Archive of Our Own

Elena was vaguely aware of being awake, of sunlight streaming in and disturbing her slumber. For a moment she was frustrated at the thought that she would soon have to get up and go to school; then she realized that no, she wouldn’t—and everything from the last few weeks crashed down on her, making her eyes pop open with a gasp.

She was in a small room she didn’t recognize. She was tucked into bed in the last clothes she’d worn, the clothes she’d been wearing for days now, with her shoes neatly set just under the frame. A window on either side of the bed let in the sunlight, and she saw three doors, a table and chair, and a dresser. And that was it. She didn’t get the impression this was another cheap motel, though—at least, not unless it had some sort of weird medieval theme. The walls and floor appeared to be stone, cool to the touch when she sat up and put her bare feet on them.

The latest images in her brain were fragmented, distorted. The canals in Venice. Running wildly through the narrow streets, across the ancient bridges, gondoliers yelling at them in Italian for trying to make off with their boats. Didn’t they see they were desperate? Didn’t they see the dark figures pursuing them, watching their every move, dogging their heels relentlessly? They had to get away, had to be safe. The very last thing she remembered was falling painfully on the street as Jeremy leapt onto a passing streetcar, yelling at him to keep going, to not come back for her. He would only be caught if he did.

Elena looked at the heels of her hands; they showed faint scrape marks. Her knees and elbows felt sore when she probed them—evidence of her fall—but nothing seemed broken. The next most important question, of course, was—where was she?

Elena peered out one window and was surprised to find herself overlooking the countryside, not the bustling city. There was a lush green lawn below—far below, she must have been up at least five or six stories—edged by a thick forest, then patchy meadows and trees as far as she could see. Small cabins occasionally dotted the landscape but no towns or even roads. It was beautiful, idyllic, and yet somehow—unnatural.

Elena pulled her shoes on and tried the first door. It opened onto a small closet, where a few colorful hoodies hung, alongside her two jackets and her backpack on the floor. Curious, she opened the drawers of the dresser nearby, finding a mixture of clothes she’d brought with her—all laundered—and new ones that appeared to be her size: t-shirts, pajama pants, socks, underwear. Generic, but serviceable. When she left she intended to carry off as much of it as possible.

But leaving might not be so easy. The next door, the one directly across from the foot of the bed, was locked from the other side. The third door led to a small, pristine bathroom, but by then Elena wasn’t in a mood to appreciate it. The windows didn’t seem to have a mechanism for opening at all, and no matter how she twisted herself and bonked her forehead on the glass, she couldn’t see a ledge or ladder outside of them anyway.

There was only one conclusion. She was a prisoner here. She’d been caught, despite her desperate flight. She hoped Jeremy had gotten away at least.

Before she could sink too far into despair, however, she heard a noise at the locked door. Without thinking she dropped to the floor and rolled underneath the bed—perhaps an obvious place to look, but she didn’t have many options.

The door opened inwardly, with a creak, and she saw a pair of motorcycle boots under dark jeans just outside the doorway. There was a pause, then the figure crouched down and peered under the bed, staring straight at Elena. Her heart stopped as brilliant blue eyes pierced right through her. She knew those eyes. They were the ones she’d glimpsed behind her constantly—a train station in Berlin, an alley in Brussels, the airport in Cadiz.

“Well hello there,” he began, with forced cheer. “Elena? Why don’t you come out from under there?”

If that was what he wanted, she had no intention of doing it. “Where’s my brother?” she demanded, hoping her voice sounded less shaky than it felt.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” the man claimed. “You really won’t come out? Okay.” With some effort he lay down on the floor on his stomach—still just outside the room—so he could look at her more easily. There was a long, silent moment as he simply stared at her, his gaze assessing, intense. He really wasn’t that much older than she was and in other circumstances she might’ve called him handsome. She squirmed uncomfortably. “So, I don’t know where your brother is,” he finally said. “Do you know? I need to find him.”

Elena assumed he was telling the truth—she didn’t see any sense in him lying, if Jeremy was really next door. But then again she didn’t have the mind of a psycho who chased teenagers across two continents. “No,” she told him. He gave her a look. “We got separated,” she added, a bit defensively.

“But I’m sure you could tell me where you were going,” he pressed, the friendly veneer starting to wear thin. “Where were you headed?”

“We hadn’t decided,” Elena claimed. “We were just—running.”

She could tell he was getting tired of her unhelpful answers, but she had no intention of assisting him in finding Jeremy. He narrowed his eyes at her impatiently and she glared right back. Suddenly his expression changed. “You look so much like your mother,” he remarked unexpectedly.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Where am I? What do you want?”

“It’s really kind of tiresome when no one explains anything,” he said cryptically, with a put-upon sigh. “But perhaps your mother meant to, when you were older,” he added thoughtfully.

“Stop talking about my mother!” Elena snapped, then immediately regretted it. She didn’t need to let him know what her sore points were.

“But I knew your mother,” he persisted, “when she was a little girl. She was my daughter.”

If Elena had any doubts about his mental state before, she had none anymore. “That’s impossible,” she challenged anyway. “You can’t be my grandfather.”

“I’m also your uncle,” he claimed easily. “My name’s Damon Salvatore. Ah, I see that rings a bell.” She’d seen that name before, on some documents of her mother’s after she’d died. And her father’s name was—“Stefan Salvatore is my brother,” he added, studying her reaction carefully.

“That doesn’t many any sense,” she whispered fiercely.

“I suppose it doesn’t,” he allowed. “I could explain to you about magical beings and ancient destinies and all that, but then you’d think I’m even crazier than you already do.” He gave a lop-sided grin.

“That’s impossible,” she repeated, this time with a hint of sass that made his grin widen.

“You’re in my home,” he explained, going back to an earlier question. “Where that is, exactly, is hard to explain. Did you look in the closet?”

She blinked at his abrupt question. “What?”

“That’s a closet over there,” he pointed out, nodding towards the door she’d opened earlier. “Open it, take a look inside.” She hesitated, not wanting to move from under the bed, and he sighed. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered, getting back on his feet. Elena tensed, ready to run—somewhere. “Come out from under there. Look, I can’t enter the room, you’re perfectly safe.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?” Elena questioned suspiciously, watching his feet.

“I can’t,” he repeated unhelpfully. She saw his feet attempt to cross the threshold—they stopped as though there was some kind of invisible barrier preventing them. “See? So you’re fine. Come out, I want you to see some magic.”

Oh, like she was going to leave the relative safety of under the bed on the word of a crazy man who wanted to ‘show her some magic.’ “No,” she told him defiantly.

“Stubborn,” he judged. “Your grandmother was stubborn, too.” Elena felt he was not helping his case. “Fine. I’m leaving. Marga will bring you some food.”

Elena watched the boots turn and walk away—there appeared to be a small foyer beyond the door, then a staircase that curved around a corner. He’d left the door open—was it some kind of trap? Well, he already had her trapped, and it surely wouldn’t have been that hard to yank her from under the bed if he’d wanted. Perhaps there wasn’t any place to go if she did run. Or perhaps he thought she was too timid to try.

