Branches broke behind Matt. He whirled.
"Damon!"
"Whom were you expecting?" The wraparound Ray-Bans concealed Damon's eyes completely.
"We weren't expectinganyone ," Matt said aggressively. "We just turned in here." The last time he'd seen Damon, when Damon had been banished like a whipped dog from Stefan's room, he'd wanted to punch Damon in the mouth very much, Elena knew. She could feel that he wanted it again now.
But Damon wasn't the same as he'd been when he'd left that room. Elena could see danger rising off him like heat waves.
"Oh, Isee . This is - yourprivate area for - privateexplorations," Damon translated, and there was a note of complicity in his voice that Elena disliked.
"No!" Matt snarled. Elena realized she was going to have to keep him under control. It was dangerous to antagonize Damon in this mood. "How can you even say that?" Matt went on. "Elena belongs to Stefan."
"Well - we belong to each other," Elena temporized.
"Of course you do," said Damon. "One body, one heart, one soul." For a moment there was something there - an expression inside the Ray-Bans, she thought, that was murderous.
Instantly, though, Damon's tone changed to an expressionless murmur. "But then, why areyou two here?" His head, turning to follow Matt's movement, moved like a predator tracking prey. There was something more disquieting than usual about his attitude.
"We saw something red," Matt said before Elena could stop him. "Something like what I saw when I had that accident."
Prickles were now running up and down Elena's arms. Somehow she wished Matt hadn't said that. In this dim, quiet clearing in the evergreen grove, she was suddenly very much afraid.
Stretching her new senses to their utmost - until she could feel them distending like a gossamer garment pushed thin all around her, she felt the wrongness there, too, and felt it pass out of the reach of her mind. At the same time she felt birds go quiet all that long distance away.
What was most disturbing was to turn just then, just as the birdsong stopped, and find Damon turning at the same instant to look at her. The sunglasses kept her from knowing what he was thinking. The rest of his face was a mask.
Stefan, she thought helplessly, longingly.
How could he have left her - with this? With no warning, no idea of his destination, no way of ever contacting him again...It might have made sense to him, with his desperate desire not to make her into something he loathed in himself. But to leave her with Damon in this mood, and all of her previous powers gone -
Your own fault, she thought, cutting short the flood of self-pity. You were the one who harped on brotherhood. You were the one who convinced him Damon was to be trusted. Now you deal with the consequences.
"Damon," she said, "I've been looking foryou . I wanted to ask you - about Stefan. You do know that he's left me."
"Of course. I believe the saying goes, for your own good. He left me to be your bodyguard."
"Then you saw him two nights ago?"
"Of course."
And - of course - you didn't try to stop him. Things couldn't have turned out better for you, Elena thought. She had never wished more for the abilities she'd had as a spirit, not even when she'd realized Stefan was really gone and beyond her all-too-human reach.
"Well, I'm not just letting him leave me," she said flatly, "for my own good or for any other reason. I'm going to follow him - but first I need to know where he might have gone."
"You're askingme ?"
"Yes. Please. Damon, I have to find him. I need him. I - " She was starting to choke up, and she had to be stern with herself.
But just then she realized that Matt was whispering very softly to her. "Elena, stop. I think we're just making him mad. Look at the sky."
Elena felt it herself. The circle of trees seemed to be leaning in all around them, darker than before, menacing. Elena tilted her chin slowly, looking up. Directly above them, gray clouds were pooling, piling in on themselves, cirrus overwhelmed by cumulus, turning to thunderheads - centered exactly over the spot where they stood.
On the ground, small whirlwinds began to form, lifting handfuls of pine needles and fresh green summer leaves off saplings. She had never seen anything like it before, and it filled the clearing with a sweet but sensuous smell, redolent of exotic oils and long, dark winter nights.
Looking at Damon, then, as the whirlwinds lifted higher and the sweet scent encircled her, resinous and aromatic, closing in until she knew it was soaking into her clothes and being impressed into her very flesh, she knew she had overstepped herself.
She couldn't protect Matt.
Stefan told me to trust Damon in his note in my diary. Stefan knows more about him than I do, she thought desperately. But we both know what Damon wants, ultimately. What he's always wanted. Me. My blood...
"Damon," she began softly - and broke off. Without looking at her, he held out a hand with the palm toward her.
Wait.
"There's something I have to do," he murmured. He bent down, every movement as unconsciously and economically graceful as a panther's, and picked up a small broken branch of what looked like ordinary Virginia pine. He waved it slightly, appraisingly, hefting it in his hand as if to feel weight and balance. It looked more like a fan than a branch.
Elena was now looking at Matt, trying with her eyes to tell him all the things she was feeling, foremost of which was that she was sorry: sorry that she had gotten him into this; sorry that she'd ever cared for him; sorry that she'd kept him bound into a group of friends who were so intimately intertwined with the supernatural.