“I know this is difficult for you to understand,” he told Damon. “And I can explain it to you, but I can’t comprehend it for you. Not feeding on humans is more than just a quirk. It is an ethical decision I made half a millennium ago. Not feeding on unconscious, un-consenting donors is a choice that I would still hold to if I were dying—”
“Blah, blah, blah, yes, and in your spare time you cast out devilled ham and walk on watercress.” Damon yawned like the sleek and well-fed predator he was. “But you’ve been holding all of these people frozen for a long time and you need to be realistic—” He broke off.
Stefan was smiling, shaking his head. He allowed himself the luxury of several seconds of this, which was all the time Damon was prepared to give him before physically atacking.
“They’re not frozen,” he said just as Damon went from utter relaxation to a bundle of coiled potential energy. “They’re asleep. It’s nighttime, and they’re not at a hospital in the middle of a huge crisis, and I haven’t been alarming them by meddling with their memories. I just put them to sleep on their feet.”
Damon’s muscles uncoiled slowly, like a cobra flaring out its hood—a position which kept it from striking. He still radiated menace, but at least the physical threat was over.
“Well, you’re going to have to meddle now,” Damon said. “What have you got?”
Stefan let his full aura loose around him, undiminished since he’d caught the twelve-point red-brown buck. He hadn’t needed to use Power to spy on Elena and her friends; they’d been projecting so loudly that he’d worried the forest werewolves might decide to investigate.
Damon raised his eyebrows a fraction. Stefan knew that he didn’t entirely believe that such Power could come from an animal, but there was no question that it was enough. Stefan reined it in to forestall Damon’s otherwise inevitable demonstration of how his own newly-acquired store of Power was greater.
“All right,” Damon said. “We get to work. We need them to understand that there are no such things as auras; that I have no supernatural powers; that I am above suspicion. Besides which, Matt needs to have a dozen
memories of why he trusts me, and Meredith needs to know that she’s a fitness nut. You see? For all that you’ve taken, we give a little back to each of them.”
Stefan thought that it all sounded depressingly like foul play. But who was he to judge? Damon was right: Elena and Bonnie were on the brink of madness already. And they . . .
“And they need the most work of all,” Damon said, without apologizing for hijacking Stefan’s thoughts. “Bonnie needs to stop obsessing over any of her witch powers that may appear within the next few days. She has to be convinced she’s not going insane. And finally,” he muttered half under his breath, “she has to give up the idea that she’s keeping a big white dog for a pet.”
Stefan was too intently focused on his own thoughts to ask questions. He was gazing at Elena; at the pulse that beat in her soft, slim throat. He felt ill at the notion of invading her mind again.
“And . . . Elena?” he got out.
“Elena needs to be more logical and less intuitive. She needs to forget whatever she dreamed tonight, and to know I had nothing to do with her blood loss. She needs to remember—with specific incidents—some good days spent with me as her boyfriend. She also has to accept that I’m sleeping on her bed, and that she has no objection to me moving in. She has to know that although she may not be keeping to the letter of her word to her Aunt Judith, she’s still keeping to the spirit. That’s all.”
“Oh, that’s all, is it? And you imagine that I’m going to persuade her of that little list?”
Damon flashed him a chilling smile. “No, I’ll do it, if you prefer. I’m already taking care of Bonnie. You may work on Matt and Meredith.”
* * *
The new Influencing was done, although it had required both Stefan’s effort and Damon’s assistance to fine-tune Elena’s fond “memories” of days she and Damon had spent together as the seasons had turned.
Stefan had at last gone back to Dyer Wood, tired and with only a quarter of the aura he’d had when he arrived. Damon privately predicted that he would be hunting white-tailed deer in this new forest before dawn.
All the humans but Elena had departed, befuddled by sleep, to their own rooms.
In the sweet darkness of the last hours of night, Damon settled down in bed. He was holding the newly-Influenced Elena’s hand, was bathed in the warm radiance of Elena’s aura. He put up wards about the perimeter of Soto hall, to ensure that if anyone who didn’t have business in the dormitory was sniffing around the entryway, windows, or exits of the building they would trip an eldritch wire and he Damon, would be wakened out of the soundest sleep.
Then he settled his head on the pillow. In just minutes, he had fallen asleep.
Damon dreamed.
* * *
He was paralyzed and covered with ash: ash and tiny droplets of Power. However, the Power didn’t seem to be enough to allow him movement except in one hand, and that hand was weak; its movements restricted.
Damon slept and woke and slept again. Even with the huge stake no longer pushing him into both intolerable agony and true extinction, the wooden fibers that had spread from his circulatory system to his nerve and muscle cells were trying to make his body a seedbed for a new great Tree. The droplets of Power that slowly soaked into his skin only sufficed to keep the fibers from accomplishing their purpose. Perhaps in time enough drops would accumulate to kill the wooden fibers off completely, but Damon was somehow certain that even this would not allow him to get up and walk around freely. He would need . . . some kind of help from outside to drag him back from the shadowy world of death that was all he could perceive around him. Some sort of, ah, jump-start.
Meanwhile, he was bored. The shadowy world of near-death was incredibly dull. Lying and clenching his left hand into a fist over and over, Damon tried to keep himself from watching events in his life parade over the inner movie screen of his mind’s eye. He felt that introspection right now would only lead to him slipping into depression and a darkness from which there was no return.
Eventually, he struck on the idea to ask the Power to do something different. He had been wondering what was happening with Elena and Bonnie and Stefan and Sage. Were they even alive?
To his astonishment, when he thought about them, it seemed that he could see them. He could see the gold of Elena’s hair. If he concentrated, he could even see out of her lapis lazuli eyes, and hear what was going on in that convoluted mind of hers.