She went into his arms, and let herself breathe in the fresh smel of him, warm and spicy, with a trace of rusty nails.
You're my life, Stefan told her silently. We're not going to do anything today. There's not much time, and you deserve your golden negligee and your roses and candles. If not from Lady Ulma, from the finest Earth designers that money can provide. But...kiss me?
Elena kissed him wil ingly, so glad that he was wil ing to wait.
The kiss was warm and comforting and she didn't mind the slight taste of rust. And it was wonderful to be with someone who would provide exactly what she needed, whether that was a slight mind probe, just to make her feel safer, or...
And then sheet lightning hit them. It seemed to come from both of them at once, and then Elena involuntarily clamped her teeth on Stefan's lip, drawing blood.
Stefan locked his arms around her, and barely waited for her to back off a little, before deliberately taking her lower lip in his own teeth and...after a moment of tension that seemed to last forever...biting down hard.
Elena almost cried out. She almost then and there unleashed the Still-undefined Wings of Destruction on him. But two things stopped her. One, Stefan had never, ever hurt her before. And, two, she was being drawn into something so ancient and mystical that she couldn't stop now.
A minute of finessing and Stefan had the two little wounds aligned. Blood surged from Elena's bleeding lip and, in direct connection with Stefan's less serious wound, caused a backflow. Her blood into his lip.
And the same thing happened with Stefan's blood; some of it, rich with Power, rushed into Elena.
It wasn't perfect. A bead of blood swell ed and stood gleaming on Elena's lip. But Elena couldn't have cared less.
A moment later the bead dropped down into Stefan's mouth and she felt the sheer staggering power of how much he loved her.
She herself was concentrating on one single tiny feeling, somewhere in the center of this storm they'd cal ed up. This kind of exchange of blood - she was sure as she could be -
this was the old way, the way that two vampires could share blood and love and their souls. She was being drawn into Stefan's mind. She felt his soul, pure and unconstrained, swirling around her with a thousand different emotions, tears from his past, joy from the present, al open without a trace of a shield from her.
She felt her own soul lift to meet his, herself unshielded and unafraid. Stefan had long ago seen any selfishness, vanity, over-ambition in her - and forgiven it. He'd seen al of her and loved al of her, even the bad parts.
And so she saw him, as darkness as tender as rest, as gentle as evensong, wrapping black protective wings around her...
Stefan, I...
Love...I know...
That was when someone knocked on the door.
Chapter 18
After breakfast Matt went online to find two stores, neither in Fel 's Church, that had the amount of clay Mrs. Flowers said she'd need and that said they'd deliver. But after that there was the matter of driving away from the boardinghouse and by the last lonely remains of where the Old Wood had been.
He drove by the little thicket where Shinichi often came like a demonic Pied Piper with the possessed children shuffling behind him - the place where Sheriff Mossberg had gone after them and hadn't come out. Where, later, protected by magical wards on Post-it Notes, he and Tyrone Alpert had pul ed out a bare, chewed femur.
Today, he figured the only way to get past the thicket was to work his wheezing junk car up by stages, and it was actual y going over sixty when he flew by the thicket, even managing to hit the turn perfectly. No trees fel on him, no swarms of foot-long bugs.
He whispered "Whoa,"in relief and headed for home. He dreaded that - but simply driving through Fel 's Church was so horrible it glued his tongue to the top of his mouth. It looked - this pretty, innocent little town where he had grown up - as if it were one of those neighborhoods you saw on TV or on the Internet that had been bombed, or something. And whether it was bombs or disasterous fires, one house in four was simply rubble. A few were half-rubble, with police tape enclosing them, which meant that whatever had happened had happened early enough for the police to care - or dare.
Around the burned-out bits the vegetation flourished strangely: a decorative bush from one house grown so as to be halfway across a neighbor's grass. Vines dipping from one tree to another, to another, as if this were some ancient jungle.
His home was right in the middle of a long block of houses ful of kids - and in summer, when grandchildren inevitably came to visit, there were even more kids. Matt just hoped that that part of summer vacation was done...but would Shinichi and Misao let the youngsters go home? Matt had no idea. And, if they went home, would they keep spreading the disease in their own hometowns? Where did it stop?
Driving down his block, though, Matt saw nothing hideous.
There were kids playing out on the front lawns, or the sidewalks, crouching over marbles, hanging out in the trees.
There was no single overt thing that he could put his finger on There was no single overt thing that he could put his finger on that was weird.
He was Stilluneasy. But he'd reached his house now, the one with a grand old oak tree shading the porch, so he had to get out. He coasted to a stop just under the tree and parked by the sidewalk. He grabbed a large laundry bag from the backseat. He'd been accumulating dirty clothes for a couple of weeks at the boardinghouse and it hadn't seemed fair to ask Mrs. Flowers to wash them.
As he got out of the car, pul ing the bag out with him, he was just in time to hear the birdsong stop.
For a moment after it did, he wondered what was wrong. He knew that something was missing, cut short. It made the air heavier. It even seemed to change the smel of the grass.