Phantom, p.23
Phantom, page 23
They all sat down on the garage floor in a semicircle, outside the diagram, facing toward the empty inner circle, holding their unlit candles. The sleepers lay behind them, and Meredith held Bonnie’s candle in her lap as well as her own; Stefan took Elena’s, and Alaric Matt’s.
“Now we anoint them with our blood,” Alaric said. They all looked at him, and he shrugged defensively. “It’s what the book says.”
Meredith removed a small pocketknife from her bag, cut her finger, and quickly, matter-of-factly, smeared a stripe of blood from the top to the bottom of her brown candle, then passed the knife to Alaric along with a little bottle of disinfectant. One by one, the others followed her lead.
“This is really unsanitary,” Celia said, wincing, but she followed through.
Stefan was very aware of the smell of human blood in such an enclosed space. Even though he’d just fed, his canines prickled in an automatic response.
Meredith picked up the candles and walked to their sleeping friends, crossing from one to the next and raising their hands to make a swift cut and wipe their blood against their candles. Not one of them even flinched. When she had finished, Meredith redistributed the sleepers’ candles and returned to her spot.
Alaric began to read, in Latin, the first words of the spell. After a few sentences, he hesitated at a word and Stefan silently took the grimoire. Smoothly he picked up where Alaric had left off. The words flowed off his tongue, the feel of the Latin on his lips reminding him of hours spent with his childhood tutor hundreds of years ago, and of a period when he lived in a monastery in England during the early days of his struggle with vampirism.
When the time came, he snapped his fingers and, with a touch of Power, his candle lit itself. He handed it to Meredith, who dripped a little of the melted wax onto the garage floor at the edge of the diagram and stuck the candle there. One by one, at the appropriate points in the ritual, he lit a candle and she placed it, until there was a little row of multicolored candles bravely burning between them and the chalk outlines of the diagram.
Stefan read on. Suddenly the pages of the book began to flutter. A cold, unnatural wind rose inside the closed garage, and the flames of the candles flickered wildly and then blew out. Two candles fell over. Meredith’s long hair whipped around her face.
“This isn’t supposed to happen,” Alaric shouted.
But Stefan just squinted his eyes against the gale and read on.
The pitch-blackness and the unpleasant sensation of falling lasted for only a moment, and then Elena landed jarringly on both feet and staggered forward, clutching Matt’s and Bonnie’s hands.
They were in a dim octagonal room lined with doors. A single piece of furniture sat in the center. Behind the lone desk lounged a tanned, beautiful, amazingly muscular, bare-chested vampire with a long, spiraling mane of bronze hair falling past his shoulders.
Instantly Elena knew where she was.
“We’re here.” She gasped. “The Gatehouse!”
Sage leaped to his feet on the other side of the desk, his face almost comically surprised. “Elena?” he exclaimed. “Bonnie? Matt? What’s going on? Qu’est-ce qui arrive?”
Usually, Elena would have been relieved to see Sage, who had always been kind and helpful to her, but she had to get to Damon. She knew where he must be. She could almost hear him calling to her.
She strode across the empty room with barely a glance at the startled gatekeeper, pulling Matt and Bonnie along with her.
“Sorry, Sage,” she said as she reached the door she wanted. “We’ve got to find Damon.”
“Damon?” he said. “He’s back again?” and then they passed through, ignoring Sage’s shouts of “Stop! Arretez-vous!”
The door closed behind them, and they found themselves in a landscape of ash. Nothing grew here, and there were no landmarks. Harsh winds had blown the fine black ash into shifting hills and valleys. As they watched, a strong gust caught at the light top layer of ash and sent it flying in a cloud that soon settled into new shapes. Below the lighter ash, they could see swamps of wet, muddy ash. Nearby was an ash-choked pool of still water. Nothing but ash and mud, except for an occasional scorched and blackened bit of wood.
Above them was a twilit sky in which hung a huge planet and two great moons, one a swirling bluish white, the other silvery.
“Where are we?” said Matt, gaping up at the sky.
“Once this was a world—a moon, technically—that was shaded by a huge tree,” Elena told him, walking steadily forward. “Until I destroyed it. This is where Damon died.”
