He focused on Elena again. It wasn’t so bad to watch her standing still when her eyes were shut. He had marveled over Elena asleep often enough that this didn’t seem unnatural.
It was dangerous, though. Looking led to the desire to touch. He only wanted to trace the curve of her cheek with one finger, he bargained. Just that—and perhaps to kiss her warm lips.
Madness. He wasn’t stupid enough to start a domino effect like that. This was a hunger that grew when you fed it. That was Shakespeare, wasn’t it? “But she makes hungry, where she most satisfies . . .” Antony and Cleopatra. Oh, right. Hamlet, too. “As if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on . . .”
He was dully surprised at how much he missed her already. Images and sensations whirled through his mind: moments that they’d shared; the flash of her eyes as she glanced back at him, pointing out a joke that no one else besides Stefan could comprehend; the taste of rusty iron when she kissed him after holding a mouthful of nails; her expression as tears traced white paths on her dusty, sweaty face when she was mourning Damon’s death; the way her hair whipped into a thousand priceless silk snakes in the wind. The warmth of her lissome body when they slept curled together, and—even more delicious than that—the knowledge that she trusted him absolutely to take no liberty with her while she was at her most vulnerable.
That was what had been ineffably precious: her faith in his love for her. Each time they had embraced had been a unique encounter; each had been a distinct and separate paradise. She had slain him with a thousand butterfly kisses; resurrected him with the swift arch of her throat. Afterward, with their souls still joined mysteriously through the gift of her blood, joy had dizzied him until he trembled when she’d held him with his cheek against the softness of her silk-clad breast. How could a creature be so yielding, so yearningly tender and yet have the fierce and questing spirit of a medieval knight?
Automatically, Stefan put one hand to his throat and touched the talisman hanging there: Elena’s lapis ring, long abandoned, and—even longer abandoned—the apricot ribbon that had once bound her hair.
He realized suddenly that he had his eyes tightly shut in sheer emotional pain. He opened them while trying to keep his jaw and chin stiff, afraid that his mouth would begin to tremble
He had just decided on how to settle the desperate question of how to kiss Elena without actually kissing her, when the door opened. Stefan instinctively tried to freeze in place the person entering and got a withering look from Damon
“Done pawing her?” Damon asked, after deliberately turning away and making a show of not watching.
“Yes,” Stefan said emptily. He’d thought of kissing his fingers and then pressing them—gently—to Elena’s lips, but of course he couldn’t do anything of the kind while Damon was here.
“I don’t suppose,” Damon said dourly, “that you used any of the time I was gone in re-Influencing them—or even her?”
Stefan was startled into staring at his brother. He answered the sentiment beneath the question.
“How can you be jealous of me?” he breathed. “I have nothing, and you have everything.”
Damon had found a wall to lounge against, while examining Bonnie with narrowed eyes. “Oh, yes? Let me tell you about this everything I have. Do you know about salmon, little brother? No, I’m not crazy—I remain an entire millimeter away from insanity. Just shut up and listen.”
Stefan shut up. He wondered how many girls Damon had got to while he himself had been sentimentalizing over Elena, and whether his older brother had even taken the basic precaution of walking upstairs a floor to keep Elena’s immediate neighbors from getting suspicious.
“Salmon,” Damon said, with every indication of being fascinated, “are curious creatures. They’re born in rivers, but early on they swim out to sea and there in the ocean they grow up—if they’re not eaten first. But then one day when they’re mature and ready to be mommy and daddy salmon, they just turn around and swim back to the rivers to spawn. And the thing is that they usually manage to find—with eerie precision, yes?—not just the river, but the actual spawning ground where they were born.”
“And the bit of this that every kindergartner doesn’t know is?”
“They home, salmon do. Just like pigeons. And so do your friends. Your coterie is homing. Bonnie’s not just trancing; she’s getting flashes of who I really am—and how I’m different from you. I think she can see auras. It was pure dumb luck that I was starving and didn’t have an aura when she took a good look at me a little while ago. In fact, earlier, while she was sleepwalking—well, never mind that. But she’s definitely being uncanny.”
Stefan was shocked. He’d known that things were going wrong tonight; of course; that was why he’d left his tree and come to investigate the chaos he’d sensed around Elena. But Bonnie shouldn’t be regaining her witch powers with anything like the speed Damon had described.
“What do you mean ‘while she was sleepwalking?’ Where did she go?”
“To her morning class, I believe—and I said, never mind about that. Elena’s even worse than Bonnie. She more or less called me out on not being human before we went to bed. I didn’t have enough Power to Influence her—and before you ask why, it’s because I couldn’t leave her to feed, right?—until I burned life energy and even then what did she do? She apparently had an inspired dream—in somnis veritas—in which she decided that I somehow made her missing blood disappear.”
“But you didn’t!”
“Which was just as well, because Bonnie was able to sense the truth about that, too. Meanwhile, Meredith is going crazy for lack of kata to do—”
“Of who?”
“Her aikido and judo exercises—although I think for judo you need another person to practice with. Plus, probably half a dozen other martial arts forms that I don’t know the names of. Anyway, she’s going loony trying to make sense of the other loons. And Matt can’t remember a single reason to actually trust me, which puts him more than a millimeter on the wrong side of sanity. He’s started just making random remarks about crazy things.”
Stefan didn’t ask about Caroline. Caroline knew the truth about herself, in any case. Caroline would look after Caroline.
“And why is this all happening?” Damon continued relentlessly. “Because you didn’t give them enough of a reality to believe in. You took away their identities, but you didn’t give them anything new to identify with. Also possibly because you relied on a neuro-virus rather than doing all the work by hand.”
“I didn’t have time—” Stefan began, but then he stopped and shook his head. “I couldn’t stand to make time,” he said slowly. “I didn’t want to see them—watch their eyes—while I was taking their memories away.”
“Well, they all have their eyes shut now,” Damon said, with a grim shadow of his most glorious smile. “And you and I are going to finish what you started. But first, since you’ve been holding them all frozen for this long, you’re going to go out and find yourself a nice girl and settle down for about a quarter of an hour.”
It took Stefan several seconds to interpret this. By the time he was finished he was barely even angry anymore. Exasperated, however: yes.