"Yes, angel. I think you're right."
This time Elena thought a good deal longer before venturing, "Stefan? I'm not sure he understands what it's like to be loved." And while he thought out his response, she was on tenterhooks.
Then he said very softly, very slowly again, "Yes, angel. I think you're right."
Oh, she did love him. He always understood. And he was always most brave and gallant and trusting just when she needed him to be.
"Stefan? Can I stay again tonight?"
"Is it nighttime, lovely love? You can stay - unless They come to take me somewhere." All at once Stefan was very solemn, holding her gaze. "But if They come - you'll promise me to leave then, won't you?"
Elena looked straight into his green eyes and said, "If that's what you want, I'll promise."
"Elena? Do you...do you keep your promises or not?" Suddenly, he sounded very sleepy, but the right kind of sleepy, not worn out, but someone who has been refreshed and is being lulled into a perfect slumber.
"I keep them close to me," Elena whispered. But I keep you closer, she thought. If someone came to hurt him, they would find out what a bodiless opponent could do. For instance, what if she just reached inside their bodies and managed to make contact for an instant? Long enough to squeeze a heart between her pretty white fingers? That would be something.
"I love you, Elena. I'm so glad...we kissed..."
"It's not the last time! You'll see! I swear it!" She dropped new healing tears down on him.
Stefan just smiled gently. And then he was asleep.
In the morning Elena woke up in her grand bedroom in Lady Ulma's house, alone. But she had another memory, like a pressed rose, to put away in its own special place inside her.
And somewhere, deep in her heart, she knew that these memories might be all she had of Stefan someday. She could imagine that these sweet-scented, fragile mementoes would be something to hold on to and cherish - if Stefan never came home.
Chapter 25
"Oh, I just want to take a little peek," Bonnie moaned, looking at the forbidden sketchbook, the one in which Lady Ulma had drawn their high couture outfits for the first party, the one that would be held tonight. Beside it, just within reach, were some sample squares from bolts of fabric in shimmering satin, rippling silk, transparent muslin, and soft, rich velvet.
"You'll get to try it on for the last fitting in an hour - this time with your eyes open!" Elena laughed. "But we can't forget that tonight isn't playtime. We'll have to dance some dances, of course - "
"Of course!" Bonnie repeated ecstatically.
"But our purpose there is to find the key. The first half of the double fox key. I just wish there was a star ball that showed the inside of tonight's house."
"Well, we all know pretty much about it; we can talk about it and try to imagine it," Meredith said.
Elena, who had been fiddling with the star ball from the other house, now put the slightly cloudy orb down and said, "All right. Let's brainstorm."
"May I storm, too?" a low, modulated voice asked from the doorway. The girls all turned, rising at the same time to greet a smiling Lady Ulma.
Before taking a chair, she gave Elena a particularly heartfelt hug and kiss on the cheek and Elena couldn't help herself from comparing the woman as they had seen her at Dr. Meggar's to the elegant lady she was now. Then, she had been hardly more than skin over bones, with the eyes of a timid wild creature under great strain, wearing a common housecoat, with men's bedroom slippers. Now, she reminded Elena of a Roman matron, with her face tranquil and beginning to fill out under a crown of glossy dark braids held back by jeweled combs. Her body was filling out, too, especially her belly, although she retained her natural grace as she took a seat on a velvet couch. She was wearing a saffron-colored gown of raw silk, with an underskirt of fringed and shimmering apricot.
"We're so excited about the fitting tonight," Elena said, with a nod toward the sketchbook.
"I am as excited as a child, myself," Lady Ulma admitted. "I only wish I could do for you a tenth of what you have done for me."
"You have already," Elena said. "And if we can find the fox keys - it will only be because you helped us so much. And that - I can't tell you how much that means to me," she finished almost in a whisper.
"But you never thought I could help you when you defied the law for a ravaged slave. You simply wanted to save me - and you have suffered much for it," Ulma responded quietly.
Elena shifted uncomfortably. The cut running down her face had left only a thin white scar along the cheekbone. Once - when she had first returned to Earth from the afterlife - she would have been able to wave the scar away with a simple wash of Power. But now, although she could channel her Power through her body, and use it to enhance her senses, she couldn't make it obey her will in any other way.
And once, she thought, imagining the Elena who had stood in Robert E. Lee High School's parking lot and drooled over a Porsche, she would have considered the marring of her face the greatest calamity of her life. But with all the accolades she had received, with Damon calling it her "white wound of honor," and her certainty that it would mean as little to Stefan as a scar on his cheekbone would mean to her, she had found she just couldn't take it very seriously.
I am not the same person I once was, she thought. And I'm glad.
"Never mind," she said, ignoring the pain down her leg that still throbbed at times. "Let's talk about the Silver Nightingale and her gala."
"Right," Meredith said. "What do we know about her? How did the clue go again, Elena?"