That thought emboldened her and she scooted out from under the bed, warily checking to make sure he hadn’t snuck into the room somehow. She edged towards the door, peering out in both directions—yes, just an empty, short hallway, more like the landing at the top of some stairs really. She saw no one else, no security cameras—but also no other exit than the stairs down, which he must’ve taken. She decided she would have to risk it—he could hardly expect any less from her.

Elena took a breath and started to step outside the room. Her foot hit something, though, and she looked down but saw nothing. She tried again and this time more of her body ran into—something. Tentatively, she put her hands up in the empty air and felt—a barrier of some kind. It was like trying to walk through a sliding glass door one hadn’t noticed—but no matter what angle she tried, she saw nothing—no shine, no smudge, no fingerprints, no condensation when she breathed on it.

Carefully Elena felt all the edges of the doorway—the barrier extended across it completely, no holes or gaps. Experimentally she pressed harder, leaning against it—if it were to suddenly disappear she’d collapse to the ground. But it didn’t. Frustrated, she pushed harder, kicking, pounding her fists on it. It didn’t give like glass—it was more like beating on unyielding stone—but it did produce a dull thump.

A shadow moved on the staircase wall and she jumped back around the corner, out of sight. “Trying the barrier, are you?” It was him again. “You’ve come out from under the bed, I guess—oh, there you are.” He had to stand at an awkward angle to see her.

Taking a risk, Elena pushed away from the wall and stood fully in front of the open doorway. “You can’t get in?” she questioned.

He reached out and knocked on the barrier, producing the thump. “Nope. And you can’t get out. Bummer, huh?”

“That’s—“

“Ridiculous? Impossible?” he scoffed. “You’ve had an awful lot of adventures lately. Surely you’re not expecting things to be normal now.”

She didn’t want to concede his point. “What do you want from me?” she asked again. It was the one question he hadn’t attempted to answer yet.

“First, I’d like you to look in the closet,” he responded, frustratingly.

“Fine.” Elena walked over to the closet door and opened it. It looked the same as when she’d seen it before. Glancing back to make sure his view of her was limited, she reached into the closet, making sure there wasn’t a barrier across that threshold. There wasn’t. “It’s a closet,” she reported, unimpressed with his magic trick.

“Now shut the door, and open it again,” he instructed.

Sighing, Elena shut the door. Could be worse, she supposed. She opened the door again and saw—a huge walk-in closet bigger than her bathroom, with three walls with racks for hanging clothes and a center island with drawers and a bench. The small collection of hoodies and jackets hung rather pathetically in the large space.

“Nice, huh?” Damon called while Elena gaped.

She stepped into the closet and touched the far wall, opened some of the drawers, just to make sure it was real. Then she walked back into the bedroom, mind racing about how it could, somehow, be just a trick. She shut the closet door and opened it again almost instantly—and saw the plain, small closet had returned. She was disappointed by this for a second and chided herself for being so shallow.

“You can have lots of nice things here, Elena,” Damon tempted. “You can have lots of room, lots of things to do. You could be very happy here.”

She didn’t like how long-term that sounded. “And you just want to know where my brother is?” she asked in confusion.

He leaned casually in the doorway, his hands in his pockets. “No, I want a couple other things as well,” he admitted. “But they’re not really good to hear on an empty stomach.” He turned and called over his shoulder. “Marga! Where are you, you fossil? She’s going to starve to death! You’re hungry, aren’t you?” he asked, turning back to Elena.

She hadn’t noticed it before, but now that he’d mentioned it, she felt her stomach gnawing at her. “Not really,” she said defiantly.

He saw through that immediately and smirked—an expression that she deeply wished to smack off his face. He was holding all the cards here—all the answers, all the power, though apparently not enough to enter the room with her, or so he claimed. And all she knew was that her life had been turned upside-down—again—in the last few weeks, and she was tired of being scared and confused all the time. And just plain tired.

“Hey, don’t cry,” Damon admonished as she sat down on the bed, a genuine note of concern in his voice.

“I’m not crying,” Elena snapped. She might’ve started, though, if a faint rattling noise hadn’t caught her attention.

Damon heard it too and rolled his eyes. “Well finally.” He stepped aside as an elderly woman came trudging up the steps, carrying a tray. She was small and hunchbacked, and her face was as wrinkled as an old apple. She appeared ancient. “This is Marga,” Damon introduced as the old woman inched forward. “She’ll look after you.”

Elena hopped off the bed and went to the doorway. “How will—“ she started to ask, then she saw to her amazement that Marga and her tray walked right into the room as though crossing any ordinary threshold. Elena tapped the barrier again to see if it was still in place—it was—and gave Damon a questioning look. He merely shrugged unhelpfully.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Elena said to the old woman, trying to take the tray from her. Watching her progress had been painful.

“I have got it,” Marga replied gruffly, her voice heavily accented, refusing to relinquish the tray. She set it down on the table then straightened up an inch or two, her back making a dangerous-sounding crack. “Go ahead, eat,” she urged Elena. “Too skinny. Not good for baby.”

“Marga!” Damon snapped in exasperation. She rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breather, and Elena decided she might like her, even if she said odd things. Quickly Elena sat down at the table and started eating—clam chowder, cornbread, steamed broccoli, a pear, and a glass of milk. A bit random, but delicious, and Elena tried not to scarf it.

“You can have as much as you want to eat,” Damon promised her. “Marga can bring you food whenever you’re hungry. Just stand at the door and call down to her if you need something.”

“I clean, too,” Marga stated flatly. “Do laundry, take out trash. No worries, I do it.”

“Um, thank you,” Elena told her. She predicted she’d be doing her own cleaning soon enough—she’d feel too guilty watching this elderly woman do it. To Damon, she said, “How long are you going to keep me here?”

“Have you ever met your father?” he asked instead, watching her eat. Marga puttered about the room straightening the bed sheets. “That you remember.”

“Yes,” Elena replied. The memory was hazy but it felt solid and warm to her. “He came to my birthday party. Once. He brought me a huge dollhouse.”

Damon rolled his eyes at this remark, which did not endear him to Elena. “What did your mother tell you about him?” She shrugged a little, knowing she was being unhelpful but not really caring; he was the one keeping her prisoner, after all, the one who had chased her and Jeremy for weeks. He sighed. “Marga, you can go now,” he told the old woman, and Elena watched her leave with slight trepidation. She tried to remind herself that the same barrier that kept her in also kept him out, or so it appeared.

Damon glanced around behind him and dragged a chair from the corner of the landing to sit in the doorway. He gave Elena a long look as she continued trying to choke down her food; suddenly she had little appetite. “I don’t want to keep secrets from you, Elena,” he stated levelly. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

She pushed away from the table slightly, turning to face him. “Why have you been chasing me and my brother?” she asked first. That was really the heart of the matter.

“It wasn’t just me chasing you,” he revealed. “Stefan was chasing you, too. It was a race to see who would catch you first.”

The way he said this extraordinary thing was just so straightforward, it made Elena’s stomach clench with dread. “Why?” she repeated, her mouth dry.

