The War of Roses Page 5

  When Bonnie saw the full extent of the map, she dropped her end with a squeak. Elena held it partially unrolled, but she could tell that her own eyes were wide.

  There seemed to be more ink than white space on the scroll. Mrs. Flowers had seemingly drawn in microscopic detail the entirety of the Dark Dimension: no labels on anything, but thousands of tiny polygons that might be buildings, and hundreds of sinuous lines that might be roads. There was even a river, crossed by dozens of different bridges.

  “But how—even if you’ve been drawing since last night—how did you manage to get this finished? Bonnie, it won’t bite you; hold out the other side of it,” Elena added, so that she could admire the masterpiece all at once.

  “Of course I wasn’t conscious while I did it,” Mrs. Flowers said matter-of-factly. “Dear Grandmama took over my mind and I wasn’t aware of doing anything until the entire process was over. Rather like automatic writing, you see.” Mrs. Flowers coughed delicately. “I . . . er, was just a little alarmed at how familiar Grandmama seemed to be with the place. I hope she herself is not a resident.”

  “We met some very nice people there,” Elena said truthfully. “And here! This is Lady Ulma’s house. I’m sure of it. Do you see, Bonnie?”

  “Ye-es, if you say so,” Bonnie agreed doubtfully. “But . . . well, what am I supposed to do with it, exactly?”

  Mrs. Flowers explained and Bonnie’s brown eyes got bigger and bigger. She was desperate enough, though, Elena knew, to be willing to try anything.

  After they had put four heavy weights at the corners of the map to hold it open, Bonnie solemnly took the translucent white quartz crystal on a thin gold necklace chain that Mrs. Flowers gave her. She held the necklace by the chain over the center of the map, and the crystal swung slightly from the motion of her shaking fingers.

  “When you hold it over the right spot, it should make a circle,” Mrs. Flowers explained.

  While Elena watched through narrow eyes, Bonnie made the attempt. She started at the top left of the map, and, keeping the crystal about an inch above the map, she moved slowly all the way to the top right. Then, as if she were mowing a lawn, she moved her hand down a bit and covered the area from the extreme right of the map to the far left. Back and forth she went, although twice she was forced to rest her arm, the trembling of which had caused the crystal pendulum to shimmy.

  But nowhere on the entire sheet of vellum did the quartz make anything like a circle.

  “It’s no good,” she said at last, tears spilling over her cheeks. “The crystal doesn’t react anywhere. I don’t sense anything, either.”

  Elena felt as tired as she knew that Bonnie was. Her nerves were stretched like harpsichord strings about to snap.

  “Why? Why doesn’t it work?” she wondered aloud. “Unless”—blinking away tears of her own—“he’s been reincarnated already like you said, Mrs. Flowers.” She couldn’t bring herself to say “or he’s just disappeared,” but the words were in her mind.

  I’m not there! I’m still here, Damon thought helplessly, knowing that she couldn’t hear him, that not even Bonnie could hear him through the barrier of worlds. I’m exactly where you left me!

  “If,” Mrs. Flowers said thoughtfully, “he has already been reincarnated to some woman on earth, then we would need a globe.”

  “To some woman?” Elena and Bonnie said almost in unison.

  “Some pregnant woman,” Mrs. Flowers continued mildly. “That is how reincarnation works, I believe.”

  Elena looked sideways at Bonnie, but Bonnie was just staring at Mrs. Flowers with brown eyes that seemed enormous in her small heart-shaped face.

  Damon-as-a-baby-born-to-some-stranger didn’t sound right to Elena. It would be eighteen years and some odd months before they could even approach him. And would he be a vampire? How could he be, in a new life? He wouldn’t remember Elena or Bonnie or Stefan.

  It didn’t sound like a very good proposition. But . . .

  “Stefan has a globe in his room,” Elena said. “I’ll get it.”

  Forget the globe! Damon thought at her fiercely. I’m not in some woman’s womb! I’m here, buried under the ash! I’m exactly where you left me!

  Elena slowly climbed the rickety staircase to Stefan’s room. It was a familiar route and she would normally have no hesitation about entering his room unasked. It had been their room for so long; for all the time that she had to hide from the people of Fell’s Church because they thought she was dead.

