Phantom (20 page)

Alaric took the book and flipped through the pages until he found the right spell. He studied it, his forehead crinkling, and said, “He’s telling the truth. There isn’t anything about summoning a phantom in this book. And the spell here fits what we saw in Caleb’s workshop and what I’ve been reading in his notebooks. This rose spell is a fairly low-level discord spell; it would make whatever negative emotions we were feeling—hate, anger, jealousy, fear, sorrow—just a little bit stronger, make us a little more likely to blame one another for anything that went wrong.”

“But when combined with the powers of whatever phantom might be hanging around here, the spell would become a feedback loop, just as Mrs. Flowers said could happen, strengthening our emotions and making the phantom more powerful,” Stefan said slowly.

“Jealousy,” said Meredith thoughtfully. “You know, I hate to admit it, but I was horribly jealous of Celia when she was here.” She glanced apologetically at Alaric, who reached out and gently touched her hand.

“She was jealous of you, too,” Stefan said matter-of-factly. “I could sense it.” He sighed. “And I’ve been feeling jealous as well.”

“So perhaps a jealousy phantom?” Alaric said. “Good, that’ll give us more of a basis for researching banishing spells. Although I haven’t been feeling jealous at all.”

“Of course not,” Meredith said pointedly. “You’re the one who’s had two girls fighting over you.”

Suddenly Stefan felt so exhausted that his legs shook. He needed to feed, immediately. He nodded awkwardly to Caleb. “I’m sorry . . . for what happened.”

Caleb looked up at him. “Please tell me what happened to Tyler,” he implored. “I have to know. I’ll leave you alone if you just tell me the truth, I promise.”

Meredith and Stefan glanced at each other, and Stefan raised his eyebrows slightly. “Tyler was alive when he left town this past winter,” Meredith said slowly. “That’s all we know about him, I swear.”

Caleb stared up at her for a long moment, then nodded. “Thank you,” he said simply.

She nodded back at him crisply, like a general acknowledging the troops, and led the way out of his room.

Just then a muffled, cutoff shout came from downstairs, followed by a thud. Stefan and Alaric raced after Meredith down the stairs, almost bumping into her as she pulled to a sudden halt.

“What is it?” Stefan asked. Meredith drew aside.

Matt was lying facedown at the foot of the stairs, his arms flung out as though to catch himself. Meredith stepped quickly the rest of the way down the stairs to him and turned him over gently.

His eyes were closed, his face pale. He was breathing, slowly but steadily. Meredith felt his pulse, then shook him gently by the shoulder. “Matt,” she called. “Matt!” She looked up at Stefan and Alaric. “Just like the others,” she said grimly. “The phantom’s got him.”

I
will not die—not again,
Elena thought furiously as she writhed in pain, the invisible vise clamping down even harder on her.

Bonnie fell to the grass, even paler than before, clutching her stomach in a mirror image of Elena.

It cannot take me!

And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the deafening roar ceased and the crushing pain lifted. Elena collapsed to the ground, air whooshing back into her lungs.
It’s finished grinding bones to make its bread,
Elena thought semihysterically, and almost giggled.

Bonnie gasped loudly, letting out a small sob.

“What was that?” Elena asked her.

Bonnie shook her head. “It felt like something was getting pulled out of us,” she said, panting. “I felt it before, too, right before you showed up.”

“That pulling feeling.” Elena grimaced, her mind whirling. “I think it’s the phantom. Damon says that it wants to drain our power. That must be how it does it.”

Bonnie was staring at her, her mouth just a tiny bit open. Her pink tongue darted out and licked her lips. “
Damon
says?” she said. She frowned anxiously. “Damon’s dead, Elena.”

“No, he’s alive. The star ball brought him back after we’d already left the Dark Moon. I found out after the phantom took you.”

Bonnie made a little noise, a sort of
eep!
that reminded Elena of a bunny, of something soft and small and surprised. All the blood drained out of her face, leaving her usually faint freckles vivid spots against the white of her cheeks. She pressed shaking hands to her mouth, staring at Elena with huge dark eyes.

“Listen, Bonnie,” Elena said fiercely. “Nobody else knows this yet. Nobody but you and me, Bonnie. Damon wanted to keep it a secret until he could figure out the right way to come back. So we need to keep quiet about it.”