“Stefan has two children, you and Jeremy,” Damon began. “I have two children, Elliott and June. Your mother, Eliza, was my daughter. Elliott and June’s mother is Jacinda, Stefan’s daughter.”

Elena blinked at him in confusion. “What?”

He tried again. “Stefan has kids with my daughter, I have kids with his daughter. The daughter I had with his daughter? He then has kids with her, his granddaughter. Also his niece.” Elena blinked at him. “We’ve been doing this for a really long time and we don’t age,” he added. “Also we don’t have to worry about bad effects from inbreeding, in case you were wondering.”

She wasn’t. “You want to have children with me?” she finally asked, horrified.

“Well don’t get so worked up about it, it’s not that bad,” Damon advised, mildly offended by her reaction.

She could care less about his offense and jumped up, unable to sit still any longer. The small room suddenly felt even more like a cage, its walls closing in around her. “You can’t—I don’t—You can’t be serious!” she sputtered.

He stood as well, seemingly alarmed by this response. “Hey, calm down,” he suggested, his tone softer. “You don’t have to worry about anything, the barrier won’t come down until you’re seventeen.”

“Oh G-d,” Elena choked. Eighteen months never seemed so short.

“And I can only enter then when you give me permission,” he hastened to add. “It’s okay, please don’t cry, Elena. I would never hurt you.” He pressed his palms against the barrier and the skin whitened and spread out, as though he was pushing on glass. It seemed to illustrate just how helpless he was to reach her. “Maybe I should call Marga back—“

“No, I’m okay,” Elena claimed, sitting down on the edge of the bed. This assessment seemed overly optimistic, but he waited quietly while she brushed the moisture from her eyes and tried to calm her thoughts. “How long have you two been doing this?” she asked after a moment.

Damon sat back down in the chair. “Over a thousand years,” he admitted. The number didn’t faze her at this point. “It’s your destiny, Elena. It’s what you were meant to do. Your mom never told you?”

She shook her head. There were a lot of things her mom had never told her, undoubtedly thinking that she would have time to pass them on later. But she didn’t. “Once—“ Elena began haltingly, “I had this friend, Mike. We’d been friends since we were little, and I knew he wanted to be more than friends. And I didn’t really know how I felt about it, but I thought I might give it a try.” Her eyes stared off, unseeing. “I remember my mom discouraged me from dating him. She said I shouldn’t get attached to anyone, because I would just get hurt later. I thought she meant how she got hurt when my dad left her.” But now she could see how it might be interpreted in another way.

“She left him,” Damon corrected, and Elena nodded slowly. “As soon as your brother was born she wanted to leave—she could’ve stayed at Stefan’s house. Or he would’ve set her up anywhere in the world and taken care of her, and you. She could’ve had a palace.” Damon smirked a bit ruefully. “But Eliza was always independent-minded.”

Elena frowned a little. “She got a check from my dad every month—“

“Well sure, she wasn’t stupid,” Damon pointed out. “It’s hard to raise two kids on your own. But he could’ve done a lot more, and she just didn’t want him to.” His expression darkened suddenly. “He could’ve kept her safe—“ Elena blinked, thinking of the ‘routine’ car accident that had killed her mother. “Humans are so fragile, but so careless—“ He stopped, biting his lip to restrain himself, and Elena remembered that it had been his daughter who was killed.

“Did—did Stefan send us those letters right after?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh, no, that was me,” Damon admitted easily.

Elena’s temper flared suddenly and she jumped off the bed. “Those were terrifying!” she snapped at him. “Why would you do that?!”

“Well I had to get you out of the house, on the run,” Damon replied, slightly indignant. “Stefan was about to swoop in and gather you both up. If I got you on the run, at least I had a chance of getting to you first.”

Elena did not think this was justification for the threatening letters that had given her so many sleepless nights, jumping at every sound. “Why?” she demanded. “Why is it—a competition? A game?” A game with their lives at stake.

“If Stefan had you and your brother in his possession, when I needed you, I’d be at a disadvantage, wouldn’t I?” Damon pointed out, sounding disturbingly reasonable considering the subject matter. “He’d have the upper hand. Oh, he’d have to hand you over eventually, because the whole system would collapse otherwise,” he added. “But he could’ve set the terms. I don’t want that to happen.”

Elena stared at him, not sure whether the many unbelievable aspects of this tale were so far beyond her ken she couldn’t understand them, or if they were merely as pathetic as they seemed on the surface. “Using each other’s children as pawns in some little power struggle?” she finally concluded. She was clearly not impressed.

Damon rolled his eyes. “It’s hardly little,” he defended. “And anyway, everyone needs a hobby,” he added with a smirk.

“This is ridiculous,” Elena muttered, turning away.

“Have you ever seen a symbol,” Damon called after her, trying to reengage her attention, “two woody vines twined around each other, one with red berries, the other with blue? Or sometimes they’re flowers instead of berries.”

Elena paused, a softly-colored image coming unbidden to her mind, and she faced him again slowly. She remembered the grandfather clock in the hallway of their house, with the twining vines painted on every surface. The good china in the cabinet, almost never used, with the vines around the edges, little red and blue dots just able to be seen if you came very close to the glass. And more recently—Elena suddenly headed for the closet, not caring whether it was the spacious walk-in or the simple niche, as long as she could easily grab her bookbag. Crouching down she wrenched open the back zipper and pulled a Ziploc bag from it, containing important documents she’d gathered before they fled the house.

One was a letter from her father, written a few years earlier from Venice—hence the destination she and Jeremy had chosen. The text was fairly generic but she’d hoped it might prove useful in finding him. Now, however—She finally located the heavy piece of paper and unfolded it, her eyes going to the decorative border she’d barely noticed before—brown vines woven together, dotted with red and blue flowers. Close inspection showed that the red always followed one vine, the blue the other.

Damon was giving her a patient, if curious, look when she turned back to him. “Why would my mother have all those things with this symbol on it?” she wanted to know. “The clock, the china, the sheets…” As she thought about it, more items popped to mind, usually nicer ones that were only on display, or used for company.

Damon shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess she wanted them, and Stefan gave them to her. He’s the red, I’m the blue.” He cocked his head to the side, watching her. “You can have a lot of nice things here, Elena,” he added, repeating his words from earlier.

She wasn’t able to appreciate that idea right now, as the weight of reality—however fantastical it might appear—crashed down on her. She meant to sit back down on the bed but got too close to the edge, slipped, and sat down hard on the stone floor.

Damon popped up immediately. “Are you okay? Marga! Come see if she’s okay!”

“No, I’m fine, I just—“ Elena stopped speaking when she saw Marga hovering over her.

“You alright? Come on now,” the older woman encouraged. She took Elena’s arm and helped her up with surprising strength.

Damon was standing at the doorway, trying to see in. “Is she okay? Does she need some ice?”

Elena envisioned putting ice on her bruised rear end and decided the other two were just fussing over nothing. “I’m fine, really,” she insisted. “Thank you, Marga,” she added politely.