  Still, she paused a moment and then knocked before opening the door. Stefan had other ways of entering his room than via Mrs. Flowers’s front door. If he had enough Power he could fly on the wings of a falcon through the window.

  She got no answer, and she walked inside. The bed was neatly made and had an air of not being slept on at all last night.

  Suddenly Elena wished that Stefan wasn’t the type of boyfriend to give her space. She wished that he was here with her. Come to think of it, if they were all grieving for the same person, why shouldn’t he be with her? Why had he run away instead of staying to support her?

  Elena tried to think of an answer as she brought the heavy globe down. It was heavy because its surface was made of semiprecious jewels. The dark blue of the deep oceans was lapis lazuli. The continents were malachite and citrine, abalone, black opal, agate, jade, garnet, peridot, amethyst and carnelian. The shallows were blue topaz.

  “How beautiful, my dear,” Mrs. Flowers said, beholding it.

  “Those lovely stones won’t interfere with Bonnie’s dowsing at all. They may even enhance it.”

  “Good,” Elena said.

  Bonnie took a deep breath, with her eyes shut, clearly trying to compose herself for a second trial.

  “Can you turn the globe so that different parts of it face upwards—so they’re at the top, I mean?” she asked when she opened her eyes.

  The globe, fortunately, was one that allowed this, and Elena, out of wishful thinking undoubtedly, put the United States exactly at the top of the sphere.

  And then Bonnie began to work.

  She started with the United States, being careful with the quartz pendulum, holding it exactly one inch above whichever state was directly under the trembling crystal. Soon a sheen of perspiration formed on her brow, and several little strawberry curls stuck to her forehead.

  Elena tried to be patient, waiting for Bonnie to finish—to be certain that she’d finished—with an area before moving the sphere a tiny fraction of an inch so that another state appeared below the pendulum.

  Soon Elena was sweating, too. Eventually she wanted to scream. This was madness. They were sure to make a mistake, to miss some area. The world was just too big, and the globe was too small.

  “Do you know, my dear, I believe I must have an old school geography book somewhere,” Mrs. Flowers said at last, just when Elena had sunk her teeth into her lower lip to keep an impatient shriek from exploding from her throat.

  “Really? But—well, won’t it be a bit dated?” she asked, trying not to sound too eager to get up and stretch and use her legs and arms to some purpose.

  “Yes, it will,” Mrs. Flowers replied composedly. “But it will be better than this globe. Why don’t you look in the storage room, and if it’s not there you might try the second floor bedroom closets. I don’t believe I ever gave it away, and I know I didn’t throw it away.”

  “I’ll go and look for it,” Elena said. Then, as Bonnie glanced up and managed a tiny, preoccupied smile, she added: “Um—if it’s really okay. Is it okay?”

  “It’s fine, if Mrs. Flowers doesn’t mind moving the globe for me,” Bonnie said valiantly.

  “Not at all, dear, not at all.” Mrs. Flowers touched the great multicolored sphere very gently, moving it an infinitesimal amount to the right.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Call me if you find anything!” Elena had to shout as she hurried into the front hallway. “Don’t forget to try Italy—especially Florence. Maybe sometimes
lightning strikes twice!”

  What Elena found in the storage room was . . . everything. Lamps, rugs, mirrors, baskets, candles, preserves, trays, empty boxes, full boxes, lawn furniture, throw pillows, old VHS tapes, a tangled forest of Christmas lights, dolls in costumes from around the world, vases of every shape and size, scarves, umbrellas, bells, coats, music boxes, silk flower arrangements, frying pans of assorted sizes, stationery, shoes—usually singletons rather than pairs—pewter goblets, doorstops, pieces of slate roofing, real cameos, outrageous costume jewelry, a feather boa, a container of assorted tools, a broken ceiling fan, frames for paintings (some with paintings in them; some without), a file cabinet full of very old papers, a first aid kit, a wedding dress carefully folded away in a square package that smelled of lavender and mothballs, a large statue of a rearing horse, and a small bust of Alexander the Great. There was more—a lot more, and all of it dusty and cobwebby—but Elena’s brain refused to catalogue it.

