The Return Shadow Souls Teaser (LJ Smith).pdf

“Tears”

A Teaser for Vampire Diaries: Shadow Souls

Elena and Damon reached the motel room just after midnight.

“What's wrong?" Elena sat on the bed, swinging up her legs to support her head on a pillow

which sank beneath her unsatisfactorily. She liked her pillows firm.

"Nothing." Damon was at the window, pretending to be engrossed in something beyond the

shrubbery outside.

"What nothing?"

Damon shook his head.

Elena examined the room with the too-bright vision of the seriously sleep-impaired. She must

not have really slept at all last night on her out of body adventure to see Stefan, she

thought. She contemplated beige walls, beige carpet, a beige armchair, a beige desk, and of

course, a beige bedspread. Even Damon couldn’t reject a room on the grounds that it doesn't

match his basic black, she thought, and then: oh, I'm tired. And frightened. And irritable.

And stupid. There's only one bed.

"Damon . . . " With an effort, she rolled over and sat up. "What do you want?” she

said. “There's a chair. I can sleep on the chair."

He half turned, and Elena saw in that movement the extent of his anger. The faster-than-the-

human-eye-could-follow assassin's spin and the complete muscular control that stilled it

almost before it had started. Damon with his sudden movements and his frightening

stillness. He was looking out the window again, body poised as always for . . .

something. Right now it looked poised to jump.

"Vampires don't need sleep," Damon said in a voice icier and more controlled than she'd

heard in a while.

That gave Elena her first clue and the energy to get off the bed. "You know I know that's a

lie."

"Take the bed, Elena." But his voice was the same. She would have expected flat, weary

command. Damon sounded more tense, more shakily-controlled than ever.

More shaken than ever.

Elena’s eyelids sank. "Is this about what happened with the tumbleweeds attacked us and we

had to strip to get the malach off?"

"No."

“Is it about what happened when you were possessed back in Fell’s Church and made to hurt

me?”

“No!”

Aha.

"It is, then. You're afraid, aren't you? You're afraid that Shinichi will get past all your

defenses and possess you again. Why? Have you sensed him or heard from him?"

"Go to sleep."

"What does it take to show you that I trust you? We were just practically naked together

getting those malach off, and I didn’t mind." She was behind him now, on the beige carpet

which smelled like...dust.

Her words were the dust. There was something about them that sounded hollow, wrong. But

they were true. They had been practically naked together, desperately pulling the jelly like

malach off each other, and it hadn’t once occurred to her. . .

Oh. Oh.

But she’d been so busy worrying about herself, she’d never thought about how it must be

affecting him. Especially being so closeand so upsether aura must have been

everywhere. And what could Damon have done about it? Nothing except try not to look at

her, try to block her out. . . Try to be a gentleman . . .

Not exactly his forte.

Elena sighed. She was going to have to get Damon to talk about it . . . somehow. Get him to

deal with it.

Get yourself to deal with it, a voice inside her whispered.

Touching Damon was always a tricky business, with all the risks of setting off murderous

instinct by accident, even when he wasn't possessed. She reached out, very carefully, to put

her fingertips on the elbow of his leather jacket. She spoke as precisely and unemotionally as

she could.

"You also know I have other senses now than the usual five. How many times do I have to

say it, Damon? I know it wasn't you torturing me and Matt last week." Despite herself, Elena

heard a certain pleading in her own voice. "I know that you’ve protected me on this trip when

I was in danger. That meansa lot to me. You may say you don't believe in the human

'sentiment' of forgiveness, but I don't think you've forgotten it. And when you know that there

is nothing to forgive in the first place"

"This has nothing to do with that!"

The change in his voicethe force in ithit her like a whiplash. It hurt . . . and

bewildered. He was serious. He was also under some dreadful strain, not completely unlike

that of fighting the possessor, but different.

"Damon . . . "

"Leave me alone!"

Now, where have I heard that before? Befuddled, her heart pounding, Elena groped through

memories.

Oh, yes. Stefan. Stefan when they first met, when he was afraid to love her. When he was

sure he would damn her if he showed he was in love with her.

Could Damon be that much like the brother he always mocked?

"At least turn around and talk with me face to face," Elena said.

"Elena." It was a whisper, but it sounded as if Damon couldn't summon up his usual silky

menace. "Go to bed. Go to hell. Go anywhere, but stay away from me."

"You're so good at that, aren't you?" Her own voice was cold, now. Recklessly, angrily, she

moved in even closer. "At pushing people away. But I know that you've fed this

morning. There's nothing you want from me, and you can't do the starving-martyr bit half as

well as Stefan”

She had spoken the words guaranteed to incite a response of some kind, but Damon's usual

response to this sort of thing was to lounge against something and pretend to be completely

indifferent or mockingly seductive.

What happened instead was completely outside her range of her experience.

Damon whirled, caught her precisely, held her locked in an unbreakable grip. Then, with a

swoop of his head like a falcon on a mouse, he kissed her.