“You not done eating?” Marga observed, looking at her half-finished meal. “Get cold. You want more?”

“No, thank you,” Elena told her, feeling slightly guilty. “I’m done.”

Muttering disapprovingly Marga picked up the tray and carried it slowly out of the room. “Bring her something else in a couple hours,” Damon told the old woman as she inched past him. “She might be hungry again then.”

Elena sat down on the foot of the bed—more carefully this time—facing Damon. “How did she get in here so fast?” she asked, when she saw Marga disappear down the stairs. “And why can she get through the barrier?”

Damon sat back in his chair. “She can move fast when she wants to,” he noted, “when there’s an emergency.” Elena rolled her eyes slightly at the thought of her small slip being deemed an ‘emergency.’ “And someone has to be able to get in and take care of you,” he added, “someone trustworthy. Marga was my nanny when I was little.”

Considering he’d said he’d been playing this game with Stefan with over a thousand years, this made Marga very old indeed. “Wow,” Elena commented. They were both quiet for a long moment. “So now what?” Elena asked finally. “I just sit in here until I’m seventeen?” The prospect was a grim one. “I can’t just stay in this room!”

“Well, there’s a bathroom,” Damon pointed out, and she gave him a look; that wasn’t what she meant. “You saw what I can do with the closet,” he reminded her. “I can make it nice here, with lots of room, maybe even some outdoor space—a balcony or courtyard.” That thought interested her, though she tried not to show it.

“But what am I supposed to do all day?” Elena protested. She felt bratty saying that, but at the same time—held prisoner! The idea of endless boredom and inactivity loomed over her, oppressive and grey.

“You can continue your schooling,” Damon suggested. “You can study whatever you want, you can even follow some kind of program, get a degree. You can read—you like to read, don’t you?” She nodded slightly. “I bet you do something creative, don’t you? What is it?”

“Well,” she hesitated, “I like to write. In my journal, or reviews of books I’ve read, things like that.”

“You can do that, too,” Damon encouraged. “You’re not like all those other kids you went to school with, Elena,” he added in a persuasive tone. “You’re smarter, you’re more talented. Are you athletic? You’re probably the best athlete on the team, or at least everything seems to come easily to you.”

Well, it was true she didn’t seem to have as many problems with pulled muscles or stiffness as the other members of the cheerleading squad, though she would hardly say she was the best member. She liked the social aspect more, and the physical part was easy enough. Thinking about this she remembered the friends she’d left behind and her expression turned melancholy.

“You’re special, Elena,” Damon tried to tell her. “You weren’t meant to be like the people you know.”

“No, I was meant to be a teenage mom and live as a prisoner in a stone tower,” she concluded darkly.

“Well, it’s different,” he quipped, and she gave him a sharp look. “It won’t be that bad, Elena,” he insisted. “It doesn’t even have to last that long. Once you have the second child, you can go anywhere in the world you want. I’ll help you out, you won’t have to worry about money—“

Despite having recently awakened, Elena was feeling suddenly quite tired, wearied by all these strange plans and abilities. “So I sit here until I’m seventeen, have two kids, and then I can leave?” she sighed.

His expression said he felt she was oversimplifying considerably, but she didn’t care. “Well, I also need to find your brother,” he reminded her.

“Why?”

“Um, I don’t know, it’s kind of weird—“ Elena’s eyebrows shot up—weird in comparison to what he’d already told her? “Well, I just mean it won’t work without him,” Damon tried to explain. “I don’t mean anything kinky by it,” he assured her. “But I have to have him in my possession, or you won’t get pregnant. See, he would have his own rooms just like you do, and you could see each other whenever you wanted. And you’d both be free to go at the same time. But I need both of you. You go together.”

It was difficult for Elena to evaluate whether this seemed plausible or not. Everything Damon told her seemed impossible, yet certain things—the magic closet, the barrier, the twined-vines symbol—she could see were true. She didn’t necessarily disbelieve the rest, just—she suddenly wondered what her father, Stefan, would say about it if he were here. Was it better that she’d been caught by Damon and not Stefan, or worse? Or did it not really matter, in the end?

“Do you know what happened to my mother’s brother?” she asked, deflecting his unspoken question about Jeremy’s whereabouts. “James, I mean. I guess my grandmother got married later and had other children”—Damon nodded—“but James must’ve been…”

“My son,” he confirmed when she trailed off. “He lives here.”

Elena’s eyes widened in surprise. “Here? He lives here?”

“Well, in one of the farmhouses out there,” he clarified. “Maybe you can see it from your window. He’s married, he has several children, younger than you.” Her astonishment must’ve shown on her face. “Your grandmother, Jeanette, lives in one, too. See, Jeanette liked it here,” he told her, a bit smugly. “She stayed a long time, until Eliza and James were almost teenagers. I thought, great, this is gonna be an easy one, I’ll just trade them to Stefan when they’re older, no sweat.” Elena rolled her eyes at his casual regard for his children.

“But then Jeanette got it in her head that she wanted to go out into the world,” he went on, scoffing at the notion. “Personally I think Stefan may have had something to do with that. But once Jeanette got something in her head she wouldn’t let it go, so I resettled her and the kids. Eliza liked the outside world; James, not so much. It wasn’t hard to persuade him to come back.”

“I know my grandmother,” Elena pointed out, as if this would poke a hole in his story. “She got married, she had other kids, like my aunt Anna and my uncle Robert.” Who were, she noted to herself, considerably younger than her mother.

“Okay, okay, I should’ve said she lives here part-time,” Damon amended, as though this was a minor difference only. “Kind of a snowbird. She and her husband live in Philadelphia part of the time, and they come here when it gets cold, because who wants to spend the winter in Philadelphia? Anyway, you’ve not met her that often,” he corrected patronizingly. “I asked. She and your mom had issues.”

Elena glared at him, though his modification was sadly accurate: she’d met her grandmother—more often than she’d met her father, for certain—but she didn’t really know her. Her mother never spoke much about her family past, though her younger aunt and uncle had often visited. Elena had never taken the opportunity to ask them what they knew, though of course she hadn’t expected the story to be quite this strange.

“And where is here?” she asked pointedly. “This place that’s so wonderful?” The sarcasm in her tone was hard to miss.

“Well, it’s kind of a magical other dimension,” Damon told her, his tone admitting he knew this explanation was paltry. “There’s no crime, the weather’s usually nice, people don’t get sick… They work in their gardens and throw festivals in the meadow just outside your window. Okay, frankly I think it’s kind of dull,” he finally said, which she’d guessed from his attitude. “I prefer the city. But a lot of people seem to like it.” There was a pause. “Have I answered all your questions?” he checked.

“I guess. For now,” she qualified. They weren’t necessarily answered to her satisfaction, but she had a feeling that might never happen.

“Good. Then back to my original question: Where’s your brother?” Damon’s gaze was suddenly so cold and sharp, his eyes glittering as if he could see the answer on her face if he looked hard enough—Elena remembered he was the predator who had stalked and trapped her, and that she didn’t really know him at all, except for this inescapable fact.

