The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Shadow Souls (13 page)

The boat stopped—somehow. Elena couldn’t see any anchor dropped or anything to fasten it to. But the fact was that it did stop, and the slumped man put down a plank, which stayed in place as they boarded: first Damon, and then his bevy of “slaves.”

On board, Elena watched Damon wordlessly offer six pieces of gold to the ferryman—two for each human who presumably wouldn’t be coming back, she thought.

For a moment she was lost in the memory of being very young—only three or so, she must have been—and sitting on her father’s lap while he read to her from a wonderfully illustrated book about the Greek myths. It told about the ferryman, Charon, who took spirits of the deceased over the river Styx to the land of the dead. And her father telling her that the Greeks put coins on the eyes of those who died so they could pay the ferryman….

There’s no coming back from this journey!
she thought suddenly and violently. No escape! They might as well be truly dead….

Strangely, it was horror that saved her from this morass of terror. Just as she lifted her head, perhaps to scream, the dim figure of the ferryman turned from his duties briefly as if to look back over the passengers. Elena heard Bonnie’s shriek. Meredith, shaking, was frantically and illogically reaching for the bag in which her gun was stowed. Even Damon didn’t seem to be able to move.

The tall specter in the boat had no face.

He had deep depressions where his eyes should be, a shallow hollow for a mouth, and a triangular hole where his nose should have protruded. The uncanny horror of it, on top of the stink from the depot pens, was simply too much for Bonnie, and she slumped sideways, limp against Meredith, in a faint.

Elena, in the midst of her terror, had a moment of revelation. In the dim, moist, dripping twilight, she had forgotten to stop trying to use all her senses to their fullest. She was undoubtedly better able to see the inhuman face of the ferryman than, say, Meredith. She could also
hear
things, like the sounds of long-dead miners tapping at the rock above them, and the scurrying of enormous bats or cockroaches or something,
inside
the stone walls all around them.

But now, Elena suddenly felt warm tears on her icy cheeks as she realized that she had completely underestimated Bonnie for as long as she’d known about her friend’s psychic powers. If Bonnie’s senses were permanently open to the kinds of horrors Elena was experiencing now, it was no wonder that Bonnie lived in fear. Elena found herself promising to be a hell of a lot more tolerant the next time Bonnie faltered or started screaming. In fact, Bonnie deserved some kind of an award for keeping a grip on sanity this far, Elena decided. But Elena didn’t dare do any more than gaze at her friend, who was completely unconscious, and swear to herself that from now on Bonnie would find a champion in Elena Gilbert.

That promise and the warmth of it burned like a candle in Elena’s mind, a candle she pictured held by Stefan, the light of it dancing in his green eyes and playing over the planes of his face. It was just enough to keep her from losing her own sanity on the rest of the journey.

By the time the boat docked—at a place just slightly more traveled than the one where they had embarked—all three of the girls were in a state of exhaustion brought on by prolonged terror and wrenching suspense.

But they hadn’t really used the time to think over the words “Dark Dimension” or to imagine the number of ways its darkness might be manifested.

“Our new home,” Damon said grimly. Watching him instead of the landscape, Elena realized from the tension in his neck and shoulders that Damon was not enjoying himself. She’d thought he’d be heading into his own particular paradise, this world of human slaves, and torture for entertainment, whose only rule was self-preservation of the individual ego. Now she realized that she had been wrong. For Damon this was a world of beings with Powers as great or greater than his own. He was going to have to claw out a foothold here among them, just like any urchin on the street—except that he couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. They needed to find a way not just to live, but to live in luxury and mingle with high society, if they were to have any chance to rescue Stefan.

Stefan—no, she couldn’t allow
herself
the luxury of thinking about him at that time. Once she started she would become undone, begin to demand ridiculous things, like that they go round to the prison, just to stare at it, like a junior high kid with a crush on an older boy, who just wanted to be driven “by
his
house” to worship it. And then what would that do to their plans for a jailbreak later? Plan A was:
don’t make mistakes
, and Elena would stick to that until she found a better one.