She felt rather than saw Matt and Bonnie exchange a glance. “But, uh, then he came back, right? You saw him in Fell’s Church the other night, didn’t you?” Matt said hesitantly. “Why are we here now?”
“I know that Damon’s close,” Elena said impatiently. “I can feel him. He’s come back here. Maybe this is where he began his search for the phantom.” They kept walking. Soon they were not so much walking as wading through black ash that stuck to their legs in nasty thick clumps. The mud underneath the ash clung to their shoes, releasing them at each step with a wet sucking sound.
They were almost there. She could feel it. Elena picked up the pace, and the others, still linked to her, hurried to keep up. The ash was thicker and deeper here because they were approaching where the trunk had been, the very center of this world. Elena remembered it exploding, shooting up into the sky like a rocket, disintegrating as it went. Damon’s body had lain underneath and had been completely buried in the falling ash.
Elena stopped. There was a thick, drifting pile of ash that looked like it would be at least as high as her waist in places. She thought she could see where Damon had awoken—the ash was disturbed and caved in, as if someone had tunneled out of one of the deeper drifts. But there was no one around except themselves. A cold wind blew up a spray of ash, and Bonnie coughed. Elena, knee-deep in cold, sticky ash, dropped Bonnie’s hand and wrapped her arms around herself.
“He’s not here,” she said blankly. “I was so sure he would be here.”
“He must be somewhere else, then,” said Matt logically. “I’m sure he’s fighting the phantom, like you said he was going to. The Dark Dimension’s a big place.”
Bonnie shivered and huddled closer to Matt, her brown eyes huge and full of pathos, like a hungry puppy’s. “Can we go home now? Please? Sage can send us back again, can’t he?”
“I just don’t understand,” Elena said, staring at the empty space where the great trunk of the tree had once been. “I just knew he would be here. I could practically hear him calling me.”
Just then a low, musical laugh cut through the silence. It was a beautiful sound, but there was something chilly and alien about it, something that made Elena shudder.
“Elena,” Bonnie whispered, her eyes wide. “That’s the thing I heard before the fog took me.”
They turned.
Behind them stood a woman. A woman-shaped being, anyway, Elena amended quickly. This was no woman. And, like its laugh, this woman-shaped being was beautiful, but frightening. She—it—was huge, more than one and a half times the size of a human, but perfectly proportioned, and it looked like it was made of ice and mist in blues and greens—like the purest glacier, its eyes were clear with just a touch of pale green. As they watched, its solid, icy-translucent hips and legs shifted and blurred, changing to a swirl of mist.
A long wave of blue-green hair drifted behind it, its shape like a gradually roiling cloud. It smiled at Elena, and its sharp teeth shone like silvery icicles. There was something in its chest, though, that wasn’t ice, something solid and roundish and dark, dark red.
Elena saw all of this in an instant before her attention was fully riveted on what hung from the ice-woman-thing’s outstretched hand.
“Damon.” She gasped.
The ice-woman was holding him casually around the neck, ignoring his struggles as he dangled in the air. It held him so easily that he looked like a toy. The black-clad vampire swung out with his leg, kicking at the ice-woman’s side, but his foot simply passed through mist.
“Elena,” Damon said in a choked, thin voice.
The ice-woman—the phantom—cocked its head to one side and looked at Damon, then squeezed his neck a little tighter.
“I don’t need to breathe, you . . . idiot phantom,” he gasped defiantly.
The phantom’s smile widened and it said in a sweet, cold voice, like crystals chiming together, “But your head can pop off, can’t it? That’ll do just as well.” It shook him a little, and then transferred its smile to Elena, Bonnie, and Matt. Elena instinctively stepped back as the glacier-cold eyes found her.
“Welcome,” the phantom said to her in a tone of pleasure, as though they were old friends. “I’ve found you and your friends so refreshing, all your little jealousies. Each of you with your own special flavor of envy. You’ve got an awful lot of problems, don’t you? I haven’t felt so strong or so well-nourished for millennia.” Its face became thoughtful, and it began to shake Damon gently up and down. He was making a guttural choking noise now, and tears of pain ran down his face.
