The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Shadow Souls (30 page)

“But I can’t wear these,” Elena had protested to Lady Ulma. “I might not get to see you again before we get Stefan—and from that moment we’re on the run!”

“It’s the same for all of us,” Meredith had added quietly, looking at each of the girls in their “indoor” colors of silvery-blue, scarlet, and opal. “We’re all wearing the most jewelry we’ve ever worn indoors or out—but you might lose it all!”

“And you might need it all,” Lucen had said quietly. “All the more reason for you each to have jewelry that you can trade for carriages, safety, food, whatever. It’s simply designed, too—you can wrench out a stone and use it as payment, and the jewels are not in an elaborate setting that might not be to some collector’s taste.”

“In addition to which, they are all of the highest quality,” Lady Ulma had added. “They are the most flawless examples of their kind we could get on such short notice.”

At that point, all three girls had reached their limit, and rushed the couple—Lady Ulma on her enormous bed, sketchbook always beside her, and Lucen standing nearby—and cried and kissed and generally undid the beautiful jobs that had been done on their faces.

“You’re like angels to us, do you know that?” Elena sobbed. “Just like fairy godparents or angels! I don’t know how I can say good-bye!”

“Like angels,” Lady Ulma had said then, wiping a tear from Elena’s cheek. Then she grasped Elena, saying “Look!” and gestured to herself comfortably in bed, with a couple of blooming, dewy-eyed young women ready to attend to her wishes. Lady Ulma had then nodded at the window, out of which a small mill stream could be seen, and some plum trees, with ripe fruit blazing like jewels on the branches, and then with a sweep of her hand indicated the gardens, orchards, fields, and forests on the estate.

Then she had taken Elena’s hand and smoothed it over her own softly curving abdomen. “You see?” she had spoken almost in a whisper. “Do you see all of this—and can you remember how you found me? Which of us is an angel now?”

At the words “how you found me” Elena’s hands had flown up to cover her face—as if she’d been unable to bear what memory showed her at that moment. Then she was hugging and kissing Lady Ulma again, and a whole new round of cosmetic-destroying embraces had begun.

“Master Damon was even kind enough to buy Lucen,” Lady Ulma had said, “and you may not be able to picture it, but”—here she had looked at the quiet, bearded jeweler with eyes full of tears—“I feel for him as you feel for your Stefan.” And then she had blushed and hidden her face in her hands.

“He’s freeing Lucen today,” Elena had said, dropping to her knees to rest her head against Lady Ulma’s pillow. “And giving the estate to you irrevocably. He’s had a lawyer—an advocate, you’d say—working on the papers all week with a Guardian. They’re done now, and even if that hideous general should come back, he couldn’t touch you. You have your home forever.”

More crying. More kissing. Sage, who had been innocently walking down the hallway, whistling, after a romp with his dog, Saber, had passed Lady Ulma’s room and had been drawn in. “We’ll all miss you, too!” Elena had wept. “Oh, thank you!”

Later that day, Damon had made good on all of Elena’s promises, besides giving a large bonus to each member of the staff. The air had been full of metallic confetti, rose petals, music, and cries of farewell as Damon, Elena, Bonnie, and Meredith had been carried to Bloddeuwedd’s party—and away forever.

“Come to think of it, why didn’t Damon free
us
?” Bonnie asked Meredith as they rode in litters toward Bloddeuwedd’s mansion. “I can understand that we needed to be slaves to get into this world, but we’re in now. Why not make honest girls of us?”

“Bonnie, we’re honest girls already,” Meredith reminded her. “And I think the point is that we were never
real
slaves at all.”

“Well, I meant: Why doesn’t he free us so that everyone
knows
we’re honest girls, Meredith, and you know it.”

“Because you can’t free somebody who’s free already, that’s why.”

“But he could have gone through the ceremony,” Bonnie persisted. “Or is it really hard to free a slave here?”

“I don’t know,” Meredith said, breaking at last under this tireless inquisition. “But I’ll tell you why I
think
he doesn’t do it. I
think
that it’s because this way he’s responsible for us. I mean, it’s not that slaves can’t be punished—we saw that with Elena.” Meredith paused while they both shuddered at the memory. “But, ultimately, it’s the slave
owner
that can lose their life over it. Remember, they wanted to stake Damon for what Elena did.”

“So he’s doing it for us? To protect us?”

“I don’t know. I…suppose so,” Meredith said slowly.

“Then—I guess we’ve been wrong about him in the past?” Bonnie generously said “we’ve” instead of “you’ve.” Meredith had always been the one of Elena’s group most resistant to Damon’s charm.

“I…suppose so,” Meredith said again. “Although it seems that everyone is forgetting that until recently Damon
helped
the kitsune twins to put Stefan here! And Stefan definitely hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”

“Well, of course
that’s
true,” Bonnie said, sounding relieved not to have been too wrong, and at the same time strangely wistful.

