom hadn’t brought him to wherever it was keeping Bonnie. Alone on this ash heap of the moon, he felt oddly rejected. Didn’t it want him?

A sudden powerful wind pushed against him, and Damon staggered backward a few steps before regaining his balance. The wind brought a sound with it: Was that a moan? He altered his course, hunching his shoulders and heading for where he thought the sound had come from.

Then the sound came again, a sad, sobbing moan echoing behind him.

He turned back, but his footsteps were closer together and less confident than usual. What if he was wrong and the little witch was hurt and alone somewhere on this godforsaken moon?

He was terribly hungry. He pushed his tongue against his aching canines, and they grew knife-sharp. His mouth was so dry; he imagined the flow of sweet, rich blood, life itself pulsing against his lips. The moaning came once more, from his left this time, and again he swerved toward it. The wind blew against his face, cold and wet with mist.

This was all Elena’s fault.

He was a monster. He was
supposed
to be a monster, to take blood unflinchingly, to kill without a second thought or care. But Elena had changed all that. She had made him want to protect her. Then he had started looking out for her friends, and finally even saving her provincial little town, when any self-respecting vampire would have either been long gone when the kitsune came, or enjoyed the devastation with warm blood on his lips.

He’d done all that—he’d changed for
her—
and she still didn’t love him.

Not enough, anyway. When he’d kissed her throat and stroked her hair the other night, who had she been thinking of? That weakling Stefan.

“It’s always Stefan, isn’t it?” a clear, cool voice said behind him. Damon froze, the hairs on the back of his neck rising.

“Whatever you tried to take from him,” the voice continued, “you were just fighting to even the scales, because the fact is that he got
everything
, and you had nothing at all. You just wanted things to be fair.”

Damon shuddered, not turning around. No one had ever understood that. He just wanted things to be
fair.

“Your father cared for him much more than he did for you. You’ve always known that,” the voice went on. “You were the oldest, the heir, but Stefan was the one your father loved. And, in romance, you have always been two steps behind Stefan. Katherine already loved him by the time you met her; then the same sad story happened all over again with Elena. They say they love you, these girls of yours, but they have never loved you best, or most, or only, not even when you give them your whole heart.”

Damon shuddered again. He felt a tear run down his cheek and, infuriated, wiped it away.

“And you know why that is, don’t you, Damon?” the creature went on smoothly. “Stefan. Stefan’s always taken everything you’ve ever wanted. He’s gotten the things you wanted before you even saw them, and left nothing for you. Elena doesn’t love you. She never has and she never will.”

Something broke inside Damon at the creature’s words, and instantly he snapped back to himself. How dare the phantom make him question Elena’s love? It was the only true thing he knew.