“But you really should have stayed where I put you,” the phantom continued, its voice a little colder, and it swung Damon casually in a great arc through the air. He wheezed and pulled at its huge hand. Was it even true that he didn’t need to breathe? Elena didn’t know. Damon wasn’t above lying about it if he had a reason, or even for no reason except to annoy his opponent.
“Stop it!” Elena shouted.
The phantom laughed again, genuinely amused. “Go ahead and make me, little one.” Its grip tightened around Damon’s throat and he shuddered. Then his eyes rolled back until Elena could see only the ghastly, red-veined whites of his eyes, and he went limp.
Chapter 32
Matt watched in horror as the phantom shook Damon like a rag doll.
Elena spun around to lock eyes with Matt and Bonnie. “We have to save him,” she whispered, a fierce determination on her face, and immediately took off running, shoving her way through the piles of ash.
Matt figured that if Damon, with all his vampire strength and fighting skills honed over the centuries, was so completely helpless in the hands of this phantom—and jeez, with the way it was yanking him back and forth now, his head really was going to pop off—then Matt, Bonnie, and Elena had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of making any difference to this fight. The only real question would be whether the phantom would kill them, too.
And the truth was that Matt didn’t even like Damon, not one tiny little bit. Sure, Damon had helped save Fell’s Church from Katherine and Klaus, and from the kitsune demons, but he was still a murderous, sarcastic, unrepentant, cocky, arrogant, nasty, usually unpleasant vampire. Damon had undoubtedly hurt more people than he had helped over his long life, even if you generously credited him with saving every single resident of Fell’s Church. And he always called Matt “Mutt,” pretending that he couldn’t remember his actual name, which was completely infuriating. As Damon meant it to be.
Still, Elena loved Damon. For whatever reason. Probably the same inexplicable reason that regular girls loved regular old bad boys, Matt suspected. A dyed-in-the-wool good guy, he’d never seen the appeal himself.
But Elena did.
And Damon was part of the team, sort of, and you didn’t leave your teammates to get decapitated by demon ice-women on ash-blanketed moons in other dimensions without at least doing your best to put up a fight.
Not even if you didn’t like them at all.
Matt ran after Elena, and Bonnie followed. When they reached the phantom, Elena was already scrabbling at the icy blue hand clutched around Damon’s throat, trying to pry its fingers up enough to slip her own underneath. The phantom barely glanced at her. Matt gave an inward sigh at the hopelessness of it all and swung a powerful roundhouse blow toward the phantom’s stomach.
Before his fist could connect, his target turned from ice to swirling, intangible mist, and his punch passed right through the phantom. Thrown off balance, Matt staggered and fell into the phantom’s now-vaporous torso.
It was like falling into a freezing-cold river of sewage. A numbing chill and a horrible, sickening smell washed over Matt. He pulled back out of the mist, nauseous and shivering but upright. He blinked dazedly around.
Elena was grappling with the phantom’s fingers, scratching and yanking, and the phantom watched her with a kind of distant amusement, not the least bit alarmed or discomforted by the girl’s efforts. Then it moved, so quickly Matt saw only a blur of bluish green, sending Elena flying, her arms and legs flailing, into a heap of ash. She scrambled to her feet immediately, blood trickling from her hairline, leaving red tracks through the ash that now coated her skin.
Bonnie was trying, too: She’d worked her way around behind the phantom and was hitting and kicking at it. Mostly, her feet and fists swung harmlessly right through the phantom’s mist, but occasionally a blow would connect with the more solid ice. These blows seemed like they were totally ineffective, though: Matt couldn’t tell whether the phantom had even noticed Bonnie was attacking it.
Veins were bulging out of Damon’s face and neck, and he hung from the phantom’s hand. The flesh of his neck was white around the stretched tendons. Superpowered strong old vampire or not, Damon was hurting. Matt tossed up a prayer in the direction of whatever saint looked after people pursuing hopeless causes, and threw himself back into the fight.
There was blackness. And then there was pain, and the darkness reddened, then cleared, and Damon could see once more.