  There were also many books, some hardbacks with no jackets and very dusty spines of the shape and size that meant they might be an old school geography text. But although Elena rubbed and blew away the dust on each candidate, no geography manifested itself.

  At last, covered in dust, with scratches on her arms and one ankle, she got up and walked like a very old woman until she was outside the storage room. Then she could stretch her arms and legs and roll her head on her neck to relax it.

  The August sun was hot on her face as she exhaled, knowing that sweat was running down the back of her neck and had collected in between her breasts, darkening her camisole and T-shirt.

  She was glad that Damon wasn’t around to see her right this moment. No, she couldn’t be glad he was gone, but she could just imagine his expression . . . she surprised herself by bursting into laughter at the same time as tears welled up in her eyes. She fought hard to blink the tears away and make them go back to where they’d come from, but they trickled out and slid down her dusty cheeks. There was no point in smearing her face by trying to wipe them away with equally dusty hands.

  Elena’s cellphone was silent in her cutoff jeans’ pocket. Bonnie hadn’t called. She hadn’t located . . . anything. Elena sighed, and then, forcing herself to concentrate, she deliberately took up an aikido stance that Meredith had taught her. She imagined an opponent coming toward her, reaching for her, and she seized its hand, twisting so that the phantom’s forearm turned the wrong way against its elbow. Then, with a sudden, vicious pressure, she did what Meredith had expressly told her never to do, and snapped both the radius and the ulna of her invisible attacker’s arm, tearing muscles and tendons. She finished by giving a savage kick with her right knee to the groin, a move that Meredith had not taught her, but was purely Elena’s invention.

  Then she sagged. In her mind’s eye she could see Meredith sadly shaking her head over her student’s lack of restraint. The tall, dark-haired girl who’d been born a hunter-slayer of vampires, werewolves and other evil supernatural creatures had learned that discipline was everything. But right at this moment Elena felt no self-control at all.

  Even as she thought this, Elena’s head jerked up. A footfall had sounded quite near her. For an instant she stared blindly and then she made a soft noise of pure longing. Stefan had just stepped out of the shadow of a clump of cherry trees and was standing in the sunlight.

  She ran to him as if she hadn’t seen him in weeks. When he saw how she was moving he hurried to meet her. They came together and each clutched fiercely at the other. Elena was crying quietly and after a moment she realized that Stefan was, too.

  “Bonnie can’t find him,” Elena said. “She’s been dousing everywhere with a quartz crystal. But he’s not in the Dark Dimension . . . and I can’t even find Mrs. Flowers’s old school geography book so that we can see if he’s been reincarnated on Earth!”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing? Looking for a school book? I thought maybe you’d been coalmining.” Stefan first dashed his own tears away and then, very gently, used his thumbs to wipe away hers.

  This small kindness almost undid Elena. She squeezed Stefan as hard as she could. This was his cue to squeeze her back, not with any significant proportion of his true strength, but much harder than he would normally do.

  Elena felt better for being tightly held. Strange, but she had never wondered at all about Stefan’s expression should he see her looking as if she’d “gone coalmining.” She knew that he saw beneath the dust and beneath her fair skin as well. He saw her heart, and that was the end of his searching.

  Just now he was rubbing his chin against the top of her head in a very comforting way. Elena’s last tears fell when she blinked and she was able to keep back any new ones. The coolness of Stefan’s body permeated hers even as the sun beat down on both of them, and his touch soothed all her knotted muscles and relaxed her aching joints. The only pain that was left was in her heart.

  “I . . . miss him,” Elena confided abruptly, without having planned to speak at all.

  “So do I.”—very softly, but with a deep component, because he was speaking with his jaw against her scalp, and she could hear him through bone conduction. He kissed her hair, so lightly that she could barely feel it.

  Elena felt that there was nothing more to be said. They understood one another. They both ached to see Damon, and Stefan was not going to allow anything as petty as jealousy to break the deep and lasting communion that she and he shared.