“All Stefan ever wanted from Damon was peace and quiet,” Meredith continued, as if on more steady ground there.

“And Elena,” Bonnie added automatically.

“Yes, yes—
and
Elena. But all Elena wanted was Stefan! I mean—all Elena
wants
…” Meredith’s voice trailed off. The sentence didn’t seem to work properly in the present tense anymore. She tried again. “All Elena wants now is…”

Bonnie just watched her speechlessly.

“Well, whatever she wants,” Meredith concluded, rather shaken, “she wants Stefan to be a part of it. And she doesn’t want
any
of us to have to stay here—in this…this hellhole.”

In another litter just beside them things were very quiet. Bonnie and Meredith were so used by now to traveling in closed litters that they hadn’t even realized that another palanquin had drawn abreast of them and that their voices carried clearly in the hot, still afternoon air.

In the second litter, Damon and Elena both looked very hard at the silken curtains fluttering open.

Now, Elena, with an almost mad air of needing something to do, hurriedly unwound a cord and the curtains dropped into place.

It was a mistake. It closed Elena and Damon into a surreal glowing red oblong, in which only the words that they had just heard seemed to have validity.

Elena felt her breath coming too quickly. Her aura was slipping.
Everything
was slipping sideways.

They don’t believe that I only want to be with Stefan!

“Steady on,” Damon said. “This is the last night. By tomorrow—”

Elena held up a hand to keep him from saying it.

“By tomorrow we’ll have found the key and gotten Stefan and we’ll be out of here,” Damon said anyway.

Jinx, thought Elena. And sent up a prayer after it.

They rode in silence up toward Bloddeuwedd’s grand mansion. For a surprisingly long time Elena didn’t realize that Damon was trembling. It was a quick, involuntary shaken breath that alerted her.

“Damon! Dear—dear heaven!” Elena was stricken, at a loss, not for words, but for the right words. “Damon, look at me!
Why?
”

Why?
Damon replied in the only voice he could trust not to tremble or crack or break.
Because—do you ever think of what’s happening to Stefan while you’re going to a party wearing splendid clothes, being carried along, to drink the finest wine and to dance—while he—while he—
The thought remained unfinished.

This is just what I needed right before being seen in public, Elena thought, as they reached the long driveway to Bloddeuwedd’s home. She tried to call on all of her resources before the curtains were drawn and they were free to step out at the location of the second half of the key.

I
don’t think about those things
, Elena answered in the same way Damon had spoken and for the same reason.
I don’t think because if I do I’ll go insane. But if I go insane, what good will I be to Stefan? I couldn’t help him. Instead I block it all out with walls of iron and I keep it away at any cost
.

“And you can manage that?” Damon asked, his voice shaking slightly.

“I can—because I have to. Remember in the beginning when we were arguing about the ropes around our wrists? Meredith and Bonnie had doubts. But they knew that I would wear handcuffs and crawl after you if that was what it took.” Elena turned to look at Damon in the crimson darkness and added, “And you’ve given yourself away, time after time, you know.” She slipped arms around him to touch his healed back, so that he would have no doubt about what she meant.

“That was for you,” Damon said harshly.

“Not really,” Elena replied. “Think about it. If you hadn’t agreed to the Discipline, we might have run out of town, but we could never have helped Stefan after that. When you get down to it, everything, all you’ve done, you’ve done for Stefan.”

“When you get down to it, I was the one who put Stefan here in the first place,” Damon said tiredly. “I figure we’re just about even now.”

“How many times, Damon? You were possessed when you let Shinichi talk you into it,” Elena said, feeling exhausted herself. “Maybe you need to be possessed again—just a little—so you remember how it feels.”

Every cell in Damon’s body seemed to flinch away from this idea. But aloud he just said, “There’s something that everyone has missed, you know. About the archetypal story of how two brothers killed each other simultaneously, and became vampires because they’d dallied with the same girl.”

“What?” Elena said sharply, shocked out of her tiredness. “Damon, what do you mean?”

“What I said. There’s something you’ve all missed. Ha. Maybe even Stefan has missed it. The story gets told and retold, but nobody catches it.”

Damon had turned his face away. Elena moved closer to him, just a bit, so he could smell her perfume, which was attar of roses that night. “Damon, tell me. Tell me,
please
!”

Damon started to turn toward her—

And it was at that moment that the liftmen stopped. Elena had only a second to wipe her face, and the curtains were being drawn.

Meredith had told them all the myth about Bloddeuwedd, which she’d got from a story-telling globe. All about how Bloddeuwedd had been made out of flowers and brought to life by the gods, and how she had betrayed her husband to his death, and how, in punishment, she had been doomed to spend each night from midnight to dawn as an owl.

