Phantom (21 page)

S
tefan drove like a maniac all the way back to the boardinghouse. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell him that his name had been called,” he said for what felt like the hundredth time. “I can’t believe we left him alone.”

“Slow down,” Meredith told him, trying to hold Matt’s sleeping body steady in the backseat as Stefan whipped around a corner, tires squealing. “You’re going way too fast.”

“We’re in a hurry,” Stefan growled, yanking on the wheel to make a hard right. Alaric turned around in the passenger seat and gave Meredith a panicky look as Stefan narrowly missed a garbage truck. She sighed. She knew he was trying to make up for his mistake, for not telling them immediately that Matt’s name had appeared in the herb shop, but killing them all in a race to get home wasn’t exactly the solution. Besides, although they probably would have done things differently if they’d known, it might not have changed the outcome for Matt. It wasn’t as if their precautions had saved either Bonnie or Elena.

“At least you’ve got vampire reflexes,” she said, more to reassure Alaric than out of any particular confidence in Stefan’s driving abilities.

She’d insisted on being the one sitting in the back with Matt, and now she turned her attention to him. She put a restraining hand on his chest so he wouldn’t go tumbling to the floor as the car jerked and swerved.

He was so still. None of the twitching and eye movements that usually went with sleep, just the steady shallow rise and fall of his breathing. He wasn’t even snoring. And she knew from camping trips as far back as sixth grade that Matt snored like a buzz saw. Always.

Meredith never cried. Not even when the worst happened. And she wasn’t going to start now, not when her friends needed her calm and focused to try to figure out how to save them. But if she
had
been the kind of girl who cried, instead of the kind of girl who strategized, she would have been sobbing. And even now, the breath caught in her throat a little painfully, until she schooled herself into impassive calm again.

She was the only one left. Of the four old friends who’d gone through school and summers and adolescence and all the horrors the supernatural world could throw at them, she was the only one the phantom hadn’t captured. Yet.

Meredith clenched her teeth and held Matt steady.

Stefan pulled up and parked in front of the boardinghouse, having somehow avoided causing any damage to other cars or pedestrians along the way. Alaric and Meredith started to inch Matt carefully out of the car, looping his arms around their necks and slowly shifting him forward into a half-standing position. But Stefan simply grabbed Matt away from them and threw him over his shoulder.

“Let’s go,” he said, and stalked off toward the boardinghouse, easily balancing Matt’s unconscious body with one hand, not looking back.

“He’s become kind of a strange guy,” Alaric commented, watching Stefan alertly. The sunshine caught the stubble on Alaric’s unshaven chin and it glinted with a touch of gold. He turned toward Meredith and gave her a rueful, disarming grin. “Once more into the breach . . .” he said.

Meredith took his hand, warm and solid in her own. “Come on,” she said.

Once they were in the boardinghouse, Stefan clomped straight upstairs to deposit Matt with the other bodies—the other
sleepers
, Meredith reminded herself fiercely.

Meredith and Alaric, hand in hand, turned toward the kitchen. As she pushed the door open, Meredith heard Mrs. Flowers’s voice.

“Very useful indeed, my dear,” she was saying, a warm note of approval in her voice. “You’ve done very well. I’m so grateful.”

Meredith gaped. At the kitchen table with Mrs. Flowers, cool and calm and pretty in a blue linen dress, sat Dr. Celia Conner, sipping tea.

“Hello, Alaric. Hello, Meredith,” said Celia. Her dark eyes bored coolly into Meredith’s. “You’ll never believe what I’ve found.”

“What?” said Alaric eagerly, letting go of Meredith’s hand. Her heart sank.

Celia reached into a tote bag sitting by her chair and pulled out a thick book bound in ragged brown leather. She smiled triumphantly and announced, “It’s a book on phantoms. Dr. Beltram ended up sending me to Dalcrest College, which actually has a very comprehensive collection of texts on the paranormal.”