Bonnie nodded, still gaping. The color was rushing back into her cheeks, and she looked like she was caught between joy and total confusion.

Glancing over her shoulder, Elena noticed that there was something in the grass at the foot of a rosebush beyond Bonnie, something motionless and white. A chill went through her as she was reminded of Caleb’s body at the foot of the monument in the graveyard.

“What’s that?” she asked sharply. Bonnie’s expression tipped over into confusion. Elena brushed past her and walked toward it, squinting in the sunlight.

When she got close enough, Elena saw with amazement that it was Matt, lying still and silent beneath the rosebush. A sprinkle of black petals was scattered across his chest. As she came close to him, Matt’s eyes twitched—she could see them moving rapidly back and forth under the lids, as if he was having an intense dream—and then flew open as he took in a long, rattling gulp of air. His pale blue eyes met hers.

“Elena!” He gasped. He hitched himself up onto his elbows and looked past her. “Bonnie! Thank God! Are you okay? Where are we?”

“The phantom caught us, brought us to the Nether World, and is using us to make itself more powerful,” Elena said succinctly. “How do you feel?”

“A little startled,” Matt joked in a weak voice. He looked around, then licked his lips nervously. “Huh, so this is the Nether World? It’s nicer than I’d pictured from your descriptions. Shouldn’t the sky be red? And where are all the vampires and demons?” He looked at Elena and Bonnie sternly. “Were you guys telling the truth about everything that happened to you here? Because this place seems pretty nice for a Hell dimension, what with all the roses and everything.”

Elena stared at him.
It’s possible too many weird things have happened to us.

Then she noticed the hint of panic on Matt’s face. He wasn’t unnaturally blasé about what was going on; he was just being brave, whistling to keep up their spirits in this newest danger.

“Well, we wanted to impress you,” she joked back with a tremulous smile, then quickly got down to business. “What was going on when you were back home?” she asked him.

“Um,” Matt said, “Stefan and Meredith were questioning Caleb about how he summoned the phantom.”

“Caleb’s not responsible for the phantom,” Elena said firmly. “It followed us home when we were here before. We have to get home right away so we can tell them they’re dealing with one of the Original ones. It’ll be much more difficult for us to get rid of than an ordinary one.”

Matt looked at Bonnie questioningly. “How does she know this?”

“Well,” Bonnie said, with a hint of the glee she always got from gossip, “apparently
Damon
told her. He’s alive and she saw him!”

So much for keeping Damon’s secret, Bonnie,
Elena thought, rolling her eyes. Still, it didn’t really matter if Matt knew. He wasn’t the one Damon was keeping the secret from, and he wasn’t likely to be able to tell Stefan anytime soon.

Elena tuned out Matt’s exclamations of wonder and Bonnie’s explanations as she scanned the area around them. Sunshine. Rosebushes. Rosebushes. Sunshine. Grass. Clear blue sky. All the same, in every direction. Wherever she looked, velvety black perfect blooms nodded serenely in a clear midday sun. The bushes were all the same, down to the number and positions of the roses on each one and the distances between them. Even the stems of grass were uniform—all stopping at the same height. The sun hadn’t moved since she’d arrived.

It all seemed like it should be lovely and relaxing, but after a few minutes the sameness became unnerving.

“There was a gate,” she told Bonnie and Matt. “When we were looking into this field from the Gatehouse of the Seven Treasures. There was a way in
from
there, so there must be a way to get out
to
there. We just have to find it.”

They had begun to clamber to their feet when, without warning, the sharp tugging pain struck again. Elena clutched her stomach. Bonnie lost her balance and fell back to a sitting position on the ground, her eyes clenched shut.

Matt gave a choked-off exclamation and gasped. “What is that?”

Elena waited for the pain to fade again before she answered him. Her knees were wobbling. She felt dizzy and sick. “Another reason we need to get out of here,” she said. “The phantom’s using us to increase its power. I think it needs us here to do that. And if we don’t find the gate soon, we might be too weak to make it home.”

She looked around again, the uniformity almost dizzying. Each rosebush was centered in a small circular bed of rich-looking dark loam. Between these circles, the grass of the field was velvety smooth, like the lawn of an English manor house or a really good golf course.

“Okay,” Elena said, and took a deep, calming breath. “Let’s spread out and look carefully. We’ll stay about ten feet apart from one another and go from one end of this rose garden to the other, searching. Look around carefully—anything that’s at all different from the rest of the field could be the clue we need to find the way out.”