And, apparently, there was something the myths didn’t mention. The fact that she had been doomed to live here, banished from the Celestial Court into the deep red twilight of the Dark Dimension.

All things considered, it was logical that her parties started at six in the evening.

Elena found that her mind was jumping from subject to subject. She accepted a goblet of Black Magic from a slave as her eyes wandered.

Every woman and most of the men at the party were wearing clever attire that changed color in the sun. Elena felt quite modest—after all, everything out of doors seemed to be pink or scarlet or wine-colored. Downing her goblet of Magic, Elena was slightly surprised to find herself going into automatic party-mode behavior, greeting people she’d met earlier in the week with cheek kisses and hugs as if she’d known them for years. Meanwhile she and Damon worked their way toward the mansion, sometimes with, sometimes against the tide of constantly moving people.

They made it up one steep set of white (pink) marble stairs, which sported on either side banks of glorious blue (violet) delphiniums and pink (scarlet) wild roses. Elena stopped here, for two reasons. One was to get a new goblet of Black Magic. The first had already given her a pleasant glow—although of course everything was constantly glowing here. She was hoping that the second cup would help her forget everything that Damon had brought up in the litter except the key—and help her remember what she’d been fretting over originally, before her thoughts had been hijacked by Bonnie and Meredith’s talk.

“I expect the best way is just to
ask
someone,” she told Damon, who was suddenly and silently at her elbow.

“Ask what?”

Elena leaned a little toward the slave who’d just supplied her with a fresh goblet. “May I ask—where is Lady Bloddeuwedd’s main ballroom?”

The liveried slave looked surprised. Then, with his head, he made a gesture all around. “This plaza—below the canopy—has gained the name the Great Ballroom,” he said, bowing over his tray.

Elena stared at him. Then she stared around her.

Under a giant canopy—it looked semipermanent to her and was hung all around with pretty lanterns in shades that were enhanced by the sun—the smooth grass lawn stretched away for hundreds of yards on all sides.

It is bigger than a football field.

“What I’d like to know,” Bonnie was asking a fellow guest, a woman who had clearly been to many of Bloddeuwedd’s affairs and knew her way around the mansion, “is this: which room is the main ballroom?”

“Oh, my deah, it depends on what you mean,” the guest replied cheerfully. “Theah’s the Great Ballroom out of doors—you
must
have seen it while climbing—the big pavilion? And then theah’s the White Ballroom inside. That’s lit with candelabras and has the curtains drawn all round. Sometimes it’s called the Waltz Room, since all that is played in there is waltzes.”

But Bonnie was still caught in horror a few sentences back. “There’s a ballroom
outside
?” she said shakily, hoping that somehow she hadn’t heard right.

“That’s it, deah, you can see through that wall theah.” The woman was telling the truth. You
could
see through the wall, because the walls were all of glass, one beyond another, allowing Bonnie to see what seemed to be an illusion done with mirrors: lighted room after lighted room, all filled with people. Only the last room on the bottom floor seemed to be made out of something solid. That must be the White Ballroom.

But through the opposite wall, where the guest was pointing—oh, yes. There was a canopy top. She remembered vaguely passing it. The other thing she remembered was…

“They dance on the grass? That—enormous field of grass?”

“Of course. It’s all especially cut and rolled smooth. You won’t trip over a weed or hummock of ground. Are you sure you’re feeling quite well? You look rathah pale. Well”—the guest laughed—“as pale as anyone can look in this light.”

“I’m fine,” Bonnie said dazedly. “I’m just…fine.”

The two parties met later and told each other of the horrors that they had unearthed. Damon and Elena had discovered that the ground of the outdoor ballroom was almost as hard as rock—anything that had been buried there before the ground was rolled smooth by heavy rollers would now be packed down in something like cement. The only place that anyone could dig there was around the perimeter.

“We should have brought a diviner,” Damon said. “You know, someone who uses a forked stick or a pendulum or a bit of a missing person’s clothing to home in on the correct area.”

“You’re right,” Meredith said, her tone clearly adding
for once.
“Why
didn’t
we bring a diviner?”

“Because I don’t know of any,” Damon said, with his sweetest, most ferocious barracuda smile.

Bonnie and Meredith had found that the inside ballroom’s flooring was rock—very beautiful white marble. There were dozens of floral arrangements in the room, but all that Bonnie had stuck her small hand into (as unobtrusively as possible) were simply cut flowers in a vase of water. No soil, nothing that could justify using the term “buried in.”

“And besides, why would Shinichi and Misao put the key in water they knew would be thrown out in a few days?” Bonnie asked, frowning, while Meredith added,

“And how do you find a loose floorboard in marble? So we can’t see how it could be buried there. By the way, I checked—and the White Ballroom has been here for years, so there’s no chance that they dumped it under the building stones, either.”