“I told you, I don’t know,” she repeated, willing herself to not get up and move away from him. “You were chasing us, I tripped and fell—“ She frowned. “I don’t remember anything after that.”

“You hit your head,” Damon revealed, a bit impatiently. “Fortunately I was able to fix that. But Jeremy rode away on a streetcar while I was dealing with you. Where were you going?”

“We were just running,” she told him again.

Damon gave her a long look that said he felt she was being unhelpful, perhaps deliberately so. “I’m not going to hurt you, Elena, and I’m not going to hurt your brother,” he reiterated. “But I can make things nice for you here, or I can make them unpleasant.” Her eyebrows shot up at the threat, and she hurriedly stood and moved around the side of the bed when he rose abruptly, pushing the chair back to its corner.

“Think about that,” he suggested to her. “And think about your brother being out there all alone.” She turned away quickly but knew he’d noticed her stricken expression. “I’m looking for him, and Stefan’s looking for him, but there’s a lot of other people out there who might find him, and they’re not going to be so nice.” With that he turned and walked nonchalantly down the stairs.

As soon as he was out of sight Elena shut the door to her room and dragged the chair in front of it for good measure. More confused than ever she wished she had something to distract herself with, while her thoughts settled, but the only reading matter was what she’d brought in her bookbag. Her diary was still there when she made an inventory of the bag’s contents, along with a cheap pen from their last motel. She opened to a fresh page and dated it—then her pen hovered over the inviting blank lines, unable to figure out where to begin.

Well, it seemed like she would have plenty of time to fill that in later, if she was really stuck here. And right now she had more of a burning desire to understand what was going on, so she pulled out the other documents she’d managed to salvage, scanning them for clues from this fresh perspective.

Her mother’s will was the first thing that came to hand, a thick sheaf of oversized papers the lawyer had tried to explain to her. The first time she’d seen it she’d been in the midst of shock and grief at her mother’s death; now as she stared at it she was angry, angry at her mother for all the secrets she’d kept. The document was heavy on the legalese, but in essence it seemed straightforward: her mother’s property upon death would be split between Elena and Jeremy. Should Eliza die while one or both children were minors, their care would revert to their father, Stefan Salvatore.

The will did not add the standard stipulation, “if alive.” It seemed to assume there was no chance Eliza would outlive Stefan. Or perhaps Elena was just projecting at this point.

She ploughed on and the next name mentioned caught in her throat: should they be unable to find Stefan Salvatore, custody would next pass to his brother, Damon. Not that Elena didn’t believe his story, crazy as it was; but to see his name set down in bland typeface, on a document that had been lying around her mother’s office for years—and of course, there was also the point that she and Jeremy might have been left in the care of someone they’d never met, instead of their Aunt Anna or Uncle Robert. It seemed comforting to her though, in a way; surely her mother wouldn’t have put Damon on the list of possibilities (however remote the chances of him being called upon) if he was truly dangerous.

Elena ultimately tossed the will aside in disgust; it seemed to confirm her ideas about her brother and herself just being pawns in Stefan and Damon’s game, living markers for them to chase for their own amusement. Why all the secrecy, the sinister theatrics? Why not just explain the story, bizarre as it was, and calmly trade the kids when the time came?

Because she would’ve run anyway, Elena realized. She tried to imagine her mother sitting her down at their battered, antique kitchen table and telling her that she was destined to have two children with a thousand-year-old man who was her grandfather and also her uncle many times over, and once she’d done that she could go on about her normal life, and have a rather nice one, too, except for occasional uncomfortable moments like explaining to a boyfriend why she became a teenage mother, or having this same conversation with her own daughter.

Yes, once it had been impressed upon her that this was not some kind of twisted joke—Elena would have made a run for it. And so would Jeremy, she predicted—he had a stubborn streak and didn’t like to be told what to do, whether sensible or bizarre.

So maybe Stefan and Damon had just gotten used to chasing down their offspring/mates as a matter of course. Maybe she had an instinct to run just as they had an instinct to track her. She certainly didn’t have an instinct to feel comfortable in this small cage, like a domesticated hamster. Then she thought about Jeremy and his instincts—sharper and faster than an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy’s, she now suspected. But enough to survive on his own? Enough to get somewhere safe and hide there, from either Stefan or Damon?

And even if she wanted to tell someone where he’d gone, she honestly couldn’t. She had ideas, of course… ideas she was going to keep firmly to herself.

Fevered with a sudden determination Elena began to scribble in her diary, recording the unusual will details, what Damon had told her about the red-and-blue vine symbol, the names and places she remembered him saying. She sifted through the other documents she’d brought with her, noting the times the Salvatore name was mentioned and in what context. Elena and Jeremy were Cliffords, as their mother had been. Her mother’s younger half-siblings had the surname Summers; that was her grandmother’s second husband’s name, which made sense. Elena supposed she’d imagined her biological grandfather’s surname was Clifford; she knew her parents had never married so she’d assumed her last name came down her mother’s line. Now she knew that wasn’t true—every branch of the family tree dead-ended with the Salvatore brothers—so she wondered if ‘Clifford’ had just been made up somewhere along the line. And why only names starting with E and J? Elena, Jeremy, Eliza, James, Elliott, June, Jeanette…

She kept on writing, morphing from the bald facts into speculation and then into remembrance, everything she could recall about her father—visits, comments she’d overheard, mail received. The cheap hotel pen ran out of ink, but Elena always had a back-up and kept on writing, her fingers getting stiff as she started to recount the story of her flight across Europe with her brother, the terrible days after her mother’s sudden death, the sinister letters that others dismissed. Her grandmother Jeanette had come to the funeral but said little to her or Jeremy; at the time it hadn’t seemed strange, they didn’t know her that well and there were so many people around. Their Aunt Anna had moved in temporarily to look after them while lawyers tried to contact their father—and why was he so hard to contact? Elena wondered suddenly. If he’d swooped in within a day or so he’d have her and Jeremy locked up tight (metaphorically or otherwise) right now.

There were too many questions, too many pieces that didn’t yet fit together, maybe because Elena couldn’t make herself think like thousand-year-old psychopaths. Who could work magic! That seemed almost incidental to the rest of the story which consumed her, a bizarre but benign footnote in a sordid history of lies.

There was a firm knock on the door, startling Elena who’d grown used to the faint scratch of pen on paper as the only noise. Her eyes were blurry from their restricted focal length as she looked up and saw the door start to open, pushing aside the chair she’d blockaded it with as easily as if it was a pillow. Marga shuffled in carrying a new tray and barely glanced at Elena.

“Don’t sit on floor,” she admonished, setting the tray down on the table. “Hard on spine. Come, eat more.”

Slowly, stiffly, Elena rose, not realizing how long she’d been on the stone floor. She flexed her fingers and sat down on the table before a grilled cheese sandwich, a bowl of potato salad, and some apple juice, glad that Marga had remembered to bring it to her.

“Marga,” she asked slowly. The old woman was laboriously picking up the papers Elena had scattered around the room; Elena had the feeling she would take great offense if asked to stop. “Where are we?”