“I suggest we adjourn to the den,” Mrs. Flowers said, “where we can be more comfortable, and examine its contents together.”

They moved to the den, but Stefan, when he joined them, did not seem any more comfortable.

“Different types of phantoms,” he said, taking the book from Celia and flipping rapidly through the pages. “The history of phantoms in our dimension. Where is the banishment ritual? Why doesn’t this thing have an index?”

Celia shrugged. “It’s very old and rare,” she said. “It was difficult to find, and it’s the only book on the subject we’re likely to be able to get our hands on, maybe the only one that exists, so we’ll have to excuse things like that. These older texts, the authors wanted you to read straight through and really learn about their subject, to understand what they wanted to tell you, not just to find the page you needed right away. You might try looking near the end, though.”

Alaric was watching Stefan whip through the pages with an expression of pain. “It’s a rare book, Stefan,” he said. “Please be more careful with it. Would you like me to look? I’m used to finding what I need in these kinds of books.”

Stefan snarled, literally snarled at him, and Meredith felt the hairs along the back of her neck rise. “I’ll do it myself,
teacher
. I’m in a hurry.”

He squinted down at the text. “Why does it have to be in such ornate print?” he complained. “Don’t tell me it’s because it’s old. I’m older than it is, and I can barely read it. Huh. ‘Phantoms who are feeding like vampires on one choice sensibility, whether it be guilt, or despair, or grudge; or lust for victuals, the demon rum, or fallen women. The stronger be the sensibility, the worse be the outcome of the phantom created.’ I think we could have figured that out ourselves.”

Mrs. Flowers was standing slightly removed from the rest of the group, eyes fixed on empty air, muttering seemingly to herself as she communed with her mother.

“I know,” she said. “I’ll tell them.” Her eyes focused on the others as they stood around Stefan, peering over his shoulders. “Ma
ma
says that time is getting short,” she warned.

Stefan leaped to his feet and exploded. “I
know
it’s getting short,” he roared, getting right up into Mrs. Flowers’s surprised face. “Can’t your mother tell us something useful for once?”

Mrs. Flowers staggered away from him, reaching out to steady herself on the back of a chair. Her face was white, and suddenly she looked older and more frail than ever before.

Stefan’s eyes widened, their color darkening to a stormy sea green, and he held out his hands, his face horrified. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Mrs. Flowers, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I don’t know what came over me. . . . I’m just so worried about Elena and the others.”

“I know, Stefan,” Mrs. Flowers said gravely. She had regained her balance and she looked stronger, calm and wise again. “We
will
get them back, you know. You must have faith. Ma
ma
does.”

Stefan sat down, turning back to the book, his lips pressed together into a straight line.

Her skin prickling with apprehension, Meredith gripped her stave more tightly as she watched him. When she had revealed to the others that the members of her family were hereditary vampire hunters and that it was now her turn to take on the duty, she had told Elena and Stefan that she would never turn on Stefan, that she understood that he wasn’t like other, evil vampires, that he was good: harmless and benign to humans.

She had made no such promises about Damon, and Elena and Stefan hadn’t asked her to. They all shared an unspoken understanding that Damon couldn’t really be characterized as harmless, not even when he begrudgingly worked with them, and that Meredith would need to keep her options open when it came to him.

But Stefan . . . she had never thought this would happen, but now Meredith was worried that someday she might not be able to keep her promises about Stefan. She had never seen him acting the way he had been lately: irrational, angry, violent, unpredictable. She knew his behavior was probably caused by the phantom, but was Stefan becoming too dangerous? Could she kill him if she had to? He was her friend.

Meredith’s heart was racing. She realized that her knuckles had whitened against her fighting stave, and her hand ached.
Yes
, she realized, she would fight Stefan and try to kill him, if she had to. It was true that he was her friend, but her duty had to come first.

She took a deep breath and consciously relaxed her hands.
Stay calm,
she coached herself.
Breathe.
Stefan was keeping himself more or less under control. It wasn’t a decision she had to make.
Not yet, anyway.

