But then, the little counterpoint voice murmured, Elena herself opened her mind up to you. All you did was ask. And it’s hardly as if it was your first visit there.
“Caroline?” he asked aloud, using no Influence. “Will you open your mind, please? It’s full of delicate things that I don’t want to harm. I promise I won’t hurt you or look at anything you don’t want me to see, but I have to make you forget about me.”
And you think that takes opening my whole mind? Caroline’s voice replied mockingly. You flatter yourself. But you could always try: this way. A closed door in the wall around the labyrinth sudden glowed with light. Stefan opened the door and found—strewn about on the metaphorical floor—Caroline’s pet hatreds and grudges. He was grateful to see that he was prominent among them, and he dropped his neuro-virus into his area directly. Then he pulled up the entire floor and began to peel layers like an onion.
He was surprised to find Matt’s image on one of the layers. Apparently, Caroline had resented Elena’s taking Matt as a boyfriend and then cheating on him with the handsome Jean-Claude while on summer vacation. It turned out that Jean-Claude was fictional, but by the time Caroline knew that Elena had already called it quits with Matt—and had seen Stefan. The lightning bolt had hit.
All this needs to go, Stefan realized, as he saw how bound-up it was with Caroline’s anger at Matt’s continued devotion to Elena; of the way everyone seemed to defect from Caroline to Elena, Stefan included. Stefan now realized that his casual choice of Caroline as a barrier against Elena in the beginning had been about the worst decision that he could possibly have made.
I didn’t mean to do any harm. I just wanted to protect Elena from what I thought I was—what I turned out to be, he thought.
And then: Damon will keep her safe. He’ll keep the world away from her. She’s never died in his care.
He stripped out the last layer of Caroline’s memories that pertained to vampires in general and to himself in particular. There. Now he had never bruised her ego; now she had never seen him defect to Elena.
Even a telepath wouldn’t be able to unravel that, he thought, vaguely proud, although he was strapped for time. The neuro-virus was still working away when he left Caroline—via her window—as a falcon and flew to the Porsche, which was parked legally on a street a mile from campus. Next stop: Fell’s Church.
Damon had been right. Mrs. Flowers had, of course, been right. Stefan had drunk human blood tonight, because that was what was had been needed to finish the job.
But after Caroline, it was back to animal blood only, he reminded himself sternly. No question about that. At all.
* * *
The ICU nurse glided smoothly into Elena’s room. She wasn’t one of those trash-can bangers who didn’t care if they woke the patient or not. She was healthy, honey-skinned, with an aura that Damon was perfectly willing to call beautiful. He let her chart Elena’s vital signs and then slid into her mind while deepening Elena’s sleep. The nurse’s blood was fresh and tasted faintly of ginger. Damon went back to watching over Elena, absently rubbing his chest just to the left of his breastbone. There was no scar where the Tree on the Nether World’s moon had impaled him. Vampire flesh healed too well for that. But Damon could still feel the shadow of the stake. He supposed he would always feel it, just as he would always dream of it.
Just as he would always wonder what exactly had been in his subconscious when he had chosen to trade his life for Bonnie’s while Elena looked on.
Damon didn’t spend a second wondering why he had dropped everything and come winging to the hospital when he’d heard Bonnie’s eldritch scream. He knew exactly why he had done that and he knew that she knew. But it wasn’t a thing to be spoken of. It came from the time when he had been dead.
* * *
They have to let me out sometime or other, Elena thought. After all, I’m good as new.
When she woke in the afternoon the day after being rushed into the emergency de
partment, she was radiant with health. The doctors on their evening rounds, however, were polite but skeptical. No one expected her to stay well. After they left, she spent hours visiting with Bonnie and Meredith and Matt, all of whom brought her flowers and stuffed animals and candy—none of which was strictly allowed in the ICU. Aunt Judith and Robert came, with Margaret, who was not, strictly, old enough to be allowed to visit.
But the nurses were strangely lenient about the rules—Elena thought perhaps it might be due to the large boxes of chocolates she shared with the ICU desk—and Margaret took home an armful of stuffed toys to mother.
Both Bonnie and Aunt Judith had brought Elena toiletries and fresh clothing which also weren’t actually allowed in the ICU room, but which were stored under a small table with a machine on it where they wouldn’t be in the way.
That evening Meredith also brought textbooks and assignments from sympathetic teachers who wanted Elena to keep up with her classes if she felt well enough. Bonnie brought photocopies of notes she’d sweet-talked out of Elena’s classmates in Physics 101 and Nonfiction and Memoir Writing.
“Although I don’t know why you couldn’t take Biology 101 and English 101 like me,” she said as she handed the papers over, “and then we could have passed or failed together. Especially instead of physics!”
“Oh, no, physics is interesting—if you can just get your head wrapped around it. It’s all about relativity and faster than light travel and black holes and atoms . . .” Elena realized that she was flushed with excitement and leaning forward, so that the saline IV that was still attached to her left arm strained and throbbed. She quickly sat back again. “Anyway . . . ah, Damon knows all about it. He can teach me.”
“He does?” Meredith said at the same time as Matt said, “He can?”
Damon smiled shyly while inwardly damning Stefan’s soul to hell for talking Elena into taking such a ludicrous subject. “It’s something we talk about when we’re alone,” he said, as confiding as a crocodile. “I hold her close and whisper in her ear that one teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh the same as nine hundred of the Great Pyramids of Giza on earth. It sends chills down her spine.”
“It sends chills down my spine, too,” Meredith said. “And Einstein’s relativity’s even worse.”
“Hey, I should have mentioned,” Matt broke in. “I got you some notes from your classes, too, Damon. I didn’t bring any textbooks because I couldn’t get into your room, but here’re the notes from your classes today.”
Damon slowly took the proffered papers. What the hell do I say? he wondered frantically. If it had been Meredith or Bonnie, he could have smiled lazily into their eyes. But it wasn’t, it was Mutt, no, damn it: Matt, Matt, Matt.
Act like Stefan, something inside him seemed to counsel, and without stopping to think further he slapped a humble expression on his face. “You really shouldn’t have,” he said. “I mean . . . really you shouldn’t.”