That was how Damon and his “slaves” came to the Dark Dimension, through the Demon Gate. The smallest one needed to be revived with water in the face before she could get up and walk.

H
urrying behind Damon, Elena tried not to look either to the left or the right. She could see too much of what to Meredith and Bonnie must have appeared to be featureless darkness.

There were depots on either side, places where slaves were obviously brought to be bought or sold or transported later. Elena could hear the whimpers of children in the darkness and if she hadn’t been so frightened herself, she would have rushed off looking for the crying kids.

But I can’t do that, because I’m a slave now, she thought, with a sense of shock that ran up from her fingertips. I’m not a real human being anymore. I’m a piece of property.

She found herself once again staring at the back of Damon’s head and wondering how on earth she had talked herself into this. She understood what being a slave meant—in fact she seemed to have an intuitive understanding of it that surprised her—and it was Not a Good Thing to Be.

It meant that she could be…well, that anything could be done to her and it was no one’s business but that of her owner. And her owner (
how
had he talked her into this again?) was Damon, of all people.

He could sell all three girls—Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie—and be out of here in an hour with the profits.

They hurried through this area of the docks, the girls with their eyes on their feet to prevent themselves from stumbling.

And then they crested a hill. Below them, in a sort of crater-shaped formation, was a city.

The slums were on the edges, and crowded almost up to where they were standing. But there was a chicken-wire fence in front of them, which kept them isolated even while allowing them a bird’s-eye view of the city. If they had still been in the cave they had entered, this would have been the greatest underground cavern imaginable—but they weren’t underground anymore.

“It happened sometime during the ferry ride,” Damon said. “We made—well—a twist in space, say.” He tried to explain and Elena tried to understand. “You went in through the Demon Gate, and when you came out you were no longer in Earth’s Dimension, but in another one entirely.” Elena only had to look up at the sky to believe him. The constellations were different; there was no Little or Big Dipper, no North Star.

Then there was the sun. It was much larger, but much dimmer than Earth’s, and it never left the horizon. At any moment about half of it showed, day and night—terms which, as Meredith pointed out, had lost their rational meaning here.

As they approached a gate made of chicken wire that would finally let them out of the slave-holding area, they were stopped by what Elena would later learn was a Guardian.

She would learn that in a way, the Guardians were the rulers of the Dark Dimension, although they themselves came from another place far away and it was almost as if they had permanently occupied this little slice of Hell, trying to impose order on the slum king and feudal lords who divided the city among themselves.

This Guardian was a tall woman with hair the color of Elena’s own—true gold—cut square at shoulder length, and she paid no attention at all to Damon but immediately asked Elena, who was first in line behind him, “Why are you here?”

Elena was glad, very glad, that Damon had taught her to control her aura. She concentrated on that while her brain hummed at supersonic speed, wondering what the right response to this question was. The response that would leave them free and not get them sent home.

Damon didn’t train us for this, was her first thought. And her second was, no, because he’s never been here before. He doesn’t know how everything works here, only some things.

And
if
it looked as if this woman was going to try to interfere with him, he might just go crazy and attack her, a helpful little voice added from somewhere in Elena’s subconscious. Elena doubled the speed of her scheming. Creative lying had once been a sort of specialty of hers, and now she said the first thing that popped into her head and got a thumbs-up: “I gambled with him and lost.”

Well, it sounded good. People lost all sorts of things when they gambled: plantations, talismans, horses, castles, bottles of genii. And if it turned out not to be enough of a reason, she could always say that that was just the start of her sad story. Best of all, it was in a way, true. Long ago she’d given her life for Damon as well as for Stefan, and Damon had not exactly turned over a new leaf as she’d requested. Half a leaf, maybe. A leaflet.

The Guardian was staring at her with a puzzled look in her true blue eyes. People had stared at Elena all her life—being young and very beautiful meant that you fretted only when people didn’t stare. But the puzzlement was a bit of a worry. Was the tall woman reading her mind? Elena tried to add another layer of white noise at the top. What came out was a few lines of a Britney Spears song. She turned the psychic volume up.