“Tower,” Marga replied straightforwardly.

“But what country?” Elena persisted.

“Any country. All countries,” Marga replied. She muttered under her breath in a foreign language as she neatly stacked the papers on the dresser and slowly took Elena’s bookbag back to the closet.

“Where’s Damon?”

“Downstairs, packing for trip,” Marga revealed. “You want talk to?”

“No,” Elena assured her hastily. “This food is very good, thank you, Marga,” she added, but it seemed to have little effect on the woman, who began straightening the clothes in the dresser drawers Elena had marginally jostled. “Where’s Damon going?”

“Look for brother.”

“Oh.”

“You want talk to?”

“No,” Elena repeated firmly. She tried to keep eating. “What’s outside? The houses, fields, forests…”

“Houses, fields, forests,” Marga parroted back, as though that was not her domain. “Watch window. People sometimes.”

“What people?” Elena seized.

“Relatives,” grunted Marga. She shuffled off to the bathroom, though Elena had hardly even been in that room.

Elena wasn’t sure whose relatives she meant, but it hardly mattered, she supposed. She finished eating and moved to the bed with her diary as Marga emerged to remove her dishes and sweep up crumbs. Elena’s fingers hurt from the furious writing she’d done and she didn’t really feel like resuming it right now. “Do you have anything I could read, Marga?” she asked hopfully.

“No,” the old woman replied shortly. She picked up the emptied pen and placed it on her tray with curious care. “But I tell Damon you ask.” With that Marga crossed the magical barrier and headed slowly down the stairs, dishes clanking all the way.

**

Elena managed to keep herself occupied at first. She inventoried everything in her small suite—clothes, toiletries, linens. It was all quite basic but she lacked nothing she really needed. She went through her backpack and cleaned it out, trying to pick up as many gum wrappers and pencil shavings as she could before Marga saw them. She wrote in her diary, everything she did, everything she could think of. Her second pen rant out; she had one more, but it was the last.

“Marga, do you have anything I could write with?”

“I ask Damon.” Elena presumed Marga was not a big writer. She was also not surprised when Damon decreed Elena was not to have any writing utensils. Or that none were available, it was hard to tell with Marga’s presentation sometimes.

After that things started to drift downhill. Elena was bored. It didn’t sound like such a bad thing on the surface, but it gnawed at her, softening her mind, dulling her senses. She got up when Marga badgered her to eat, then went back to bed. Then she didn’t want to get out of bed at all—while at the same time hating it, finding it hot and rough and confining—and Marga let her eat from the tray set on the mattress. Inevitably, she just didn’t want to eat at all.

There seemed to be no point in it. She was trapped in this tower, this room, and she was never getting out, and she would never see Jeremy again, and trying to remember anything about the world that she’d previously enjoyed required a mental strength she just didn’t have the energy for. Marga seemed worried. That was nice of her. Elena could do without her constant poking and chastising, though, and finally that stopped as well.

Elena was drifting, half-awake, fuzzy-headed, dimly aware that someone was calling her name. She ignored it. Something landed near her with a soft thump, but she ignored that as well. Then something whacked into her rear end, and that annoyed her enough to at least open her eyes and look around a bit.

“Elena!” Stiffly she rolled over and half sat up, gazing blearily at the doorway. Damon stood there, and as she blinked dully he threw something at her, which hit her arm rather sharply.

“Ow,” she protested after a moment.

“Elena, get up!” he insisted. “Look at what I brought.”

Slowly she picked up the object that had bounced off her arm, pausing a long moment as the symbols on the cover resolved into words she understood. “Reader’s Digest,” she finally realized. “July 1985.” She picked another couple of small, fat magazines off the bed, all the same title—and all the same year. “What?”

“Look, I’ve got more,” Damon tempted. He toed a small stack over the threshold and they spilled onto Elena’s floor.

“You’re bending the pages,” she said sourly, climbing out of bed. She ended up sitting on the floor before the doorway, clutching the periodicals to her, slightly winded by doing more movement than she had in several days.

Damon crouched down at eye level with her, his brilliant blue gaze sober as it regarded her. Elena stared back, too tired to be scared or angry or embarrassed, and noticed that he had what older people called fine bone structure, and silky-looking hair.

“You don’t look very good,” he observed of her. She expected her own hair was not very silky-looking, as it had been a few days since she’d washed or brushed it.

“Thanks,” Elena replied in a slow, flat tone. “That’s a nice jacket.”

Confused, Damon glanced at his black leather jacket, then back up at Elena’s rather hazy expression. Sighing, he sat down fully on the floor and reached just around the corner, pulling a new stack of objects towards him. He pushed it over the threshold as well and Elena gathered them close, pawing through the blank pages of the bound composition notebooks and inhaling the scent as though it was fine perfume. A rattle made her open her eyes and she greedily snatched at the box of pens Damon was pushing through the barrier.

“I want you to read those,” he told her sternly, indicating the Reader’s Digest issues, “and write something about them every day.” Elena really had no intention of doing otherwise; but he wasn’t done lecturing her yet. “Marga said you weren’t well. You haven’t been taking good care of yourself.”

“There’s nothing to do,” Elena rebounded, “and I’m a prisoner.”

“People have found ways to keep themselves occupied,” Damon countered, a bit meanly. “You’re not making much effort.”

Elena wanted to heave his notebooks and magazines back at him, but she wasn’t that stupid. “There’s nothing to do,” she repeated, louder, angrier, “and I’m a prisoner!”

Damon sighed. “You’re going to be here for a long time, Elena,” he asserted. “You need to discipline yourself, so you’ll stay healthy.”

“So we can make babies?” she shot back nastily.

He affected a world-weary look that infuriated her. “Elena, believe me, I’ve seen lots of girls try to get out of this situation in lots of different ways—“

“Doesn’t really speak well of your care for them, does it?” she interrupted.

“I’ve been through this before—“

“Then how come you’re getting angry?”

“I’m not—“ Damon stopped, paused for a long moment to regain his self-control, then repeated in a calmer tone, “You’re going to be here for a long time, Elena. You can make yourself miserable the whole time, or you can make yourself happy.”

There was a certain amount of sense in what he said, if you accepted the fact that Elena was to be a prisoner here. “Let’s not forget you left me with nothing to do,” she reminded him anyway, her tone more peevish than she’d been going for.

“I know,” Damon replied simply. There was no apology in his tone, only acknowledgement. “I’ve been out looking for your brother. No luck so far,” he went on, changing the subject. Or was he? “Any suggestions?”

“No,” Elena said stubbornly. She stood with a wobble, trying to gather up all her treasures in her arms at once, and Damon stood as well, looking like he wanted to reach in and steady her.

“I won’t take those away, I promise,” he assured her as she carted everything back to the bed. “Only, you promise you’ll read them and write about them. Marga will bring you more when you’re done.”

“I expect I will,” Elena told him, a touch of haughtiness in her tone. She wouldn’t be doing it to please him, after all, but because she wanted to.

“I’ll take good care of you, Elena,” he added, and he seemed sincere in the moment, “if you’ll let me.”