The kiss was hard and long and when he released her, Elena could taste salt. Tears were

flowing freely down her cheeks.

t didn’t seem to make any difference to her attacker who seemed at the mercy of raw

desperation. He was shaking like a little boy the first time he kissed his first love. That's

what's driving the control away, Elena thought fuzzily.

Her knees were going to give. . . .

Elena pushed and twisted, hurting herself deliberately against the apparently unbreakable grip

that held her.

It broke immediately.

The possessor? Shinichi again, sneaking into Damon’s mind and making him do things?

But somehow Elena knew this wasn’t the case. No. Instead she thought . . .

. . . she thought she had just met the real Damon, the one who lived behind the shell of

indifference.

And she was trembling so hard she wasn’t sure she could stand up.

She and Damon were left staring at each other, both breathing hard. Damon's sleek hair was

mussed, making him look rakish as a buccaneer. His face, always so pale and self-composed,

was flushed with blood. His eyes dropped to watch Elena automatically massaging her

wrists. She could feel pins and needles now: she was getting back some circulation. Once

he'd looked away, he couldn't seem to look her in the eye again.

“I hurt you . . . again,” Damon said.

“A little. Yes.”

Eye contact. All right. Elena recognized a weapon, groping for a chair and finding the bed

unexpectedly close behind her. She didn't have many weapons right now; and she needed all

of them. She gave in to the weakness in her legs, but she kept her eyes on Damon's

face. His mouth was swollen. And that was . . . unfair. Damon's pout was a part of his most

basic artillery. He had always had the most beautiful mouth she'd ever seen on anyone, man

or woman. The mouth, the hair, the half-drooping lids, the heavy lashes, the delicacy of

jawline . . . unfair, even to someone like Elena who'd long ago gotten past interest in a person

because of some accident of beauty.

But she'd never seen that mouth swollen, the perfect hair disordered, the eyelashes trembling

because he was looking everywhere except at her and trying not to show it.

"Was that . . . what you've been thinking about while you've been refusing to talk to me?" she

asked, and her voice was almost steady.

Damon's sudden stillness was perfection like all his other perfections. He stared at a spot in

the beige carpet that by rights ought to have broken into flames.

Then, finally, he lifted those huge dark eyes to hers. It was so hard to tell anything about

Damon's eyes because the iris was almost the same color as the pupil, but Elena had a feeling

that they were dilated now so far as to be almost all pupil. How could eyes that dark trap and

hold light? She seemed to see in them a universe of stars.

A universe of possibilities.

Damon said, softly, "Run."

Elena felt her legs tense. "The possessor?"

"No,” Damon said flatly “You should run now."

Elena felt her thigh muscles relax slightly and was grateful not to have to try to prove that she

could runor even crawlat this exact instant. But her fist clenched.

"You mean this is just you being a jerk?” she said. “Have you decided to hate me again? Did

you enjoy?"

Damon whirled again, stillness into motion faster than her eyes could track it. He hit the

frame of the window, once, pulling the punch almost completely at the last instant. The

shatterproof glass showered like diamonds against the darkness outside.

"That might . . . bring some people to help you." He was breathing hard now, and Elena saw

to her astonishment something she had never expected to see again.

Tears in Damon’s eyes.

She’d thought that only under the influence of her Powers to strip away the stony shell

around Damon’s heart could make him cry. But those were real teardrops trembling on

Damon’s eyelashes, and he didn’t even move when one trickled down the side of his face.

“Damon,” she said, reaching out to him, but he just shook his head.

Now that he had done all he could do to try to protect her, he didn't seem to care about

keeping up appearances. Fine tremors ran through his body. Another tear ran down his

cheek.

"Damon, the windowthis late, this far away from the main hotelwell I doubt that

anybody will come to help me." Elena's body was catching up with the adrenaline-spurt that

had allowed her to fight her way out of Damon's grip.

But that iron grip had broken, hadn’t it, when Elena had deliberately started to hurt

herself on it?

And now it seemed they were back to square one, with Damon staring into the night

and her staring at his back. Or, at least, that was where Damon wanted them to be. But she

could see that his shoulders shaking.

"You could have just asked for a kiss," Elena whispered. She didn't know if this was

possible for a vampire to understand. She still hadn't taught Stefan. Stefan went without

because he didn’t understand about asking. In all innocence and good intentions, Stefan left

things until she was forced to ask him.

Damon was laughing silently, which meant that he was truly stricken. He put his

hands to his face.

"I'll take that as an apology," Elena said softly.

Now Damon was laughing out loud, and Elena felt a chill. Here she was, trying to help

him, and-

"Do you think," he broke into her thoughts, "that that was all I wanted?"

Elena felt herself freeze as she thought this over. Damon could easily have taken her

blood while he held her immobile. Butof coursethat wasn’t all he wanted from her. Her

aura . . . she knew what it did to vampires. Damon had been protecting her all along from

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