The tall woman put two fingers to her head like someone with a sudden headache. Then she looked at Meredith.

“Why…are you here?”

Usually Meredith didn’t lie at all, but when she did she treated it as an intellectual art. Fortunately, she also never tried to fix something that wasn’t broken. “The same for me,” she said sadly.

“And you?” The woman was looking at Bonnie, who was looking as if she were going to be sick again.

Meredith gave Bonnie a little nudge. Then she stared at her hard. Elena stared at her harder, knowing that all Bonnie had to do was mumble “Me, too.” And Bonnie was a good “me, too-er” after Meredith had staked out a position.

The problem was that Bonnie was also either in trance, or so close to it that it didn’t matter.

“Shadow Souls,” Bonnie said.

The woman blinked, but not the way you blink when someone says something totally unresponsive. She blinked in astonishment.

Oh, God, Elena thought. Bonnie’s got their password or something. She’s making predictions or prophesying or whatever.

“Shadow…souls?” the Guardian said, watching Bonnie closely.

“The city is full of them,” Bonnie said miserably.

The Guardian’s fingers danced over what looked like a palmtop computer. “We know that. This is the place they come.”

“Then you should stop it.”

“We have only limited jurisdiction. The Dark Dimension is ruled by a dozen factions of overlords, who have slumlords to carry out their orders.”

Bonnie
, Elena thought, trying to cut through Bonnie’s mental haze even at the cost of the Guardian hearing her.
These are the
police.

At the same moment, Damon took over. “She’s the same as the others,” he said. “Except that she’s psychic.”

“No one asked your opinion,” the Guardian snapped at him, without even glancing in Damon’s direction. “I don’t care what kind of bigwig you are down there”—she jerked her head contemptuously at the city of lights—“you’re on my turf behind this fence. And I’m asking the little red-haired girl: is what he is saying the truth?”

Elena had a moment of panic. After all they’d been through, if Bonnie blew it now…

This time Bonnie blinked. Whatever else she was trying to communicate, it was true that she was the same as Meredith and Elena. And it was true that she was psychic. Bonnie was a terrible liar when she had too much time to think about things, but to this she could say without hesitation, “Yes, that’s true.”

The Guardian stared at Damon.

Damon stared back as if he could do it all night. He was a champion out-starer.

And the Guardian waved them away.

“I suppose even a psychic can have a bad day,” she said, then added to Damon, “Take care of them. You realize that all psychics have to be licensed?”

Damon, with his best
grand seigneur
manner, said, “Madam, these are not professional psychics. They are my private assistants.”

“And I’m not a ‘Madam’ I’m addressed as ‘Your Judgment.’ By the way, people addicted to gambling usually come to horrible ends here.”

Ha, ha, Elena thought. If she only knew what
kind
of gamble we all are taking…well, we’d probably be worse off than Stefan is right now.

Outside the fence was a courtyard. There were litters here, as well as rickshaws and small goatcarts. No carriages, no horses. Damon got two litters, one for himself and Elena and one for Meredith and Bonnie.

Bonnie, still looking confused, was staring at the sun. “You mean it never finishes rising?”

“No,” Damon said patiently. “And it’s setting here, not rising. Perpetual twilight in the City of Darkness itself. You’ll see more as we move along. Don’t touch that,” he added, as Meredith moved to untie the rope around Bonnie’s wrists before either of them got on the litter. “You two can take the ropes off in the litter if you draw the curtains, but don’t lose them. You’re still slaves, and you have to wear something symbolic around your arms to show it—even if it’s just matching bracelets. Otherwise I get in trouble. Oh, and you’ll have to go veiled in the city.”

“We—
what
?” Elena flashed a look of disbelief at him.

Damon just flashed back a 250-kilowatt smile and before Elena could say another word, he was drawing gauzy sheer fabrics from his black bag and handing them out. The veils were of a size to cover an entire body.

“But you only have to put it on your head or tie it on your hair or something,” Damon said dismissively.

“What’s it made of?” Meredith asked, feeling the light silky material, which was transparent and so thin that the wind threatened to whip it from her fingers.