Elena, by now drinking her third goblet of Black Magic, said, “All right. The way we look at this is: one room scratched off the list. Now, we’ve already got half of the key—look how easy that was—”

“Maybe that was just to tease us,” Damon said, raising an eyebrow. “To get our hopes up, before dashing them completely…here.”

“That can’t be,” Elena said desperately, glaring at him. “We’ve come so far—farther than Misao ever imagined we would. We can find it. We
will
find it.”

“All right,” Damon said, suddenly deadly serious. “If we have to pretend to be staff and use pickaxes on that soil outdoors, we’ll do it. But first, let’s go through the entire house inside. That seemed to work well last time.”

“All right,” Meredith said, for once looking straight at him and without disapproval. “Bonnie and I will take the upstairs floors and you can take the downstairs ones—maybe you can make something of that White Waltz Ballroom.”

“All right.”

They set to work. Elena wished that she could calm down. Despite most of three goblets of Black Magic oscillating inside her—or perhaps because of them—she was seeing certain things in new lights. But she must keep her mind on the quest—and only on the quest. She would do anything—
anything
—she told herself, to get the key. Anything for Stefan.

The White Ballroom smelled of flowers and was garlanded with large, opulent blooms in the midst of abundant greenery. Standing arrangements were placed to shield an area around a fountain into an intimate nook where couples could sit. And, although there was no visible orchestra, music poured into the ballroom, demanding a response from Elena’s susceptible body.

“I don’t suppose you know how to waltz,” Damon said suddenly, and Elena realized that she had been swaying in time to the beat, eyes closed.

“Of course I do,” Elena answered, a little offended. “We all of us went to Ms. Hopewell’s classes. That was the equivalent of charm school in Fell’s Church,” she added, seeing the funny side of it and laughing at herself. “But Ms. Hopewell did love to dance, and she taught us every dance and movement she thought was graceful. That was when I was about eleven.”

“I suppose it would be absurd for me to ask you to dance with
me
,” Damon said.

Elena looked at him with what she knew were large and puzzled eyes. Despite the low-cut scarlet dress, she didn’t
feel
like an irresistible siren tonight. She was too wrought up to feel the magic woven in the cloth, magic which she now realized was telling her she was a dancing flame, a fire elemental. She supposed that Meredith must feel like a quiet stream, flowing swiftly and steadily to her destination, but sparkling and glinting all the way. And Bonnie—Bonnie, of course was a sprite of the air, meant to dance as lightly as a feather in that opalescent dress, barely subject to gravity.

But abruptly Elena remembered certain glances of admiration she had seen directed toward herself. And now suddenly Damon was vulnerable? Yet he didn’t imagine she would dance with him?

“Of course I would love to dance,” she said, realizing with a slight shock that she
hadn’t
noticed before, that Damon was in flawless white tie. Of course, it was on the one night when it might hinder them, but it made him look like a prince of the blood.

Her lips quirked slightly at the title. Of the blood…oh, yes.

“Are you sure
you
know how to waltz?” she asked him.

“A good question. I took it up in 1885 because it was known to be riotous and indecent. But it depends on whether you are speaking of the peasant waltz, the Viennese Waltz, the Hesitation Waltz, or—”

“Oh, come on, or we’ll miss another dance.” Elena grabbed his hand, feeling tiny sparks as if she’d stroked a cat’s fur the wrong way, and pulled him into the swaying crowd.

Another waltz began. Music flooded into the room and lifted Elena almost off her feet as the small hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her body tingled all over as if she had drunk some sort of celestial elixir.

It was her favorite waltz since childhood: the one she’d been brought up on. Tchaichovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty
waltz. But some child part of her mind could never help but pairing the sweet sweeping notes that came after the thundering, electrifying beginning together with the words from the Disney movie version:

I know you; I danced with you once upon a dream….

As always, they brought tears to her eyes; they made her heart sing and her feet want to fly rather than dance.

Her dress was backless. Damon’s warm hand was on her bare skin there.

I know, something whispered to her, why they called this dance riotous and indecent.

And now, certainly, Elena felt like a flame.
We were meant to be this way.
She couldn’t remember if it was an old quote of Damon’s or something new he was just barely whispering to her mind now.
Like two flames that join and merge into one.

You’re good
, Damon told her, and this time she knew that it was him speaking and that it was in the present.

Y
ou don’t need to patronize me. I’m too happy already!
Elena laughed back. Damon was an expert, and not just at the precision of the steps. He danced the waltz as if it were still riotous and indecent. He had a firm lead, which of course Elena’s human strength could not break. But he could interpret little signals of her own, about what she wanted and he obliged her, as if they were ice dancing, as if at any moment they might twirl and leap.