A few minutes later, Stefan stopped flipping pages. “Here,” he said. “I think this is it.” He handed the book to Mrs. Flowers. She scanned the page quickly and nodded. “That feels like the right ritual,” she said seriously. “I ought to have everything we need to perform it right here in the house.”

Alaric reached for the book. He read the spell, too, frowning. “Does it have to be a blood spell?” he asked Mrs. Flowers. “If it backfires, the phantom might be able to turn it against us.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to have to be a blood spell,” Mrs. Flowers replied. “We’d need more time to experiment to change the spell, and time is the one thing we don’t have. If the phantom is able to use its captives the way we think it can, it’s only going to get more powerful.”

Alaric began to speak again but was interrupted.

“Wait,” said Celia, a slightly shrill note in her usually husky voice. “A
blood
spell? What does that mean? I don’t want to get involved in anything”—she searched for a word—“unsavory.”

She reached for the book, but Stefan slammed his hand down on it. “Unsavory or not, this is what we’re doing,” he said quietly, but with a voice as hard as steel. “And you’re a part of it. It’s too late for you to back out now. I won’t let you.”

Celia gave a convulsive shudder and cringed back in her chair. “Don’t you dare threaten me,” she said, her voice quavering.

“Everybody calm down,” Meredith said sharply. “Celia, no one is going to make you do anything unless you agree to it. I’ll protect you myself if need be.” Her eyes flew quickly to Alaric, who was glancing back and forth between them, looking worried. “But we need your help. Please. You may have saved us all by finding the spell, and we’re grateful, but Stefan’s right—you’re part of this, too. I don’t know if it’ll work without you.” She hesitated a beat. “Or, if it does, it might leave you as the phantom’s only target,” she added cunningly.

Celia shivered again and wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m not a coward,” she said miserably. “I’m a scientist, and this . . . irrational mysticism worries me. But I’m in. I’ll help any way I can.”

Meredith, for the first time, felt a flash of sympathy for her. She understood how hard it must be for Celia to continue to think of herself as a logical person while the boundaries of what she’d always accepted as reality collapsed around her.

“Thank you, Celia.” Meredith glanced around the room at the others. “We’ve got the ritual. We’ve got the ingredients. We just need to gather everything together and start casting the spell. Are we ready?”

Everyone sat up straighter, their faces taking on expressions of stern resolve. As scary as this was, it was good to finally have a purpose and a plan.

Stefan breathed deeply and visibly took hold of himself, his shoulders relaxing and his stance settling into something less predatory. “Okay, Meredith,” he said. His stormy green eyes met her cool gray ones, in perfect accord. “Let’s do this.”

K
nowing he couldn’t perform the ritual on an empty stomach, Stefan hunted down several squirrels in Mrs. Flowers’s backyard, then returned to the boardinghouse’s garage. Meredith had parked Mrs. Flowers’s antique Ford out in the drive, and there was more than enough room to set up everything they needed for the banishment ritual.

Stefan cocked his head at a skittering noise in the shadows and identified the fast-beating heart of a little mouse. The atmosphere might not be a comfortable one, but the spaciousness of the room and its cement floor meant it would be an excellent place to work the spell.

“Hand me the tape measure, please,” Alaric said from his sprawled position in the middle of the garage floor. “I need to get this line just the right length.” Mrs. Flowers had dug up a box of multicolored chalk from somewhere in the boardinghouse, and Alaric had the book propped open and was carefully copying the circles, arcane symbols, parabolas, and ellipses from its pages onto the smooth cement.

Stefan gave him the tool and watched as he measured carefully from the innermost circle to a row of strange runes near the outermost edge of his drawing. “It’s important that everything be precise,” Alaric said, frowning and double-checking the ends of the measuring tape. “The smallest error could lead to us accidentally setting this thing loose in Fell’s Church.”

