Midnight

I made Bonnie send for you. I made sure she got both of you out here, Elena told him. Her tears had begun to flow again, but slowly – gently. Her eyes were shut and she felt a faint smile come to her lips.

Do you know – Stefan’s mental voice was startled, astonished –  I remember something else! From when I was very young, maybe three or four years old. My father had a terrible temper, especially right after my mother died. And back then, when I was little, and my father was furious and drunk, Damon would deliberately get in between us. He’d say something obnoxious and – well, my father would end up beating him instead of me. I don’t know how I could have forgotten about that.

I do, Elena thought, remembering how frightened she had been of Damon when he’d first turned human – even though he’d put himself in between her and the vampires who wanted to Discipline her in the Dark Dimension. He had a gift for knowing exactly what to say – how to look – what to do – to get under anyone’s skin.

She could feel Stefan chuckle faintly, wryly. A gift, was it?

Well, I certainly couldn’t do it, and I can manage most people, Elena replied softly. Not him, though. Never him.

Stefan added, But he was almost always kinder to weak people than to strong ones. He always did have that soft spot for Bonnie… He broke off, as if frightened he’d ventured too near something sacred.

But Elena had her bearings now. She was glad, so glad, that in the end Damon had died to save Bonnie. Elena herself needed no more proof of his feelings about her. She would always love Damon, and she would never al ow anything to diminish that love.

And, somehow, it seemed fitting that she and Stefan should sit in her old bedroom and speak of what they remembered of Damon in hushed tones. She planned on taking the same thing up with the others tomorrow.

When she final y fel asleep in Stefan’s arms, it was hours after midnight.

Chapter 44

On the smal est moon of the Nether World fine ash was fal ing. It fel on two already ash-covered bodies. It fel on ash-choked water. It blocked the sunlight so that an endless midnight covered the moon’s ash-coated surface.

And something else fel . In the smal est imaginable droplets, an opalescent fluid fel , colors swirling as if to try and make up for the ugliness of the ashes. They were tiny drops, but there were tril ions upon tril ions of them, fal ing endlessly, concentrated over the spot where they had once been part of the largest container of raw Power in three dimensions.

There was a body on the ground on this spot – not quite a corpse. The body had no heartbeat; it did not breathe, and there was no brain activity. But somewhere in it there was a slow pulsing, that quickened very slightly as the tiny drops of Power fel upon it.

The pulsing was made up of nothing but a memory. The memory of a girl with dark blue eyes and golden hair and a smal face with wide brown eyes. And the taste: the taste of two maidens’tears. Elena. Bonnie.

Putting the two of them together they formed what was not exactly a thought, not exactly a picture. But to someone who only understood words, it might be translated: They are wiating for me. If I can figure out who I am.

And that sparked a fierce determination.

After what seemed like centuries but was only a few hours, something moved in the ash. A fist clenched.

And something stirred in the brain, a self-revelation. A name.

Damon.