"I didn't want you and Matt fighting."

"You let me bleed you when it was against your true will."

This time she could find nothing to say but, "Yes."

"I-dear G.o.d!-I used my powers to afflict you with terrible grief!"

"If you mean an attack that causes hideous pain and seizures, then yes. And you were worse to Matt."

Matt wasn't on Damon's radarscope. "And then I kidnapped you."

"Youtried ."

"And you jumped out of a speeding car rather than take your chances with me."

"You were playing rough, Damon. They had told you to go out and play rough, maybe even to break your toys."

"I've been looking for the one who made you jump from the car-I couldn't remember anything before that. And I swore to take out his eyes and his tongue before he died in agony. You couldn't walk. You had to use a crutch to get through the forest, and just when help should have come, Shinichi drew you into a trap. Oh, yes, I know him. You wandered into his snow globe...and would be wandering still if I hadn't broken it."

"No," Elena said quietly. "I would have been dead a long time ago. You found me at the point of suffocation, remember?"

"Yes." A moment of fierce joy on his face. But then the trapped, horrified look returned. "I was the tormenter, the persecutor, the one you were so terrified of. I made you do things with-with-"

"Matt."

"O G.o.d," he said, and it was clearly an invocation to the deity, not just an exclamation, because he looked up, holding his clenched hands to heaven. "I thought I was being a hero for you. InsteadI'm the abomination. What now? By rights, I should be dead at your feet already." He looked at her with wide, feral, black eyes. There was no humor in them, no sarcasm, no holding back. He looked very young and very wild and desperate. If he'd been a black leopard he'd have been pacing his cage frantically, biting at the bars.

Then he bowed his head to kiss her bare foot.

Elena was shocked.

"I'm yours to do what you please with," he said in that same stunned voice. "You can order me to die right now. After all my clever talk, it turns out that I'm the monster."

And then he wept. Probably no other set of circ.u.mstances could have brought tears to Damon Salvatore's eyes. But he had boxed himself in. He never broke his word, and he'd given his word to break the monster, the one who had done all this to Elena. The fact that he had been possessed-at first a little, and then more and more, until his entire mind was simply another of Shinichi's toys, to be picked up and put down at leisure-didn't make up for his crimes.

"You know that I-I'm d.a.m.ned," he told her, as if perhaps that might go a small way toward rest.i.tution. "No, Idon't ," Elena said. "Because I don't believe that's true. And Damon, think of how many times you fought them. I'm sure they wanted you to kill Caroline that first night you said you felt something in her mirror. You said you almost did it. I'm sure they want you to kill me. Are you going to do it?"

He bent toward her foot again, and she hastily grabbed him by the shoulders. She couldn't stand to see him in such pain.

But now Damon was looking this way and that, as if he had a definite purpose. He was also twisting the lapis lazuli ring.

"Damon-what are you thinking? Tell me what you're thinking!"

"That he may pick me up as a puppet again-and that this time there may be areal birch rod. Shinichi-he's monstrous beyond your innocent belief. And he can take me over at a moment's notice. We've seen that."

"He can't if you'll let me kiss you."

"What?" He looked at her as if she hadn't been following the conversation properly.

"Let me kiss you-and strip out that dying malach inside you."

"Dying?"

"It dies a little more each time you gain enough strength to turn your back on it."

"Is-it very big?"

"As big as you are by now."

"Good," he whispered. "I only wish I could fight it myself."

"Pour le sport?" Elena answered, showing that her summer in France last year hadn't been entirely wasted.

"No. Because I hate the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's guts and I'd happily suffer a hundred times its pain as long as I knew I was hurtingit. "

Elena decided this was no time for delay. He was ready. "Will you let me do this one last thing?"

"I told you before-the monster who hurt you is your slave now."

All right. They could argue about that point later. Elena leaned forward and tilted her head up, lips pursed slightly.

After a few moments, Damon, the Don Juan of darkness, got the point.