“But isn’t it loose already?” asked Stefan.

“No,” Alaric explained. “This ritual will allow the phantom to appear in its corporeal form, which is far more dangerous than the insubstantial thing it is now.”

“Then you’d better get this right,” Stefan agreed grimly.

“If this all goes as planned, the phantom will be trapped in the innermost circle,” Alaric said, pointing. “We’ll be at the outermost edge, over there past the runes. We ought to be safe out there.” He looked up and gave Stefan a rueful grin. “I hope. I’m afraid I’ve never done any kind of summoning in real life before, although I’ve read a lot about it.”

Terrific
, Stefan thought, but he returned Alaric’s smile without comment. The man was doing the best he could. All they could do was hope it would be enough to save Elena and the others.

Meredith and Mrs. Flowers entered the garage, each carrying a plastic shopping bag. Celia trailed behind them.

“Holy water,” Meredith said, lifting a plant mister out of her bag to show him.

“It doesn’t work on vampires,” Stefan reminded her.

“We’re not summoning a vampire,” she replied, and went off to mist the outer spaces in the diagram, careful not to disturb the chalk lines.

Alaric stood and started very cautiously hopping out of the huge multicolored diagram, clutching the book in one hand. “I think we’re about ready,” he said.

Mrs. Flowers looked at Stefan. “We need the others,” she said. “Everyone affected by the phantom’s powers has to be here.”

“I’ll help you carry them down,” Alaric offered.

“Not necessary,” Stefan told him, and headed upstairs alone. Standing by the side of the bed in the little rose-and-cream bedroom, he looked down at Elena, Matt, and Bonnie. None of them had moved since he had placed Matt there.

He sighed and gathered Elena in his arms first. After a moment, he also picked up her pillow and a blanket. At least he could try to make her comfortable.

A few minutes later all three of the sleepers were lying in the front of the garage, well outside the diagram, their heads supported by pillows.

“Now what?” Stefan asked.

“Now we each choose a candle,” Mrs. Flowers said, opening her plastic bag. “One that you feel represents you in color. According to the book, they really should be hand-dipped and specially scented, but this will just have to do. I won’t pick one myself,” Mrs. Flowers said, handing the bag to Stefan. “The phantom hasn’t focused its powers on me, and I don’t remember being jealous of anyone since 1943.”

“What happened in 1943?” asked Meredith curiously.

“I lost the Little Miss Fell’s Church crown to Nancy Sue Baker,” Mrs. Flowers answered. When Meredith gaped at her, she threw her hands up in the air. “Even I was a child once, you know. I was strikingly adorable, with Shirley Temple curls, and my mother liked to dress me in frills and show me off.”

Putting the astounding image of Mrs. Flowers in Shirley Temple curls out of his mind, Stefan poked through the assortment of candles and chose a dark blue one. It seemed right to him somehow. “We need candles for the others, too,” he said. Carefully, he chose a golden one for Elena and a pink one for Bonnie.

“Are you just going by their hair colors?” asked Meredith. “You’re such a
guy
.”

“You know these are the right colors for them, though,” Stefan argued. “Besides, Bonnie’s hair is red, not pink.”

Meredith nodded grudgingly. “I guess you’re right. White for Matt, though.”

“Really?” Stefan asked. He didn’t know what he would have chosen for Matt. American-flag patterned, maybe, if they had had it.

“He’s the purest person I know,” Meredith said softly. Alaric raised an eyebrow at her and she elbowed him. “Pure in spirit, I mean. What you see is what you get with Matt, and he’s good and truehearted all the way through.”

“I suppose so,” said Stefan, and he watched without comment as Meredith chose a dark brown candle for herself.

Alaric shuffled through the bag and picked a dark green candle, and Celia selected one of pale lavender. Mrs. Flowers took the bag with the remaining candles and stashed it on a high shelf near the garage doors, between a bag of potting soil and what looked like an old-fashioned kerosene lantern.

