vampire diaries the return midnight | Page 9

them, was petite Bonnie McCullough, a bottle of Black Magic wine, nonalcoholic but mystically exhilarating, held high in her hand. But as Elena watched, Bonnie�s expression changed all in an instant. It had been triumphant joy. But now it was shock. It was disbelief that couldn�t hold. Elena knew exactly what she was thinking. The whole house had devoted itself to making Damon comfortable�while Damon stole what rightfully belonged to Stefan: Elena. Plus he�d lied about not being a vampire anymore. And Elena wasn�t even fighting him off. She was calling him �darling�!

Bonnie dropped the bottle and turned, running.


3


Damon leaped. Somewhere in the middle of the leap Elena felt herself left to the
whims of gravity. She tried to curl into a ball to take the impact on one buttock.
What happened was strange�almost miraculous. She came down, right side up,
on the opposite side of the couch from the plate of steak tartar. The plate did a little
leap of its own, three or four inches, perhaps, and then settled back where it had
been.

Elena was also lucky enough to get a perfect view of the end of the heroic rescue�which involved Damon diving for the floor and grabbing the bottle of precious Black Magic wine just before it hit the ground and smashed. He might not have the kind of lightning-fast reflexes he had when he was a vampire, but he was still far, far faster than an ordinary human. Leap holding girl, drop girl onto something soft, turn leap into dive, and at last instant grab bottle, just before it would hit. Amazing.

But there was another way that Damon wasn�t like a vampire anymore�he wasn�t invincible to falling onto hard surfaces. Elena only realized this when she heard him gasp, trying to breathe and not being able to.

She scrambled wildly in her mind for all the accidents she could remember with jocks, and�yes, recalled one when Matt had had the wind completely knocked out of him. The coach had seized him by the collar and thumped him on the back.

Elena ran to Damon and grabbed him under the arms, rolling him onto his back. She put all her strength into hauling him into a sitting position. Then she made a club of her hands. Pretending she was Meredith, who had been on the baseball team at Robert E. Lee High and had a .225 ERA, she swung as hard as she could at Damon, slamming her fists into his back.

And it worked!

Suddenly Damon was wheezing, and then breathing again. A born straightener of ties, Elena knelt and tried to rearrange his clothes. As soon as he could breathe properly, his limbs stopped being pliant under her fingers. He gently curled her hands into each other. Elena wondered if possibly they�d gone so far beyond words that they would never find them again.

How had it all happened? Damon had picked her up�perhaps because her leg was burned, or perhaps because he had decided Mrs. Flowers was the one with the star ball. She herself had said, �Damon, what are you doing?� Perfectly straightforward. And then halfway through the sentence she had heard for herself the �darling� and�but who would ever believe her?�it hadn�t been connected with anything they had been doing earlier at all. It had been an accident, a slip of the tongue.

But she�d said it in front of Bonnie, the one person most likely to take it seriously and personally. And then Bonnie had been gone before she could even explain.

Darling! When they had just started fighting again.

It really was a joke. Because he had been serious about just taking the star ball. She had seen it in his eyes.

To call Damon �darling� seriously, you would have to be�have to be�
hopelessly�helplessly�desperately in�

Oh, God�

Tears began to run down Elena�s cheeks. But these were tears of revelation. Elena knew she wasn�t in her best form today. No real sleep for going on three days�too many conflicting emotions�too much genuine terror right now.
Still, she was terrified to find that something fundamental had changed inside her. It wasn�t anything she had asked for. All she had asked was that the two brothers
stop feuding. And she had been born to love Stefan; she knew that! Once, he�d been willing to marry her. Well, since then she�d been a vampire, a spirit, and a new
incarnation dropped from the sky, and she could hope that one day he would be
willing to marry the new Elena, too.

But the new Elena was bewildered, what with her strange new blood that to vampires was like rocket fuel compared to the gasoline most girls carried about in their veins. With her Wings Powers, such as Wings of Redemption, most of