Knowing he couldn't perform the ritual on an empty stomach, Stefan hunted down several squirrels in Mrs. Flowers's backyard, then returned to the boardinghouse's garage. Meredith had parked Mrs. Flowers's antique Ford out in the drive, and there was more than enough room to set up everything they needed for the banishment ritual. Stefan cocked his head at a skittering noise in the shadows and identified the fast-beating heart of a little mouse. The atmosphere might not be a comfortable one, but the spaciousness of the room and its cement floor meant it would be an excel ent place to work the spel .
"Hand me the tape measure, please," Alaric said from his sprawled position in the middle of the garage floor. "I need to get this line just the right length." Mrs. Flowers had dug up a box of multicolored chalk from somewhere in the boardinghouse, and Alaric had the book propped open and was careful y copying the circles, arcane symbols, parabolas, and el ipses from its pages onto the smooth cement.
Stefan gave him the tool and watched as he measured careful y from the innermost circle to a row of strange runes near the outermost edge of his drawing. "It's important that everything be precise," Alaric said, frowning and doublechecking the ends of the measuring tape. "The smal est error could lead to us accidental y setting this thing loose in Fel 's Church."
"But isn't it loose already?" asked Stefan.
"No," Alaric explained. "This ritual wil al ow the phantom to appear in its corporeal form, which is far more dangerous than the insubstantial thing it is now."
"Then you'd better get this right," Stefan agreed grimly.
"If this al goes as planned, the phantom wil be trapped in the innermost circle," Alaric said, pointing. "We'l be at the outermost edge, over there past the runes. We ought to be safe out there." He looked up and gave Stefan a rueful grin.
"I hope. I'm afraid I've never done any kind of summoning in real life before, although I've read a lot about it."
Terrific, Stefan thought, but he returned Alaric's smile without comment. The man was doing the best he could. Al they could do was hope it would be enough to save Elena and the others.
Meredith and Mrs. Flowers entered the garage, each carrying a plastic shopping bag. Celia trailed behind them.
"Holy water," Meredith said, lifting a plant mister out of her bag to show him.
"It doesn't work on vampires," Stefan reminded her.
"We're not summoning a vampire," she replied, and went off to mist the outer spaces in the diagram, careful not to disturb the chalk lines.
Alaric stood and started very cautiously hopping out of the huge multicolored diagram, clutching the book in one hand. "I think we're about ready," he said.
Mrs. Flowers looked at Stefan. "We need the others," she said. "Everyone affected by the phantom's powers has to be here."
"I'l help you carry them down," Alaric offered.
"Not necessary," Stefan told him, and headed upstairs alone. Standing by the side of the bed in the little rose-andcream bedroom, he looked down at Elena, Matt, and Bonnie. None of them had moved since he had placed Matt there.
He sighed and gathered Elena in his arms first. After a moment, he also picked up her pil ow and a blanket. At least he could try to make her comfortable.
A few minutes later al three of the sleepers were lying in the front of the garage, wel outside the diagram, their heads supported by pil ows.
"Now what?" Stefan asked.
"Now we each choose a candle," Mrs. Flowers said, opening her plastic bag. "One that you feel represents you in color. According to the book, they real y should be handdipped and special y scented, but this wil just have to do. I won't pick one myself," Mrs. Flowers said, handing the bag to Stefan. "The phantom hasn't focused its powers on me, and I don't remember being jealous of anyone since 1943."
"What happened in 1943?" asked Meredith curiously.
"I lost the Little Miss Fel 's Church crown to Nancy Sue Baker," Mrs. Flowers answered. When Meredith gaped at her, she threw her hands up in the air. "Even I was a child once, you know. I was strikingly adorable, with Shirley Temple curls, and my mother liked to dress me in fril s and show me off."
Putting the astounding image of Mrs. Flowers in Shirley Temple curls out of his mind, Stefan poked through the assortment of candles and chose a dark blue one. It seemed right to him somehow. "We need candles for the others, too," he said. Careful y, he chose a golden one for Elena and a pink one for Bonnie.
"Are you just going by their hair colors?" asked Meredith.
"You're such a guy."
"You know these are the right colors for them, though,"
Stefan argued. "Besides, Bonnie's hair is red, not pink."
Meredith nodded grudgingly. "I guess you're right. White for Matt, though."
"Real y?" Stefan asked. He didn't know what he would have chosen for Matt. American-flag patterned, maybe, if they had had it.
"He's the purest person I know," Meredith said softly. Alaric raised an eyebrow at her and she elbowed him.
"Pure in spirit, I mean. What you see is what you get with Matt, and he's good and truehearted al the way through."
"I suppose so," said Stefan, and he watched without comment as Meredith chose a dark brown candle for herself.
Alaric shuffled through the bag and picked a dark green candle, and Celia selected one of pale lavender. Mrs. Flowers took the bag with the remaining candles and stashed it on a high shelf near the garage doors, between a bag of potting soil and what looked like an old-fashioned kerosene lantern.
They al 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 wel as her own; Stefan took Elena's, and Alaric Matt's.
"Now we anoint them with our blood," Alaric said. They al looked at him, and he shrugged defensively. "It's what the book says."
Meredith removed a smal 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 fol owed her lead.
"This is real y unsanitary," Celia said, wincing, but she fol owed through.
Stefan was very aware of the smel 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 spel . 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 fel 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 fal ing 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 fal ing 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 comical y surprised. "Elena?" he exclaimed.
"Bonnie? Matt? What's going on? Qu'est-ce qui arrive?"
Usual y, 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 cal ing to her.
She strode across the empty room with barely a glance at the startled gatekeeper, pul ing 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! Arretezvous!"
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 hil s and val eys. 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 stil 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, technical y - 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 Fel '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, stil 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 fal ing 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, kneedeep 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 logical y.
"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 ful 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 practical y hear him cal ing me."
Just then a low, musical laugh cut through the silence. It was a beautiful sound, but there was something chil y 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, icytranslucent 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 gradual y 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 al of this in an instant before her attention was ful y riveted on what hung from the ice-woman-thing's outstretched hand.
"Damon." She gasped.
The ice-woman was holding him casual y 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'l do just as wel ." 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, al 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 wel -nourished for mil ennia." 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 real y should have stayed where I put you," the phantom continued, its voice a little colder, and it swung Damon casual y in a great arc through the air. He wheezed and pul ed 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 rol ed back until Elena could see only the ghastly, red-veined whites of his eyes, and he went limp.