He kissed her very gently, as if afraid to make too much contact.

"Wings of Purification," Elena whispered against his lips. These wings were as white as untrammeled snow, and lacelike, barely existing in some places at all. They arched high above Elena, shimmering with an iridescence that reminded her of moonlight on frosted cobwebs. They encased mortal and vampire in a web made of diamond and pearl.

"This is going to hurt you," Elena said, not knowing how she knew. The knowledge seemed to come moment by moment as she needed it. It was almost like being in a dream where great truths are understood without needing to be learned, and accepted without astonishment.

And that was how she knew thatWings of Purification would seek out and destroy anything foreign inside Damon and that the feeling could be very unpleasant for him. When the malach didn't seem to be coming out of its own accord, she said, prompted by her inner voice, "Take off your shirt. The malach is attached to your spine and it's closest to the skin at the back of your neck where it entered. I'm going to have to strip it out by hand." "Attached to my spine?"

"Yes. Did you ever feel it? I think it would have felt like a bee sting at first, as it entered you, just a sharp little drill and a blob of jelly that attached to your spine."

"Oh. The mosquito bite. Yes, I felt that. And then later, my neck began to ache, and at last my whole body. Was it...growing inside me?"

"Yes, and taking over more and more of your nervous system. Shinichi was controlling you like a marionette."

"Dear G.o.d, I'msorry ."

"Let's make him be sorry instead. Will you take off your shirt?"

Silently, like a trusting child, Damon took off his black jacket and shirt. Then, as Elena motioned him into position, he lay across her lap, his back hard with muscle and pale against the dark ground on either side.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Getting rid of it this way-pulling it out through the hole where it entered-willreally hurt."

"Good," grunted Damon. And then he buried his face in his lithe, flat-muscled arms.

Elena used the pads of her fingers, feeling at the top of his spine for what she was looking for. A squishy point. A blister. When she found it, she pinched it with her fingernails until blood suddenly spurted.

She almost lost it then as it tried to go flat, but she was pursuing it with sharp nails-and it was too slow. At last she had it held firmly between thumbnail and two fingernails.

The malach was still alive and aware enough to feebly resist her. But it was like a jellyfish trying to resist-only jellyfish broke apart when you pulled. This slick, slimy, man-shaped thing retained its shape as she slowly pulled it through the breach in Damon's skin.

And it was hurting him. She could tell. She started to take some of the pain into herself, but he gasped,"No!" with such vehemence that she decided to let him have his way.

The malach was much larger and more substantial than she had realized. It must have been growing a long time, she thought-the little blob of jelly that had expanded until it controlled him to the fingertips. She had to sit up, then scoot away from Damon and back again before it lay on the ground, a sickly, stringy, white caricature of a human body.

"Is it done?" Damon was breathless-it really had hurt, then.

"Yes."

Damon stood and looked down at the flabby white thing-barely twitching-that had made him persecute the person he cared most about in the world. Then, deliberately, he trampled on it, crushing it under the heels of his boots until it lay torn in pieces, and then trampling the pieces. Elena guessed that he didn't dare blast it with Power for fear of alerting Shinichi.

At last, all that was left was a stain and a smell.

Elena didn't know why she felt so dizzy then. But she reached for Damon and he reached for her and they went to their knees holding each other.

"I release you from every promise you made-while in the possession of that malach," Elena said. This was strategy. She didn't want to release him from the promise of caring for his brother.

"Thank you," Damon whispered, the weight of his head on her shoulder. "And now," said Elena, like a kindergarten teacher who wants to move quickly on to another activity, "We need to make plans. But to make plans in utter secrecy..."

"We have to share blood. But Elena, how much have you donated today? You look white."

"You said you'd be my slave-now you won't take a little of my blood."

"You said you released me-instead you're going to hold that over me forever, aren't you? But there's a simpler solution. You take some ofmy blood."