“We’re going to search the whole field?” Bonnie asked, sounding dismayed. “It’s huge.”

“We’ll just do one little bit at a time,” Elena said encouragingly.

They started in a spread-out line, gazing intently back and forth, up and down. At first there was only the silence of focused concentration as they searched. There was no sign of a gate. Step by step through the field, nothing changed. Endless rows of identical rosebushes stretched in all directions, spaced about three feet from one another, enough room between them for one person to easily pass.

The eternal midday sun beat down uncomfortably on the tops of their heads, and Elena wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. The scent of roses hung heavily in the warm air; at first Elena had found it pleasant, but now it was nauseating, like a too-sweet perfume. The perfect stalks of grass bent under her feet, then sprang up again, uncrushed, as if she had never passed.

“I wish there were a breeze,” Bonnie complained. “But I don’t think the wind ever blows here.”

“This field must come to an end sometime,” Elena said desperately. “It can’t just go on forever.” There was a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, though, that suggested to her that maybe it
could
go on forever. This wasn’t her world, after all. The rules were different here.

“So where’s Damon now?” Bonnie asked suddenly. She wasn’t looking at Elena. She was keeping up the same steady pace, the same careful, systematic gaze. But there was a note of strain in her voice, and Elena broke her own search to glance at her quickly.

Then one possible answer to Bonnie’s question hit Elena and she stopped dead. “That’s it!” she said. “Bonnie, Matt, I think Damon might be
here
. Or not here, not in the rose garden, but somewhere in the Nether World, in the Dark Dimension.” They looked at her blankly.

“Damon was going to try to come here to look for the phantom,” Elena explained. “He thought it followed us home from here when we came back to our own world, so this is probably where he’d start searching for its physical body. The last time I saw him, he told me that he thought he would be able to fight it better from here, where it came from. If he is here, maybe he can help us get back to Fell’s Church.”

Damon, please be here somewhere. Please help us,
she begged silently.

Just then, something caught her eye. Ahead of them, between two rosebushes that looked just the same as any other two rosebushes in the garden, there was the slightest shift, the tiniest distortion. It looked like the heat shimmer that would sometimes appear over the highway on the hottest, most still days of summer as the sun’s rays bounced off the asphalt.

No asphalt here to radiate back the sun’s heat. But something had to be causing that shimmer.

Unless she was imagining it. Were her eyes playing tricks on her, showing her a mirage among the rosebushes?

“Do you see that?” she asked the others. “Over there, just a little to the right?”

They stopped and peered carefully.

“Maybe?” Bonnie said hesitantly.

“I think so,” Matt said. “Like hot air rising, right?”

“Right,” Elena said. She frowned, estimating the distance. Maybe fifteen feet. “We should take it at a run,” she said. “In case we have any trouble getting through. There might be some kind of barrier we have to break to get out. I don’t think hesitating will help us.”

“Let’s hold hands,” Bonnie suggested nervously. “I don’t want to lose you guys.”

Elena didn’t take her eyes off the shimmer in the air. If she lost it, she’d never find it again, not with the sameness of everything in here. Once they got turned around, they’d never be able to tell this spot from any other.

They all three took one another’s hands, staring at the small distortion that they hoped was a gate. Bonnie was in the middle and she clutched Elena’s left hand with her thin, warm fingers.

“One, two, three, go,” Bonnie said, and then they were running. They stumbled over the grass, wove between rosebushes. The space between the bushes was barely wide enough for three to run abreast, and a thorny branch caught in Elena’s hair. She couldn’t let go of Bonnie and she couldn’t stop, so she just yanked her head forward despite the eye-wateringly painful tug on her hair and kept running, leaving a tangle of hair hanging from a bush behind her.

Then they were at the shimmer between the bushes. Close up, it was even harder to see, and Elena would have doubted that they were at the right spot except for the change in the temperature. It might have looked like a heat shimmer from a distance, but it was as cold and bracing as a mountain lake, despite the warm sun right above them.

“Don’t stop!” Elena shouted. And they plunged into the coldness.

In an instant, everything went black, as if someone had switched off the sun.

Elena felt herself falling and clung desperately to Bonnie’s hand.

Damon!
she cried silently.
Help me!