"I ask forgiveness, my master," Elena said in her no-expression voice. If left to himself, she thought, he wouldn't even have remembered the necessities.
Now, indeed, was the time. Elena knew what Damon had promised her. She also knew that a lot of promises had been broken that day. For one thing, ten was almost twice six.
She wasn't looking forward to this.
But when the first blow came, she knew that Damon wasn't one of the promise-breakers. She felt a dull thud, and a numbness, and then, curiously, a wetness which had her glancing up through the latticework of boards above them for clouds. It was disconcerting to realize that the wetness was her own blood, spilled without pain, running down her side.
"Make her count them," Young Drohzne slurred in a snarl, and Elena said "One" automatically, before Damon could put up a fight.
Elena went on counting in the same clear, unaffected voice. In her mind she wasn't here, in this foul-smelling horrible gutter at all. She was lying with her elbows propped up to support her face, and looking down into Stefan's eyes - those spring-green eyes that would never be old, no matter how many centuries he accumulated. She was dreamily counting for him, and ten would be their signal to jump up and begin the race. It was raining gently, but Stefan was giving her a handicap, and soon, soon she would scramble off him and run away through lush green grass. She would make this a fair race and really put her muscle into it, but Stefan, of course, would catch her. Then they would go down on the grass together, laughing and laughing as if they were having hysterics.
As for the vague, far-off sounds of wolflike leers and drunken snarls, even they were gradually changing. It all had to do with some silly dream about Damon and an ash rod. In the dream, Damon was swinging hard enough to satisfy the most exacting of onlookers, and the blows, which Elena could hear in the increasing silence, sounded more than hard enough, and made her feel a bit nauseated when she reflected that they were the sound of her own skin splitting, but she felt no more than dull cuffs up and down her back. And Stefan was drawing up her hand to kiss!
"I'll always be yours," Stefan said. "We belong together every time you dream."
I'll always be yours, Elena told him silently, knowing he would get the message. I may not be able to dream of you all the time, but I am always with you.
Always, my angel. I'm waiting for you, Stefan said.
Elena heard her own voice say "Ten," and Stefan kissed her hand again and was gone. Blinking, bewildered, and confused by the sudden inrush of noises, she sat cautiously up, looking around.
Young Drohzne was hunched into himself, blind with fury, disappointment, and more liquor than even he could stand up under. The wailing women had long ago gone silent, awed. The children were the only ones who still made any noise, climbing up and down on the boards, whispering to one another and running if Elena should happen to glance their way.
And then, with an entire lack of ceremony, it was over.
When Elena first stood up the world made a complete double circle around her and her legs folded. Damon caught her, and called to the few young men still conscious and inclined to look at him, "Give me a cape." It wasn't a request, and the best-dressed of the men, who seemed to have been slumming, tossed him a heavy cape, black, lined with greenish blue, and said, "Keep it. The performance - marvelous. Is it a hypnotist's act?"
"No performance," Damon snarled, in a voice that stopped the other slummers in the act of holding out business cards.
"Take them," Elena whispered.
Damon snatched up the cards in one hand, ungraciously. But Elena forced herself to toss the hair off her face and smile slowly, heavy-lidded, at the young men. They smiled somewhat timidly back.
"When you - ah - perform again..."
"You'll hear," Elena called to them. Damon was already carrying her back to Dr. Meggar, surrounded by the inevitable entourage of children plucking at their cloaks. It was only then that it occurred to Elena to wonder why Damon had asked for a cloak from some strangers, when he, in fact, was already wearing one.
"They will be having ceremonies somewhere, now that there are this many of them," Mrs. Flowers said in genteel distress as she and Matt sat and sipped herbal tea in the boardinghouse parlour. It was dinnertime, but still quite light outside.
"Ceremonies to do what?" Matt asked. He had never made it to his parents' house since he'd left Damon and Elena more than a week ago to come back to Fell's Church. He'd stopped by Meredith's house, which was on the edge of town, and she'd convinced him to come by Mrs. Flowers's first. After the conversation the three of them had had with Bonnie, Matt had decided it was best to be "invisible." His family would be safer if no one knew that he was still in Fell's Church. He would live at the boardinghouse, but none of the children who were making all the trouble would realize that. Then, with Bonnie and Meredith safely gone to meet Damon and Elena, Matt could be a sort of secret operative.
Now he almost wished he'd gone with the girls. Trying to be a secret operative in a place where all the enemies seemed to be able to hear and see better than you could, as well as to move much faster, hadn't turned out to be nearly as helpful as it had sounded. He spent reading most of the time the Internet blogs that Meredith had marked, looking for clues that might do them some good.
But he hadn't read of the need for any kind of ceremonies. He turned to Mrs. Flowers as she thoughtfully sipped her tea.
"Ceremonies for what?" he repeated.
With her soft white hair and her gentle face and vague, amiable blue eyes, Mrs. Flowers looked like the most harmless little old lady in the world. She wasn't. A witch by birth, and a gardener by vocation, she knew as much about black magic herbal toxins as about white magic healing poultices.