Damon tried to finesse his way out. “Well, I assumed….”
“No one knows what I’m thinking about,” Elena said. “Until I tell them.” She moved and made him kneel to look at her, questioningly.
Hungrily.
Then, just as it was she who had made him kneel, it was she who drew him to her wound.
Elena came back to the real world slowly, fighting it all the way. She sank her nails into the leather of Damon’s jacket, found herself wondering briefly if removing it would help, and then her mood was shattered again by that sound — a sharp, imperative knock.
Damon raised his head and snarled.
We are a pair of wolves, aren’t we? Elena thought. Fighting nail and tooth.
But, another part of her mind supplied, that isn’t stopping the knocking. He warned those girls….
Those girls! Bonnie and Meredith! And he’d said not to interrupt unless the house was on fire!
But, the doctor — oh, God, something’s happened to that poor, wretched woman! She’s dying!
Damon was still snarling, a trace of blood on his lips. It was only a trace, because her second wound had really been healed just as thoroughly as the first, the one across her cheekbone. Elena had no idea how long it had been since she had pulled Damon to her to kiss this cut. But now, with her blood in his veins and his pleasure interrupted, he was like an untamed black panther in her arms.
She didn’t know whether she could stop him or even slow him down without using raw Power on him.
“Damon!” she said aloud. “Out there — those are our friends. Remember? Bonnie and Meredith and the healer.”
“Meredith,” Damon said, and again his lips peeled back, exposing terrifyingly long canines. He still wasn’t in reality. If he saw Meredith now, he wouldn’t be frightened, Elena thought — and, oh yes, she knew how her logical, thoughtful friend made Damon uneasy. They saw the world through such different eyes. She irked him like a pebble in his shoe. But right now he might deal with that unease in a way that would leave Meredith a savaged corpse.
“Let me go see,” she said, as the knock came again — couldn’t they stop that? Didn’t she have enough to deal with?
Damon’s arms merely tightened around her. She felt a flash of heat, because she knew that, even as he restrained her, he was holding back so much of his strength. He didn’t want to crush her, as he could if he used a tenth of the power in his hard muscles alone.
The wave of feeling that washed over her made her shut her eyes briefly, helplessly, but she knew she had to be the voice of sanity here.
“Damon! They could be warning us — or Ulma may have died.”
Death got through to him. His eyes were slits, the bloodred light from the kitchen shutters throwing bars of scarlet and black across his face, making him look more handsome — and more demonic — than ever.
“You’ll stay here.” Damon said it flatly, with no idea of being a “master” or a “gentleman.” He was a wild beast protecting his mate, the only creature in the world that wasn’t competition or food.
There was no arguing with him, not in this state. Elena would stay here. Damon would go to do whatever needed to be done. And Elena would stay for as long as he thought necessary.
Elena truly didn’t know whose thoughts these last were. She and Damon were still trying to untangle their emotions. She decided to watch him and only if he really got out of control…
You don’t want to see me out of control.
Feeling him snap from raw animal instinct to icy, perfect mental dominance was even scarier than the animal alone. She didn’t know whether Damon was the sanest person she had ever met or just the one best able to cover up his wildness. She held her torn blouse together and watched as he moved with effortless grace to the door and then, suddenly, violently, wrenched it almost off its hinges.
No one fell; no one had been listening in on their private conversation. But Meredith stood, restraining Bonnie with one hand, and with the other hand raised, ready to knock again.
“Yes?” Damon said in glacial tones. “I thought I told you—”
“You did, and there is,” Meredith said, interrupting this Damon in an unusual attempt to commit suicide.
“There is what?” Damon snarled.
“There’s a mob outside threatening to burn the whole building down. I don’t know if they’re upset about Drohzne, or about us taking Ulma, but they’re enraged about something, and they’ve got torches. I didn’t want to interrupt Elena’s — treatment — but Dr. Meggar says they won’t listen to him. He’s a human.”
“He used to be a slave,” Bonnie added, wresting free of the chokehold that Meredith had on her. She looked up at Damon with streaming brown eyes, hands outstretched. “Only you can save us,” she said, translating the message of her gaze aloud — which meant that things were really serious.
