Elena was watching him intently. "Damon, do youknow where Matt is?"
"No." Well, that was true enough. But she was a bright little trinket, a pretty little pink, and more than all that, she was clever.... Damon broke off his polyrhythmic contemplations on Elena's intelligence. Why was he thinking in poetry? Was he really going crazy? He'd wondered that before - hadn't he? Didn't it prove you weren't crazy if you wondered if you were? The truly insane never doubted their sanity, right? Right. Or did they? And surely all this talking to himself couldn't be good foranyone .
Merda.
"All right, then. I'll trust you."
Damon let out a breath he didn't need and headed the car toward the clearing.
It was one of the more exciting gambles of his life. On one hand, therewas his life - Elena would find some way or other of killing him if he'd killed Mark, he was certain. And on the other hand...a taste of paradise. With a willing Elena, an eager Elena, an open Elena...he swallowed. He found himself doing the thing closest to praying that he'd done in half a millennium.
As they rounded the corner on the road to the little lane, he kept himself in hyper-alertness, the engine a bare hum, the night air bringing all kinds of information to vampire senses. He was thoroughly aware that an ambush could have been set up for him. But the lane was deserted. And as he suddenly hit the accelerator to reveal the little clearing, he found it blessedly, bleakly, blankly empty of either cars or of college-aged young men whose names started with "M."
He relaxed against the seatback.
Elena had been watching him.
"You thought he might be here."
"Yes." And now was the time for the real question. Without asking her this, the whole thing was a sham, a fraud. "Doyou remember this place?"
She glanced around. "No. Should I?"
Damon smiled.
But he took the precaution of driving on up another three hundred yards, into a different clearing, just in case she should have a sudden attack of memory.
"There were malach in the other clearing," he explained easily. "This one is guaranteed monster-free." Oh, what a liar, I am, I am, he rejoiced. Have I still got it or what?
He'd been...disturbed ever since Elena had come back from the Other Side. But if that first night it had discomfited him into literally giving her the shirt off his back - well, there were still no words for how he'd felt when she'd stood before him newly returned from the afterlife, her skin glowing in the dark clearing, na**d without shame or the concept of shame. And during her massage, where veins traced out lines of blue comet fire against an inverse sky. Damon was feeling something he hadn't felt for five hundred years.
He was feeling desire.
Human desire. Vampires didn't feel that. It was all sublimated into the need for the blood, always the blood....
But he was feeling it.
He knew why, too. Elena's aura. Elena's blood. She'd brought back with her something more substantial than wings. And while the wings had faded, this new talent seemed to be permanent.
He realized that it was a very long time since he'd felt this, and that therefore he might be quite wrong. But he didn't think so. He thought that Elena's aura would make the most fossilized of vampires stand up and blossom into virile young men once again.
He leaned away as far as the crowded confines of the Ferrari would allow. "Elena, there's something I should tell you."
"About Matt?" She gave him a straightforward, intelligent glance.
"Nat? No, no. It's about you. I know you were surprised that Stefan would leave you in the care of somebody likeme ."
There was no room for privacy in the Ferrari and he was sharing her body warmth already.
"Yes, I was," she said simply.
"Well, it may have something to do with - "
"It may have had something to do with how we decided that my aura would give even old vampires the jigsies. From now on, I'll need strong protection because of that, Stefan said."
Damon didn't know what the jigsies were, but he was prepared to bless them for getting a delicate point across to a lady. "I think," he said carefully, "that of all things, Stefan would want you to have protection from the evil folk drawn here from all over the globe, and above all other things that you not be forced to - to, um, jigsy - if it was not your wish."
"And now he'sleft me - like a selfish, stupid, idealistic idiot, considering all the people in the world who might want to jigsy me."
"I agree," Damon said, careful of keeping the lie of Stefan's willing departure intact. "And I've already promised what protection I can offer. I really will do my best, Elena, to see that no one gets near you."
"Yes," said Elena, "but then something like this" - she made a little gesture probably to indicate Shinichi and all the problems brought about by his arrival - "comes up and nobody knows how to deal with it."
"True," said Damon. He had to keep shaking himself and reminding himself of his real purpose here. He was here to...well, he wasn't on St. Stefan's side. And the thing was, it was easy enough....
There she was, brushing her hair out...a fair pretty maiden sat brushing her hair out...the sun in the sky was nonesuch so gold.... Damon shook himselfhard . Since when had he gotten into ye Olde English folksongs? What waswrong with him?
To have something to say, he asked, "How are you feeling?" - just, as it happened, as she lifted her hand to her throat.
She grimaced. "Not bad."
And that made them look at each other. And then Elena smiled and he had to smile back, at first just a quirk of the lip, and then a full smile.