They all sat down on the garage floor in a semicircle, outside the diagram, facing toward the empty inner circle, holding their unlit candles. The sleepers lay behind them, and Meredith held Bonnie’s candle in her lap as well as her own; Stefan took Elena’s, and Alaric Matt’s.

“Now we anoint them with our blood,” Alaric said. They all looked at him, and he shrugged defensively. “It’s what the book says.”

Meredith removed a small pocketknife from her bag, cut her finger, and quickly, matter-of-factly, smeared a stripe of blood from the top to the bottom of her brown candle, then passed the knife to Alaric along with a little bottle of disinfectant. One by one, the others followed her lead.

“This is really unsanitary,” Celia said, wincing, but she followed through.

Stefan was very aware of the smell of human blood in such an enclosed space. Even though he’d just fed, his canines prickled in an automatic response.

Meredith picked up the candles and walked to their sleeping friends, crossing from one to the next and raising their hands to make a swift cut and wipe their blood against their candles. Not one of them even flinched. When she had finished, Meredith redistributed the sleepers’ candles and returned to her spot.

Alaric began to read, in Latin, the first words of the spell. After a few sentences, he hesitated at a word and Stefan silently took the grimoire. Smoothly he picked up where Alaric had left off. The words flowed off his tongue, the feel of the Latin on his lips reminding him of hours spent with his childhood tutor hundreds of years ago, and of a period when he lived in a monastery in England during the early days of his struggle with vampirism.

When the time came, he snapped his fingers and, with a touch of Power, his candle lit itself. He handed it to Meredith, who dripped a little of the melted wax onto the garage floor at the edge of the diagram and stuck the candle there. One by one, at the appropriate points in the ritual, he lit a candle and she placed it, until there was a little row of multicolored candles bravely burning between them and the chalk outlines of the diagram.

Stefan read on. Suddenly the pages of the book began to flutter. A cold, unnatural wind rose inside the closed garage, and the flames of the candles flickered wildly and then blew out. Two candles fell over. Meredith’s long hair whipped around her face.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” Alaric shouted.

But Stefan just squinted his eyes against the gale and read on.

The pitch-blackness and the unpleasant sensation of falling lasted for only a moment, and then Elena landed jarringly on both feet and staggered forward, clutching Matt’s and Bonnie’s hands.

They were in a dim octagonal room lined with doors. A single piece of furniture sat in the center. Behind the lone desk lounged a tanned, beautiful, amazingly muscular, bare-chested vampire with a long, spiraling mane of bronze hair falling past his shoulders.

Instantly Elena knew where she was.

“We’re here.” She gasped. “The Gatehouse!”

Sage leaped to his feet on the other side of the desk, his face almost comically surprised. “Elena?” he exclaimed. “Bonnie? Matt? What’s going on?
Qu’est-ce qui arrive?
”

Usually, Elena would have been relieved to see Sage, who had always been kind and helpful to her, but she had to get to Damon. She knew where he must be. She could almost hear him calling to her.

She strode across the empty room with barely a glance at the startled gatekeeper, pulling Matt and Bonnie along with her.

“Sorry, Sage,” she said as she reached the door she wanted. “We’ve got to find Damon.”

“
Damon?
” he said. “He’s back again?” and then they passed through, ignoring Sage’s shouts of “Stop!
Arretez-vous!
”

The door closed behind them, and they found themselves in a landscape of ash. Nothing grew here, and there were no landmarks. Harsh winds had blown the fine black ash into shifting hills and valleys. As they watched, a strong gust caught at the light top layer of ash and sent it flying in a cloud that soon settled into new shapes. Below the lighter ash, they could see swamps of wet, muddy ash. Nearby was an ash-choked pool of still water. Nothing but ash and mud, except for an occasional scorched and blackened bit of wood.

Above them was a twilit sky in which hung a huge planet and two great moons, one a swirling bluish white, the other silvery.