“All right, all right. I’ll go take care of them. You take care of Elena.”
“Of course, but—”
“No.” Damon had either gone reckless with the blood — and the memories that were still keeping Elena from forming a coherent sentence — or he had somehow overcome all his fear of Meredith. He put a hand on each of her shoulders. He was only one and a half or two inches taller than she was, so he had no trouble holding her eyes. “You, personally, take care of Elena. Tragedies happen here every minute of the day: unforeseeable, horrible, deadly tragedies. I do not want one happening to Elena.”
Meredith looked at him for a long moment, and for once didn’t consult Elena with her eyes before answering a question involving her. She simply said, “I’ll protect her,” in a low voice that nevertheless carried. From her stance, from her tone, one could almost hear the unspoken addition, “with my life”—and it didn’t even seem melodramatic.
Damon let go of her, strode out the door, and without a backward glance disappeared from Elena’s sight. But his mental voice was crystalline in her mind: You’ll be safe if there is any way to save you. I swear it.
If there was any way to save her. Wonderful. Elena tried to kickstart her brain.
Meredith and Bonnie were both staring at her. Elena took a deep breath, automatically sucked for a moment back into the old days, when a girl fresh from a hot date could expect a long and serious debriefing.
But all Bonnie said was, “Your face — it looks much better now!”
“Yes,” Elena said, using the two ends of her blouse to tie a makeshift top around her. “My leg’s the problem. We didn’t — didn’t finish it yet.”
Bonnie opened her mouth, but closed it determinedly, which from Bonnie was a display of heroics similar to Meredith’s promise to Damon. When she opened it again it was to say, “Take my scarf and tie it around your leg. We can fold it sideways and then tie a bow over the side that got hurt. That’ll keep pressure on it.”
Meredith said, “I think Dr. Meggar has finished with Ulma. Maybe he can see you.”
In the other room, the doctor was once again washing his hands, using a large pump to get more water into the basin. There were deeply red-stained cloths in a pile and a smell that Elena was grateful the doctor had camouflaged with herbs. Also in a large, comfortable-looking chair there sat a woman whom Elena did not recognize.
Suffering and terror could change a person, Elena knew, but she could never have realized how much — nor how much relief and freedom from pain could change a face. She had brought with her a woman who huddled until she was almost child-size in Elena’s mind, and whose thin, ravaged face, twisted with agony and unrelenting dread, had seemed almost a sort of abstract drawing of a goblin hag. Her skin had been sickly gray in color, her thin hair had scarcely seemed enough to cover her head, and yet it had hung down in strands like seaweed. Everything about her screamed out that she was a slave, from the iron bands around her wrists, to her nakedness and scarred, bloody body, to her bare and rusty feet. Elena could not even have told you the color of the woman’s eyes, for they had seemed as gray as the rest of her.
Now Elena was confronted by a woman who was perhaps in her early-to mid-thirties. She had a lean, attractive, somehow aristocratic face, with a strong, patrician nose, dark, keen-looking eyes, and beautiful eyebrows like the wings of a flying bird. She was relaxing in the armchair, with her feet up on an ottoman, slowly brushing her hair, which was dark with occasional streaks of gray that lent an air of dignity to the simple deep blue housecoat she was wearing. Her face had wrinkles that lent it character, but overall one sensed a sort of yearning tenderness about her, perhaps because of the slight bulge in her abdomen, which she now gently laid a hand on. When she did this her face bloomed with color and her whole aspect glowed.
For an instant Elena thought this must be the doctor’s wife or housekeeper and she had a temptation to ask whether Ulma, the poor wreck of a slave, had died.
Then she saw what one cuff of the deep blue housecoat could not quite conceal: a glimpse of an iron bracelet.
This lean dark aristocratic woman was Ulma. The doctor had worked a miracle.
A healer, he had called himself. It was obvious that, like Damon, he could heal wounds. No one who had been whipped as Ulma had could have come round to this state without some powerful magic. Trying to simply stitch up the bloody mess that Elena had brought in had obviously been impossible, and so Dr. Meggar had healed her.
Elena had never experienced a situation like this, so she fell back upon the good manners that had been bred into her as a Virginian.