“How should I know?”

“It’s different colors on the other side!” Bonnie discovered, letting the wind transform her pale green veil into a shimmering silver. Meredith was shaking out a dramatic deep violet silk into a mysterious dark blue dotted with a myriad of stars. Elena, who had been expecting her own veil to be blue, found herself looking up at Damon. He was holding a tiny square of cloth in a clenched fist.

“Let’s see how good you’ve gotten,” he murmured, nodding her closer to him. “Guess what color.”

Another girl might only have noticed the sloe black eyes and the pure, carven lines of Damon’s face, or maybe the wild, wicked smile—somehow wilder and sweeter than ever here, like a rainbow in the middle of a hurricane. But Elena also made note of the stiffness in his neck and shoulders—places where tension built up. The Dark Dimension was already taking its toll on him, psychically, even as he mocked it.

She wondered how many soundings of Power by the merely curious he was having to block each second. She was about to offer to help by opening herself up to the eldritch world, when he snapped, “Guess!” in a tone that didn’t make it a suggestion.

“Gold,” Elena said instantly, surprising herself. When she reached to take the golden square from his hand a powerful, pleasurable feeling of electric current shot from her palm up her arm and seemed to skewer her straight through the heart. Damon clung to her fingers briefly as she took the square and Elena found she could still feel electricity pulsing from his fingertips.

The underside of her veil blew out white and sparkling as if set with diamonds. God, maybe they
were
diamonds, she thought. How could you tell with Damon?

“Your wedding veil, perhaps?” Damon murmured, lips close to her ear. The rope around Elena’s wrists had come very loose and she stroked the diaphanous fabric helplessly, feeling the tiny jewels on the white side cool to the touch of her fingers.

“How did you know you’d need all this stuff?” Elena asked, with bruising practicality. “You didn’t know everything, but you seemed to know enough.”

“Oh, I did research in bars and other places. I found a few people who’d been here and had managed to get out again—or who had gotten kicked out.” Damon’s wild grin grew even wilder. “At night while you were asleep. At a little hidden store, I got
those
.” He nodded at her veil, and added, “You don’t have to wear that over your face or anything. Press it to your hair and it will cling to it.”

Elena did so, wearing the gold side out. It fell to her heels. She fingered her veil, already able to see the flirtatious possibilities in it, as well as the dismissive ones. If only she could get this damned rope off her wrists…

After a moment, Damon retreated back into the persona of the imperturbable master and said, “For all our sakes, we ought to be strict about these things. The slum lords and nobility who run this abominable mess they call the Dark Dimension know that it’s only two days away from revolution at any time, and if we add anything to the balance they’re going to Make a Public Example of Us.”

“All right,” Elena said. “Here, hold my string and I’ll get on the litter.”

But there wasn’t much point in the rope, not once they were both sitting in the same litter. It was carried by four men—not big men, but wiry ones, and all of the same height, which made for a smooth ride.

If Elena had been a free citizen, she would never have allowed herself to be carried by four people whom (she assumed) were slaves. In fact, she would have made a big noisy fuss over it. But that talk she’d had with herself at the docks had sunk in.
She
was a slave, even if Damon hadn’t paid anyone to buy her. She didn’t have the right to make a big noisy fuss about
anything
. In this crimson, evil-smelling place she could imagine that her fuss might even make problems for the litter bearers themselves—make their owner or whoever ran the litter-bearing business punish them, as if it were their fault.

Best Plan A for now: Keep Mouth Shut.

There was plenty to see anyway, now that they had passed on a bridge over bad-smelling slums and alleys full of tumbledown houses. Shops began to appear, at first heavily barred and made of unpainted stone, then more respectable buildings, and then suddenly they were winding their way through a bazaar. But even here the stamp of poverty and weariness appeared on too many faces. Elena had expected, if anything, a cold, black, antiseptic city with emotionless vampires and fire-eyed demons walking the streets. Instead, everyone she saw looked human, and they were selling things—from medicines to food and drink—that vampires didn’t need.