“In his imagination. He’ll get a dusty orb with some old vampire’s memory of a Roman feast, or someone from the city’s memory of a modern one. Then he’ll play it over and over as he slowly starves to death.”
Elena was appalled. “Damon! Quick! I have to go back and find him—”
“You can’t, I’m afraid.” Lazily, Damon held up a hand. He had a firm grip on her rope. “Besides, he’s long gone.”
“How can he do that? How could anyone do that?”
“How can a lung cancer patient refuse to quit smoking? But I agree that those orbs can be the most addictive substances of all. Blame the kitsune for bringing their star balls here and making them the most popular form of obsession.”
“Star balls? Hoshi no tama?” Elena gasped.
Damon stared at her, looking equally surprised. “You know about them?”
“All I know is what Meredith researched. She said that kitsune were often portrayed with either keys”—she raised her eyebrows at him—“or with star balls. And that myths say they can put some or all of their power in the ball, so that if you find it, you can control the kitsune. She and Bonnie want to find Misao’s or Shinichi’s star balls and have control over them.”
“Be still, my unbeating heart,” Damon said dramatically, but the next second he was all business. “Remember what that old guy said? A summer’s day for a meal? He was talking about this.” Damon picked up the little marble that the old man had dropped on the litter and held it to Elena’s temple.
The world disappeared.
Damon was gone. The sights and sounds — yes, and the smells — of the bazaar were gone. She was sitting on green grass which rippled in a slight breeze and she was looking at a weeping willow that bent down to a stream that was copper and deep, deep green at once. There was some sweet scent in the air — honeysuckle, freesia? Something delicious that stirred Elena as she leaned back to gaze at picture-perfect white clouds rolling in a cerulean sky.
She felt — she didn’t know how to say it. She felt young, but somewhere in her mind she knew that she was actually younger than this alien personality that had taken hold of her. Still, she felt excited that it was springtime and every golden-green leaf, every springy little reed, every weightless white cloud seemed to be rejoicing with her.
Then suddenly her heart was pounding. She had just caught the sound of a footfall behind her. In one, springing joyous moment she was on her feet, arms held out in the extremity of her love, the wild devotion she felt for this…
…this young girl? Something inside the sphere user’s brain seemed to fall back in bewilderment. Most of it, though, was taken up with cataloguing the perfections of the girl who had crept up so lightly in the waving grass: the clustering dark curls at her neck, the flashing green eyes below arching brows, the smooth glowing skin of her cheeks as she laughed with her lover, pretending to run away on feet as light as any elf’s…!
Pursued and pursuer both fell down together on the soft carpet of long grass…and then things quickly got so steamy that Elena, the distant mind in the background, began wondering how on earth you made one of these things stop. Every time she put her hand to her temple, groping, she was caught and kissed breathless by…Allegra…that was the girl, Allegra. And Allegra was certainly beautiful, especially through this particular viewer’s eyes. The creamy soft skin of her…
And then, with a shock just as great as she’d felt when the bazaar disappeared, it appeared again. She was Elena; she was riding on the litter with Damon; there was a cacophony of sounds around her — and a thousand different smells, too. But she was breathing hard and part of her was still resounding with John — that had been his name — with
John’s love for Allegra.
“But I still don’t understand,” she almost keened.
“It’s simple,” Damon said. “You put a blank star ball of the size you like to your temple and you think back to the time you want to record. The star ball does the rest.” He waved off her attempted interruption and leaned forward with mischief in those fathomless black eyes of his. “Perhaps you got an especially warm summer day?” he said, adding suggestively, “These litters do have curtains you can draw closed.”
“Don’t be silly, Damon,” Elena said, but John’s feelings had sparked her own, like flint and tinder. She didn’t want to kiss Damon, she told herself sternly. She wanted to kiss Stefan. But since a moment ago she had been kissing Allegra, it didn’t seem as strong an argument as it could be.
“I don’t think,” she began, still breathless, as Damon reached for her, “that this is a very good…”
With a smooth flick of the rope, Damon untied her hands completely. He would have pulled it off both wrists, but Elena immediately half-turned, supporting herself with that hand. She needed the support.
In the circumstances, though, there was nothing more meaningful — or more…exciting…than what Damon had done.