The phantom—that bitch of a phantom—was holding him by the neck, and her skin was so cold, so cold it burned everywhere it touched him. He couldn’t move.
But he could see Elena standing below him. Beautiful Elena, covered in ash, streaked with blood, her teeth bared and her eyes flashing like a warrior goddess. His heart swelled with love and fear. The brave little redbird and the boy Mutt fought beside her.
Please, he wanted to say. Don’t try to save me. Run. Elena, you have to run.
But he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
Then the phantom shifted her stance and, as Damon watched, Elena stopped her attack and clutched at her stomach, grimacing in pain. Matt and Bonnie were holding themselves as well, their faces pale and strained, their mouths open in screams. With a wail, Bonnie collapsed.
Oh no, Damon thought with a bolt of horror. Not Elena. Not the redbird. Not for me.
Then suddenly, a gusting wind swirled around him, and he was flung from the phantom’s grip. There was a roaring in his ears and a stinging in his eyes. Looking around, he saw Bonnie and Elena, their long hair flying around them wildly; Matt, his arms pinwheeling; and the phantom, its glass-green face for once startled instead of knowing.
Tornado, Damon thought vaguely, and then, Gateway, and he realized he was being thrown upward, back into the darkness once more.
The wind was howling at a deafening pitch now, and Stefan had to raise his voice to a shout to even hear himself over it. He had to keep both hands clamped down on the book—it was being pulled out of his hands as if something alive and very strong were consciously trying to yank it away.
“Mihi adi. Te voco. Necesse est tibi parere,” Stefan said. “Come to me. I summon you. You must obey.”
That was the end of the summoning spell in Latin. The next part was the banishing spell, which would be in English. Of course, the phantom would have to actually be there for that part of the spell to be effective.
The wind whipping through the garage grew even stronger. Outside, thunder rumbled.
Stefan watched the innermost circle, deep in the shadows of the garage, but there was nothing there. The unnatural wind was beginning to let up. Panic rose in his chest. Had they failed? He glanced anxiously at Alaric and Meredith, then at Mrs. Flowers, but none of them were looking at him, staring transfixed at the circle.
Stefan looked back into it, hoping against hope. But there was nothing there.
Wait.
There was the faintest movement of something, right in the center of the circle, the tiniest flash of blue-green light, and along with it came a chill. Not like the cold wind that had spun through the garage, but more like an icy breath—inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale—slow and steady and freezing cold, right from that one spot.
The glimmer widened, deepened, darkened, and suddenly what Stefan was looking at shifted and changed from an amorphous glimmer to a woman. An icy, misty, giant woman tinted in shades of blue and green. Inside her chest was a deep red rose, its stem a solid mass of thorns.
Meredith and Celia let out audible gasps. Mrs. Flowers stared calmly, while Alaric’s jaw had dropped.
This must be the jealousy phantom. Stefan had always thought of jealousy as burning hot. Fiery kisses, fiery anger. But anger, lust, envy, all the things that made up jealousy, could be cold, too, and he had no doubt that they had the right phantom.
Stefan noticed all these things about the phantom and forgot them again in a split second, because it wasn’t just the ice-woman who materialized at the center of the circle.
Confused, weeping, staggering, streaked with ash and mud, three humans had appeared there as well.
His beautiful, elegant Elena, caked in grime, her golden hair tangled and matted, lines of blood running down her face. Delicate little Bonnie, tearstained and pale as milk, but with an expression of fury as she kicked and clawed at the phantom. And all-American, always reliable Matt, dusty and disheveled, turning to peer out at them with a peculiarly blank expression, as if simply wondering what fresh hell he’d landed in now.
And then one more person, a fourth figure wobbling and gasping, the last to shimmer into view. For a moment, Stefan didn’t recognize him—couldn’t recognize him, because this man wasn’t supposed to exist anymore. Instead he just felt like a hauntingly familiar stranger. The stranger put his hands to his throat protectively and looked out of the circle, straight at Stefan. Through a bloody, swollen lip and bruised slits of eyes, the ghost of a brilliant smile appeared, and the gears of Stefan’s mind slotted into place and began to turn again at last.
