But after an endless time in the soft, kind darkness, something was forcing Elena back up into light. Real light.
Not the terrible green half-light of the Tree. Even through shut eyelids she could see it, feel its heat. A yel ow sun. Where was she? She couldn't remember.
And she didn't care. Something was saying inside her that the gentle darkness was better. But then she remembered a name.
Stefan.
Stefan was...?
Stefan was the one who...the one she loved. But he'd never understood that love was not singular. He'd never understood that she could be in love with Damon and that it would never change an atom's worth of her love for him. Or that his lack of understanding had been so wrenching and painful that she had felt torn into two different people at times.
But now, even before she opened her eyes, she realized that she was drinking. She was drinking the blood of a vampire, and that vampire wasn't Stefan. There was something unique in this blood. It was deeper and spicier and more heavy, al at once.
She couldn't help opening her eyes. For some reason she didn't understand, they flew open and she tried immediately to focus on the scent and feeling and color of whoever was bending over her, holding her.
She couldn't understand, either, her sense of letdown when she slowly realized that it was Sage leaning over her, holding her gently but securely to his neck, with his bronze chest bare and warm from the sunlight.
But she was lying down flat, on grass, from what her hands could feel...and for some reason her head was cold. Very cold.
Cold and wet.
She stopped drinking and tried to sit up. The light grip became firmer. She heard Sage's voice say, and felt the rumbling in his chest as he said it, "Ma pauvre petite, you must drink more in a moment or so. And your hair has Stillsome of the ashes in it."
Ashes? Ashes? Didn't you put ashes on your head for...now what had she been thinking about? It was as if there was a block in her mind, keeping her from getting close to...
something. But she wasn't going to be told what to do.
Elena sat up.
She was in - yes, she was very sure - the kitsune paradise, and until a moment ago her body had been arched back, so that her hair had been in the clear little stream that she had seen earlier. Stefan and Bonnie had been washing something pitch-black out of her hair. They both were smudged with black as well: Stefan had a big swath across one cheekbone, and Bonnie had faint gray streaks below her eyes.
Crying. Bonnie had been crying. She was Stillcrying, in little sobs that she was trying to suppress. And now that Elena looked harder she could see that Stefan's eyelids were swol en and that he had been crying too.
Elena's lips were numb. She fel back onto the grass, looking up at Sage, who was wiping his eyes furtively. Her throat ached, not just inside, where sobbing and gasping might make it hurt, but outside, too. She had a picture of herself slashing at her own neck with a knife.
Through her numb lips, she whispered, "Am I a vampire?"
"Pas encore,"Sage said unsteadily. "Not yet. But Stefan and I, we both had to give you massive amounts of blood. You must be very careful in the next days. You are right on the brink."
That explained how she felt. Probably Damon was hoping that she would become one, wicked boy. Instinctively, she held out her hand to Stefan. Maybe she could help him.
"We just won't do anything for a little while,"she said. "You don't have to be sad."But she herself Stillfelt very wrong. She hadn't felt this wrong since she'd seen Stefan in prison and had thought that he would die at any moment.
No...it was worse...because with Stefan there had been hope and Elena had the feeling that now hope was gone.
Everything was gone. She was hol ow: a girl who looked solid, but whose insides were missing.