And in the end that was what they did, although it made Elena feel slightly guilty, as if she were betraying Stefan. Damon cut himself with the minimum of fuss, and then it began to happen-they weresharing minds, melting seamlessly together. In much shorter a time than it would take to speak the sentences aloud, it was done: Elena had told Damon of what her friends had found about the epidemic among the girls of Fell's Church-and Damon had told Elena everything he knew about Shinichi and Misao. Elena concocted a plan for scaring out any other possessed youngsters like Tami, and Damon promised to try to find out where Stefan was from the kitsune twins.

And, finally, when there was nothing more to say, and Damon's blood had restored faint color to Elena's cheeks they made plans as to how to meet again.

At the ceremony.

And then there was only Elena in the room, and a large raven winging its way toward the Old Wood.

Sitting on the cold stone floor, Elena took a moment to put all she now knew together. No wonder Damon had seemed so schizophrenic. No wonder he had remembered, and then forgotten, and then remembered that he was the one she was running from.

He remembered, she reasoned, when Shinichi was not controlling him, or at least was keeping him on a very loose rein. But his memory was spotty because some of the things he'd done were so terrible that his own mind had rejected them. They had seamlessly become part of the possessed Damon's memory, for when possessed Shinichi was controlling every word, every deed.

And in between episodes, Shinichi was telling him that he had to find Elena's tormentor and kill him.

All very amusing, she supposed, for this kitsune, Shinichi. But for both her and Damon it had been h.e.l.l.

Her mind refused to admit that there had been moments of heaven mixed in with the h.e.l.l. She was Stefan's, alone. That would never change.

Now Elena needed one more magical door, and she didn't know how to find one. But there was the twinkling fairy light again. She guessed it was the last of the magic that Honoria Fell had left to protect the town she had founded. Elena felt a little guilty, using it up-but if it wasn't meant for her, why had she been brought here?

To try for the most important destination she could imagine.

Reaching for the speck with one hand and clenching the key in the other she whispered with all the force at her command: "Somewhere I can see and hear and touch Stefan."

35.

Aprison, with filthy rushes on the floor and bars between her and the sleeping Stefan.Between her andStefan!

It was really him. Elena didn't know how she could know. Undoubtedly they could twist and change your perceptions here. But just now, perhaps because n.o.body had been expecting her to drop into a dungeon, no one was prepared with anything to make her doubt her senses.

Itwas Stefan. He was thinner than before, and his cheekbones stuck out. He was beautiful. And his mindfelt just right, just the right mixture of honor and love and darkness and light and hope and grim understanding of the world he lived in.

"Stefan! Oh,hold me! "

He woke and half sat up. "At least leave me my sleep. And meanwhile go away and put on another face, b.i.t.c.h!"

"Stefan! Language!"

She saw muscles in Stefan's shoulders freeze.

"What...did you...say?"

"Stefan...it's really me.I don't blame you for cursing. I curse this whole place and the two who put you here...."

"Three," he said wearily, and bent his head. "You'd know that if you were real. Go and let them teach you about my traitor brother and his friends who sneak up on people with kekkai crowns..."

Elena couldn't wait to debate about Damon now. "Won't youlook at me, at least?"

She saw him turn slowly, look slowly, then saw him leap up from a pallet made of sickly-looking hay, and saw him stare at her as if she were an angel dropped down from the sky.

Then he turned his back on her and put his hands over his ears.

"No bargains," he said flatly. "Don't even mention them to me. Go away. You've gotten better but you're still a dream."

"Stefan!"

"I said, go away!"

Time was wasting. And this was too cruel, after what she had been through just to speak to him.

"You first saw me just outside the princ.i.p.al's office the day you brought your papers into school and influenced the secretary. You didn't need to look at me to know what I looked like. Once I told you that I felt like a murderer because I said, 'Daddy, look' and pointed to-something outside-just before the car accident that killed my parents. I've never been able to remember what the something was. The first word I learned when I came back from the afterlife wa.s.stefan . Once, you looked at me in the rearview mirror of the car and said that I was your soul...."