She was going to get hurt, she knew that. But the worst part of any hurt was fear, and she wasn't afraid.
As he rounded the curve, she pulled the handle and pushed open the door as hard as she could with her hands while she kicked it as hard as she could with her feet. The door swung open, quickly being caught by centrifugal force, as were Elena's legs. As was Elena.
Her kick alone took her halfway out of the car. Damon grabbed for her and got only a handful of hair. For a moment she thought he would keep her in, even without keeping hold of her. She tumbled over and over in the air, floating, remaining about two feet off the ground, reaching out to grab fronds, branches of bushes, anything she could use to slow her velocity. And in this place where magic and physics met; she was able to do it, to slow while still floating on Damon's power, although it took her much farther from the Dunstans' house than she wanted.
Then she did hit the ground, bounced, and did her best to twist in the air, to take the impact on her buttock or the back of a shoulder, but something went wrong and her left heel hit first - God! - and tangled, swinging her around completely, slamming her knee into concrete - God, God! - flipping her in the air and bringing her down on her right arm so hard it seemed to be trying to drive it into her shoulder.
She had the wind knocked out of her by the first blow and was forced to hiss air in by the second and third.
Despite the flipping, flying universe, there was one sign she couldn't miss - an unusual spruce growing into the road that she had noticed ten feet behind her when she'd exploded out of the car. Tears were pouring uncontrollably down her cheeks as she pulled at tendrils of bush that had entangled her ankle - and a good thing, too. A few tears might have blurred her vision, made her afraid - as she had been with the last two explosions of pain - that she might pass out. But she was out on the road, her eyes were washed clear, she could see the spruce and the sunset both directly ahead, and she was thoroughly conscious. And that meant that if she headed for the sunset but at a forty-five-degree angle to her right, she couldn't miss the Dunstans'; driveway, house, barn, cornfield were all there to guide her after perhaps twenty-five steps in the woods.
She had barely stopped rolling when she was pulling at the bush that had thwarted her and getting to her feet just as she pulled the last entangling stems from her hair. The calculation about the Dunstans' house happened instantaneously in her head, even as she turned and saw the crushed swath she'd cut through the greenery and the blood on the road.
At first she looked at her skinned hands in bewilderment; they couldn't have left such a gory trail. And they hadn't. One knee had been skinned - flayed, really - right through her jeans - and one seriously messed up leg, less bloody but causing her sheets of pain like white lighting even while she was not trying to move it. Two arms with quite a lot of skin removed.
No time to find out how much or to figure out what she'd done to her shoulder. Ascreeeeeeech of brakes ahead. Lord, he's slow. No, I'm fast, hyped up by pain and terror. Use it!
She ordered her legs to sprint into the forest. Her right leg obeyed, but when she swiveled her left and it hit the ground fireworks went off behind her eyes. She was in a state of hyper-alertness; she saw the stick even as she was falling. She rolled over once or twice, which caused dull red flares of pain to go off in her head, and then she was able to grab it. It might have been specially designed for a crutch, around underarm height and blunt on one end but sharp on the other. She tucked it under her left arm and somehow willed herself up from her place in the mud: boosting off with her right leg and catching herself on the crutch so that she scarcely had to touch her left foot to the ground.
She'd got turned around in the fall and had to twist to right herself again - but there she saw it, the last remains of sunset and the road behind her. Head forty-five-degrees right from that glow, she thought. Thank God, it was her right arm that was messed up; this way she could support herself with her left
shoulder on the crutch. Still without a moment's hesitation, without giving Damon an extra millisecond to follow her, she plunged in her chosen direction into the forest.
Into the Old Wood.
Chapter 27
When Damon woke up, he was wrestling with the wheel of the Ferrari. He was on a narrow road, heading almost straight into a glorious sunset - and the passenger door was waving open.
Once again, only the combination of almost instantaneous reflex and perfectly designed automobile allowed him to keep out of the wide, muddy ditches on either side of the one-lane road. But he managed it and ended up with the sunset at his back, gazing at the long shadows down the road and wondering what the hell had just happened to him.
Was he sleep-driving now? The passenger door - why was it open?
And then something happened. A long, thin thread, slightly waving, almost like a single strand of gossamer, lit up as the reddish sunlight hit it. It was dangling from the top of the passenger window, which was shut, with the roof down.
He didn't bother to pull the car to one side, but stopped in the middle of the road and went around to look at that hair.
In his fingers, held toward the light, it turned white. But turned toward the dark of the forest, it showed its true color: gold.
A long, slightly waving, golden hair.
Elena.
As soon as he had identified it, he got back into the car and began to backtrack. Something had ripped Elena right out of his car without putting so much as a scratch on the paint. What could have done that?
How had he managed to get Elena to go for a spin anyway? And why couldn't he remember? Had they both been attacked...?
When he backtracked, however, the marks by the passenger's side of the road told the entire grisly story. For some reason, Elena had been frightened into jumping out of the car - or some power had pulled her. And Damon, who now felt as if there were steam rising from his skin, knew that in all the woods there were only two creatures that could have been responsible.