He hadn’t drawn the curtains, but Bonnie and Meredith were behind them on their own litter, out of sight. Certainly out of Elena’s mind. She felt warm arms around her, and instinctively nestled into them. She felt a surge of pure love and appreciation for Damon, for his understanding that she could never do this as a slave with a master.
We’re both of us unmastered, she heard in her head, and she remembered that when cooling down most of her psychic abilities she had forgotten to set the volume on low for this one. Oh, well, it might just come in handy….
But we both enjoy worship, she replied telepathically, and felt his laughter on her lips as he admitted the truth of it. There was nothing sweeter in her life these days than Damon’s kisses. She could drift like this forever, forgetting the outside world. And that was a good thing,
because she had the feeling that there was much depression in the outside and not too much happiness. But if she could always come back to this, this welcome, this sweetness, this ecstasy…
Elena jerked in the litter, throwing her weight back so fast that the men carrying it almost fell in a heap.
“You bastard,” she whispered venomously. They were still psychically entangled, and she was glad to see that through Damon’s eyes she was like a vengeful Aphrodite: her golden hair lifting and whipping behind her like a thunderstorm, her eyes shining violet in her elemental fury.
And now, worst of all, this goddess turned her face away from him. “Not one day,” she said. “You couldn’t even keep your promise for a single day!”
“I didn’t! I didn’t Influence you, Elena!”
“Don’t call me that. We have a professional relationship now. I call you ‘Master.’ You can call me ‘Slave’ or ‘Dog’ or whatever you want.”
“If we have the professional relationship of master and slave,” Damon said, his eyes dangerous, “then I can just order you to—”
“Try it!” Elena lifted her lips in what really wasn’t a smile. “Why don’t you do that, and see just what happens?”
Damon clearly decided to throw himself on the mercy of the court, and looked piteous and a little unbalanced, which he could easily do whenever he wanted. “I really didn’t try to Influence you,” he repeated, but then hastily added, “Maybe I can just change the subject for a while — tell you more about the star balls.”
“That,” Elena said in her most frosty voice, “might be a rather good idea.”
“Well, the balls make recordings directly from your neurons, you see? Your neurons in your brain. Everything you’ve ever experienced is there in your mind somewhere, and the ball just draws it out.”
“So you can always remember it and watch it over and over like a movie, too?” Elena said, twiddling with her veil to shade her face from him, and thinking that she would give a star ball to Alaric and Meredith before their wedding.
“No,” Damon said, rather grimly. “Not like that. For one thing, the memory is gone from you — these are kitsune toys we’re talking about, remember? Once the star ball has taken it from your neurons, you don’t remember a thing about the event. Second, the ‘recording’ on the star ball gradually fades — with use, with time, with some other factors nobody understands. But the ball gets cloudier, and the sensations weaker, until finally it’s just an empty crystal sphere.”
“But — that poor man was selling a day of his life. A wonderful day! I should think he would want to keep it.”
“You saw him.”
“Yes.” Once again Elena saw the louse-ridden, haggard, gray-faced old man. She felt something like ice down her spine at the thought that he had once been the laughing, joyous, young John that she had experienced. “Oh, how sad,” she said, and she wasn’t talking about memory.
But, for once, Damon hadn’t followed her thoughts. “Yes,” he said. “There are a lot of the poor and the old here. They worked themselves free of slavery, or had a generous owner die…and then this is where they end up.”
“But the star balls? Are they just made for poor people? The rich ones can just travel to Earth and see a real summer day for themselves, right?”
Damon laughed without much humor. “Oh, no, they can’t. Most of them are bound here.”
He said bound oddly. Elena ventured, “Too busy to go on vacation?”
“Too busy, too powerful to get through the wards protecting Earth from them, too worried about what their enemies will do while they’re gone, too physically decrepit, too notorious, too dead.”
“Dead?” The horror of the tunnel and the corpse-smelling fog seemed ready to envelope Elena.
Damon flashed one of his evil smiles. “Forgot that your boyfriend is de mortius? Not to mention your honorable master? Most people, when they die, go to another level than this — much higher or much lower. This is the place for the bad ones, but it’s the upper level. Farther down — well, nobody wants to go there.”