“Where are we?” said Matt, gaping up at the sky.

“Once this was a world—a moon, technically—that was shaded by a huge tree,” Elena told him, walking steadily forward. “Until I destroyed it. This is where Damon died.”

She felt rather than saw Matt and Bonnie exchange a glance. “But, uh, then he came back, right? You saw him in Fell’s Church the other night, didn’t you?” Matt said hesitantly. “Why are we here
now
?”

“I know that Damon’s close,” Elena said impatiently. “I can feel him. He’s come back here. Maybe this is where he began his search for the phantom.” They kept walking. Soon they were not so much walking as wading through black ash that stuck to their legs in nasty thick clumps. The mud underneath the ash clung to their shoes, releasing them at each step with a wet sucking sound.

They were almost there. She could feel it. Elena picked up the pace, and the others, still linked to her, hurried to keep up. The ash was thicker and deeper here because they were approaching where the trunk had been, the very center of this world. Elena remembered it exploding, shooting up into the sky like a rocket, disintegrating as it went. Damon’s body had lain underneath and had been completely buried in the falling ash.

Elena stopped. There was a thick, drifting pile of ash that looked like it would be at least as high as her waist in places. She thought she could see where Damon had awoken—the ash was disturbed and caved in, as if someone had tunneled out of one of the deeper drifts. But there was no one around except themselves. A cold wind blew up a spray of ash, and Bonnie coughed. Elena, knee-deep in cold, sticky ash, dropped Bonnie’s hand and wrapped her arms around herself.

“He’s not here,” she said blankly. “I was so sure he would be here.”

“He must be somewhere else, then,” said Matt logically. “I’m sure he’s fighting the phantom, like you said he was going to. The Dark Dimension’s a big place.”

Bonnie shivered and huddled closer to Matt, her brown eyes huge and full of pathos, like a hungry puppy’s. “Can we go home now? Please? Sage can send us back again, can’t he?”

“I just don’t understand,” Elena said, staring at the empty space where the great trunk of the tree had once been. “I just
knew
he would be here. I could practically hear him calling me.”

Just then a low, musical laugh cut through the silence. It was a beautiful sound, but there was something chilly and alien about it, something that made Elena shudder.

“Elena,” Bonnie whispered, her eyes wide. “That’s the thing I heard before the fog took me.”

They turned.

Behind them stood a woman. A woman-shaped being, anyway, Elena amended quickly. This was no woman. And, like its laugh, this woman-shaped being was beautiful, but frightening. She—it—was huge, more than one and a half times the size of a human, but perfectly proportioned, and it looked like it was made of ice and mist in blues and greens—like the purest glacier, its eyes were clear with just a touch of pale green. As they watched, its solid, icy-translucent hips and legs shifted and blurred, changing to a swirl of mist.

A long wave of blue-green hair drifted behind it, its shape like a gradually roiling cloud. It smiled at Elena, and its sharp teeth shone like silvery icicles. There was something in its chest, though, that wasn’t ice, something solid and roundish and dark, dark red.

Elena saw all of this in an instant before her attention was fully riveted on what hung from the ice-woman-thing’s outstretched hand.

“Damon.” She gasped.

The ice-woman was holding him casually around the neck, ignoring his struggles as he dangled in the air. It held him so easily that he looked like a toy. The black-clad vampire swung out with his leg, kicking at the ice-woman’s side, but his foot simply passed through mist.

“Elena,” Damon said in a choked, thin voice.

The ice-woman—the phantom—cocked its head to one side and looked at Damon, then squeezed his neck a little tighter.

“I don’t need to breathe, you . . . idiot phantom,” he gasped defiantly.

The phantom’s smile widened and it said in a sweet, cold voice, like crystals chiming together, “But your head can pop off, can’t it? That’ll do just as well.” It shook him a little, and then transferred its smile to Elena, Bonnie, and Matt. Elena instinctively stepped back as the glacier-cold eyes found her.