  “You know,” he said after a few minutes, speaking as calmly as before, “I have a globe in my bedroom, and—”

  Elena didn’t even try to keep the words back. “I already got it,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to bother you by calling you, and I knew you wouldn’t mind. But it’s no good; a globe isn’t. It’s too small. If Bonnie had found anything, she’d have called me. That’s why I was looking for Mrs. Flowers’s old geography book.”

  Stefan kissed her hair again. “I was going to say, ‘and there’s an outdated world atlas under my bed.’ It won’t be accurate about some countries’ names, but it’s better than that heavy, just-for-decoration globe or even an ancient geography book.”

  “An atlas? You’re kidding!” Elena squeezed Stefan even more tightly and was hugged breathless in return. “Stefan, that’s fantastic! Let’s go get it before Bonnie exhausts herself completely using the globe.”

  “Yes, let’s go.” But Stefan still hugged her hard and Elena made no move to release him from her arms.

  Instead, she tipped her face up, cautiously, so as not to knock into his jaw and make him bite his tongue. Stefan tipped his face down. And then the outside world was swept away entirely and for Elena there was only joy and the sensation of floating in a cool sunrise, with myriad pastel colors all around her.

  At last, reluctantly, Elena released Stefan and felt his grip ease. She took his hand and pressed it once firmly. Then they hurried back to the front door of the boardinghouse.

  In the kitchen, Bonnie was leaning back in her chair with her eyes shut, drinking iced tea with a chunk of lemon in it from a tall glass. She opened her eyes just as Elena approached and sputtered, spraying Stefan’s globe and Mrs. Flowers’s tablecloth with tea, narrowly missing Mrs. Flowers herself.

  “Oh, my God, Elena! You look—”

  “I know. I’m going to wash in the sink. I didn’t find the geography book in the storage room, but Stefan has an old world atlas for us.”

  “Oh.” Bonnie stopped hiccupping and sniffled, clearly trying to look refreshed and ready to get back to work. “Well, good,” she finished staunchly. “Because this globe is just impossible to work with. The only place where the pendulum even reacted was in the Pacific Ocean, and then it just swung back and forth.”

  “Which means exactly nothing,” Mrs. Flowers said, looking genteelly distressed. “Dear Stefan, I’m so glad you have an atlas. That will make the dousing much easier on Bonnie. I’m afraid that it’s difficult to maintain absolute spiritual concentration
for so long a time.”

  “Oh, I can do it,” Bonnie said, managing a shaky smile. Her eyes met Elena’s and Elena realized that Bonnie would kill herself trying rather than stop while getting negative results.

  “Stefan, will you run up and get the atlas?” she asked as unemotionally as possible. “I’m going to look at Mrs. Flowers’s encyclopedia set, if that’s all right with her.”

  “Of course it’s all right, my dear. But what will you be looking for?”

  “Oh—well, I thought I might as well see if there’s a picture of Dante’s nine circles of Hell,” Elena said, still without expression. “I mean, we’re looking everywhere else for Damon. And there are other worlds down there, aren’t there? I mean the Nether World is below the Dark Dimension, and there are still more worlds beneath it, right?”

  “Ye-es,” Stefan replied slowly. “Sage’s father is at the very bottom, I think. I don’t have any idea how the worlds above it are ordered, and I doubt that it’s much like Dante’s Inferno described, but the pendulum might take our intentions into account and react.”

  “Good,” Elena said briskly, although she could see that both Bonnie and Stefan were horrified at the idea that Damon might be in some deep hell undergoing the tortures of the damned. She was as determined as Bonnie to find Damon, wherever he was, and that included marching into hell if necessary.

  Once she’d had a chance to wash and drink some lemony iced tea, she thumbed through the musty volumes of Mrs. Flowers’s antique Encyclopædia Britannica until she found a suitable painting done by Hieronymus Bosch, who had been born around the year 1450.

  “Might as well get it over with before you start on the Earth,” she said to Bonnie, putting the heavy book on the table as Stefan returned with his old atlas.

  Bonnie gulped but picked up the piece of quartz by its golden chain. Her small hand shook so badly at first that the crystal bobbed and swung in all different directions.

  Elena held the page open and stable for her. Mrs. Flowers and Stefan murmured encouragement now and then and eventually Bonnie calmed enough to move the quartz pendulum steadily across each of the nine rows.