Once you got past the underlying base of craziness, Elena wanted to believe him. Although she still wasn’t sure they really had the same idea of ‘care’—his seemed to be more about keeping her in a jar with some holes punched in the lid, while she could think of a lot of other things she’d rather be doing. Living in her home with her brother, going to school, seeing her friends, becoming a—whatever she wanted to be as a career. Someone could take care of her by helping her do all that. Letting her start a family when she felt like it, with the person she chose.

She picked at the magazines, straightening the bent covers idly. There were a lot of things she’d taken for granted about her life, when it seemed like really, she’d never had a chance of getting them. She was still thinking this over, though, and had not yet resigned herself to this fate—it’d only been a few days, after all.

“So, ‘good care’ for you means a few notebooks and twenty-five-year-old Reader’s Digest?” Elena finally said, but in a lighter tone.

“You say that like it isn’t much,” Damon replied, with a cheeky smirk, “but I’ve got lots of those Reader’s Digests.”

Elena was suddenly keenly aware of her recent lapse in hygiene and itched to correct it. “I think I’ll go take a shower,” she decided. “Could you send Marga up with some food later? I’m starving.”

“Of course,” Damon agreed. “I’m leaving again,” he added quickly, as she pulled some fresh clothes from her dresser drawers. “I just came back—briefly.”

“Oh.” Elena wasn’t sure what else to say to that.

“Well—I’ll tell Marga you’re up,” he decided, and after another moment he turned and walked away down the stairs. Elena felt she should’ve said something else to him, but couldn’t think what.

**

Life was indeed much more bearable with the Reader’s Digests and the notebooks and pens, Elena decided. She read the volumes carefully, feeling oddly like a time traveler and having to remind herself that everything in them had happened well before she was born, that the world had moved on since then. Then she wrote in the notebooks about the articles she’d found most interesting, the jokes that were the funniest. She also wrote in her diary every day, even if all she recorded was what Marga brought her to eat and which color hoodie she wore (she had a rather limited selection and Marga washed them constantly). She tried to look outside as well, and record any observations she made, like a bird landing on the windowsill or a cart moving between the cottages. Most signs of life were far away from the tower, however, and not easy to pick out.

Marga brought her more Reader’s Digests of similar vintage when her stack started to wear down. “You can take these away then,” Elena said, indicating the ones she’d already read.

Unexpectedly Marga refused. “Damon say, they stay,” she proclaimed gruffly.

Elena blinked at her in confusion. “But I’ve read them—“ She didn’t often reread things.

“Damon said, he not take away,” Marga reiterated. “So, they stay.”

Well alright then. Elena tried to find a convenient place to stack them and eventually decided they had to go under the bed—her few pieces of furniture made the closet side of the room feel crowded already, and on the bathroom side, she needed all the space she could get to practice her exercise routine. Spend energy to make energy, healthy body makes a healthy mind, and all that—she put a towel on the floor and did yoga, or jumped around working through her cheerleading moves. The store floor wasn’t exactly the best place for it but at least nothing rattled when she landed.

“Marga, isn’t there anything else to read?” Elena finally asked. Reader’s Digest had variety, true, but she longed for an entire novel or a really thorough nonfiction account of… anything.

“No,” was the short reply. “More of those. You want different year? Have 1970s also.”

Elena figured she’d get to those soon enough anyway. “What do you read, Marga?” she cajoled, unwilling to give up.

The old woman’s grunt indicated Elena wasn’t getting anywhere. “My language.”

Elena pounced on this. “What language is that?” Mutter. “Russian? Polish? Bulgarian?”

“Very old,” Marga replied instead. Elena wasn’t sure if she was speaking of her language, herself, or something else. She was not really the best conversationalist but Elena was willing to try anything; she got rather lonely in her room by herself.

She tried writing stories. She’d never been much for writing fiction, preferring instead the challenge of describing and analyzing the real things around her. But it occurred to her that she currently had more time to fill than she had hobbies, and Marga was not stingy with the notebooks and pens, so she started a story about some teenage girls very like the ones she’d known at school. She’d always heard the advice, ‘Write what you know,’ though that didn’t seem to explain the fantasy and science fiction sections of the bookstore (or possibly romance). Elena suspected the story was not very good, but she enjoyed writing it and that seemed to be the most important factor right now.

She could sit on the bed and write, or lie on the bed; or she could sit at the table. Lying on the stone floor was not at all comfortable. The limited selection was surprisingly irritating and she found herself losing focus easily, moving from place to place and position to position; though she reflected that the exercise was probably good for her. Such were the limitations of her existence that when she discovered she could sit in the window comfortably—for a while, with the aid of a towel and a pillow—it merited two pages in her diary, with lots of exclamation points.

From this perch she could see the land spread out before the tower, a flat green lawn edged with thick trees, then the rolling countryside divided into squares and rectangles with little hedgerows and cottages; sometimes a stream snaked through, like a silver ribbon. Generally the weather seemed pleasant, though she couldn’t really tell the temperature—mostly it was sunny, and the occasional rain was mild and refreshing. She could see why her grandmother preferred to winter here instead of Philadelphia.

A movement on the lawn caught her eye and she looked down, startled, to see an animal racing across the pristine lawn—a dog, she thought. Even more astonishing, it was followed by a little boy—the first person Elena had really seen here aside from Damon and Marga. He appeared to be frantically chasing the runaway dog, at least until he looked up at the tower, saw Elena in the window, and stopped dead. She assumed he was staring at her, anyway—after a moment she thought to give a little wave, and slowly, hesitantly, he waved back. Then he looked around sharply, as though he’d heard a noise that reminded him of what he ought to be doing, and he raced away out of view.

Elena couldn’t stop thinking about him. “Marga,” she began excitedly when the old woman brought her dinner, “there was a little boy outside today! I saw him through the window.”

Marga harrumphed disparagingly. “Dogs make mess on lawn,” she noted with distaste. “Trespassers not allowed!”

“But who was he? Where did he come from?” Elena pressed, less interested in her roast beef sandwich and peach slices than in this new element in her life.

Marga shrugged and straightened the covers of Elena’s bed. “Probably village,” she revealed without interest.

“What village?”

“Village at foot of tower,” Marga elaborated. “On front side.”

“Oh,” Elena replied, slightly disappointed. “And I’m on the back of the tower.” So there was no way she’d ever get to see the village herself. “I don’t usually see people on the lawn,” she went on. “Are they not allowed?”

“Not allowed,” Marga agreed. “Except for festivals.”

Elena gave this some thought. “He saw me,” she finally admitted, “and we waved at each other. He won’t get in trouble, will he?” she added anxiously.

“Got away,” Marga told her. She didn’t act like trespassing was a capital crime, just annoying. Then she paused. “Might be more soon.”

Elena gave her a surprised look. “What do you mean?”

The old woman shuffled off to Elena’s bathroom to chase away any specks of dust that had dared to land since she’d last swept through at lunchtime. “Know you’re here now,” she finally said, her voice echoing slightly off the hard surfaces. “So excited when new person in tower. More work to chase away.”

