"My strength has been giving out on me lately," Lady Ulma said softly. "I thought it was that" - here she used a particularly crude expression for her owner - "that was leading me to death. Then I realized the truth." All at once radiance changed her face, so much that Elena could see what she must have looked like when she was in her teens and so beautiful that a demon would demand her as a wife. "I knew that new life stirred within me - and I knew that Drohzne would kill it if he had the chance - "
She didn't seem to recognize the expressions of astonishment and horror on the three girl's faces. Elena, however, had the feeling that she was groping through a nightmare, on the edge of a black crevasse, and that she would have to keep groping in the dark, around treacherous, unseen fissures in the ice in the Dark Dimension until she reached Stefan and got him free of this place. This casual reference to abomination wasn't the first of her steps around a crevasse, but it was the first she had recognized and counted.
"You young women are very new here," Lady Ulma said, as the silence stretched and stretched. "I did not mean to say anything out of place...."
"We're slaves here," Meredith replied, picking up a length of rope. "I think the more we learn the better."
"Your master - I've never seen anyone so quick to fight Old Drohzne before. Many people clucked their tongues, but that was all most dared to do. But your master - "
"We call him Damon," Bonnie put in pointedly.
It went right over Lady Ulma's head. "Master Damon - do you think he might keep me? After he pays the blood price to - to Drohzne's relatives, he will get first pick of all Drohzne's property. I am one of the few slaves he has not killed." The hope in the woman's face was almost too painful for Elena to look at.
It was only then that she consciously realized how long it had been since she'd seen Damon. How long should Damon's business be taking? She looked at Meredith anxiously.
Meredith understood exactly what the look meant. She shook her head helplessly. Even if they had Lakshmi take them to the Meeting Place, what could they do?
Elena bit back a wince of pain and smiled at Lady Ulma.
"Why don't you tell us about when you were a girl?" she said.
Chapter 19
Damon wouldn't have thought a sadistic old fool who whipped a woman to pieces for not being able to pull a cart meant for a horse would have any friends. And Old Drohzne, indeed, may not have had any. But that wasn't the issue.
Neither, strangely, was murder the issue. Murder was an everyday affair around the slums and the fact that Damon had initiated and won a fight was of no surprise to the inhabitants of these dangerous alleyways.
The issue lay in making off with a slave. Or perhaps it went deeper. The issue lay in how Damon treated his own slaves.
A crowd of men - all men, no women, Damon noticed - had indeed gathered in front of the doctor's building, and they did in fact have torches.
"Mad vampire! Mad vampire on the loose!"
"Drive him out here for justice to be done!"
"Burn the place down if they won't turn him out!"
"The elders say to bring him to them!"
This seemed to have the effect the crowd desired, clearing the streets of the more decent people and leaving only the bloody-minded sort who'd been hanging about at a loose end, and were only too glad of a fight. Most of them, of course, were vampires themselves. Most of them were fit vampires. But none of them, Damon thought, flashing a diamond-bright smile around the circle that was closing in on him, had the motivation of knowing that the lives of three young human girls depended on him - and that one of them was the jewel in the crown of humanity, Elena Gilbert.
If he, Damon, was torn to pieces in this fight, those three girls would lead lives of hell and degradation.
However, even this logic didn't seem to help him prevail as Damon was kicked, bitten, head-butted, punched, and stabbed with wooden daggers - the kind that slice vampire flesh. At first he thought he had a chance. Several of the youngest and fittest vampires fell prey to his cobra-quick strikes and his sudden strafes of Power. But the truth was that there were simply too many of them, Damon thought, as he snapped the neck of a demon whose two long tusks had already scored his arm almost through the muscle. And here came a huge vampire, clearly in training, with an aura that made Damon feel bile at the back of his throat. That one went down with a foot in the face, but he didn't stay down; he came up, clinging to Damon's leg and allowing several smaller vampires with wooden daggers to dart in and hamstring him. Damon felt black dismay as his legs went out from under him.
"Sunlight damn you," he grated through a mouthful of blood as another tusked, red-skinned demon punched him in the mouth. "Damn you all to the lowest hells...."
It was no good. Dully, still fighting, still using great swaths of Power to maim and kill as many as he could, Damon realized this. And then everything became dreamlike and dazed - not like his dream of Elena, whom he seemed to see constantly in his side-eye, weeping. But dreamlike in a feverish, nightmare sense. He could no longer use his muscles efficiently. His body was battered and even as he healed his legs, another vampire scored a great cut across his back. He was feeling more and more as if he were in a nightmare where he could not move except in slow motion. At the same time, something in his brain was whispering for him to rest. Just rest...and it would all be over.
Eventually, the greater numbers bore him down, and somebody appeared with a stake.
"Good riddance to new rubbish," the stake bringer said, his breath reeking of stale blood, his leering face grotesque, as he used leprous-looking fingers to open Damon's shirt so as not to make a hole in the fine black silk.