“Oh.” Elena hadn’t considered what her presence might mean to those who lived in Damon’s little other-dimension paradise—to people like her grandmother and her uncle James, who knew exactly why she was here, who knew it meant the chase had begun again. “Are the people who live here mostly—Damon’s descendants?”

“Relatives,” Marga replied, repeating her earlier words that seemed to confirm Elena’s theory. So maybe all of them knew, from stories at least, what her presence meant. It made her feel a little self-conscious.

“Damon said my uncle James lives here,” she went on leadingly.

“You not eating,” Marga chided, shuffling back over. She placed a paper-dry hand against Elena’s forehead. “You sick?”

“No, I’m fine,” Elena insisted, hurriedly taking a few bites of her sandwich. Marga had a rather noxious syrup she was fond of doling out, as when Elena had been feeling a bit achy at that time of the month recently. It did indeed make her feel better, but it did not go down easily and she was anxious to avoid it unless really necessary. After a moment Marga moved away to the window, vigorously wiping at a spot on the glass, and Elena tried her question again.

“Does my uncle James live nearby?” she asked more specifically.

There was a pause, uncharacteristic for Marga, who usually answered right away in a gruff tone. “Yes,” she finally said, her cloth squeaking across the glass. “Saw him last week at market.”

Elena remembered what Damon had said about Jeremy, that he wanted the boy to live in the tower just as Elena did, possibly for years. James had liked that existence so much he’d chosen to live nearby even when released. Marga must have helped take care of James at some point—maybe she still thought of him affectionately.

“Do you think I could see him?” Elena asked, trying not to get her hopes up. “Or at least write him a letter?”

“I ask Damon,” Marga replied in her usual manner, which Elena had learned was basically a brush-off. “You done eating? You want more?”

“No, thank you, Marga,” Elena told her with a sigh, and the old woman took the tray away, hobbling with painful slowness down the stairs.

**

Elena dreamed about her brother one night. Nothing mystical or even concrete; when she woke up in the morning and tried to record the dream all she could recall were fragments. And feelings: a heavy sense of worry, dread, settled over her.

She picked at her breakfast, knowing it wouldn’t take Marga long to notice. “Marga, can Damon—make me dream things?” she finally tried, her tone troubled.

Marga grunted, which seemed to correspond with, ‘No, what a ridiculous question,’ so that was some comfort. “You have bad dreams?” she questioned. “Too much cauliflower yesterday.”

Elena did not think her dream was a vegetable-induced hallucination. She was leaning away from thinking that Damon had somehow magically induced it, but if he could, it probably was the kind of dream he’d send. It made her feel anxious about Jeremy, just a boy out on the streets on his own, not knowing what happened to her, not knowing why people were chasing him. It made her want him to be found, by Damon or Stefan, as long as he didn’t fall pretty to anyone else.

She thought about it all day, wrote about it obsessively in her diary—which was now one of the bound composition notebooks, since she’d filled up her original journal—and tried to decide what to do. Could she live with it if something happened to Jeremy out there, and she’d never tried to help him? The answer to that seemed obvious, but the counterweight to it was—could she trust Damon? Was it really better for Jeremy to be here instead?

By the time Marga brought her supper that night she’d made up her mind. “Damon isn’t back yet, is he?” she asked, nervously fingering the folded letter in her hands.

“No,” Marga replied shortly, setting the tray on Elena’s table. It looked like some kind of vegetable stew, plus cornbread and a sliced pear. Elena had seen similar meals several times this week, which was odd because usually there was more variety. “Overdue. Running low on supplies.”

“Running low?” Elena repeated blankly, her original problem momentarily forgotten. Now she had a sudden vision of starving to death in her tower cell, unable to get out even to forage for food. Or what if something happened to Marga? No one would ever think to look for her up here, at least not until it was too late… She almost folded up the paper and put it away in her pocket right then, figuring Jeremy had a better chance on the streets.

“Not to worry,” Marga said, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone. “Plenty of food in village! At the market. But Damon usually brings.”

She didn’t sound worried. But then again, Elena wasn’t sure what Marga being worried would sound like. “Oh,” she said dully, indecisive again. She plunged ahead before she lost her nerve. “Do you have a way to contact him?”

Marga was sweeping out Elena’s bare closet, in which hung two jackets and four hoodies, the fifth being the one Elena was currently wearing; her bookbag sat on the stone floor. Even with the closet in its smallest incarnation it looked pathetically empty; and the hoodies were starting to get a bit shabby from all the times they’d been worn and washed.

“You want talk to?” Marga responded finally, satisfied that the closet was clean.

“I—“ Elena unfolded the letter and held it out for Marga to see. “It’s from my father. Stefan,” she said haltingly. “It has his address in Venice. That’s where Jeremy and I were going. Maybe Jeremy went there after we got separated.”

Marga nodded as though she understood Elena’s point and took the letter. “I tell Damon,” she promised. Then, “You not eating!”

Elena abruptly turned to face her meal and picked up the spoon. “I’m eating! I’m eating!”

**

The next day Elena spent second-guessing her decision to give Damon Stefan’s address in Venice. She almost asked Marga at breakfast if she’d contacted Damon yet, then almost again at lunch. She’d quailed at the last minute both times, though, instead asking Marga again if she had anything else to read besides the old Reader’s Digests. The answer, as usual, was no.

Her surroundings did not give her much distraction from her thoughts about Jeremy; no one new appeared on the lawn behind the tower, and the day was pleasantly sunny with few clouds to watch. Elena wondered briefly if it was boring to live somewhere so uniformly nice, then recalled the popularity of places like Florida and Southern California. No one seemed to complain of boredom there.

Marga brought her supper at her usual time—zucchini bread that tasted homemade, spaghetti with thick noodles, an apple. It was something different, anyway. Fearing that by now the answer had to be yes, Elena screwed herself up and began, “Marga, have you—“

“Well, you’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” remarked a familiar voice, and Elena stood suddenly as she saw Damon lounging in the doorway, an infuriating smirk on his face. He was just as she remembered him, only somehow… more real, more alive. He’d been gone for at least two months, she thought.

“Did you find my brother?” she asked immediately, as Marga shuffled away.

She could read the answer on his face before he spoke. “No,” he sighed regretfully. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and passed it through the barrier to her. It was the letter she’d given Marga. “Thanks for the suggestion, though.”

“Did you find… Stefan’s house?” she asked tentatively.

“No, actually,” Damon told her. “That address doesn’t exist anymore.” Elena blinked rapidly, trying to process this. “It was an old apartment building that’s been torn down to make room for a shopping mall.”

“Oh,” Elena replied dully, imagining what she and Jeremy would’ve done if they’d made it there and found out it was a dead end.

“Any idea where he’d go next?” Damon probed, as if reading her thoughts.

Elena sat down on the foot of the bed. “No,” she replied unhelpfully, and this time she really didn’t. “He might try to—have you checked home?” For some reason she was very eager to think of Jeremy at home, even if he would be alone there.

Damon shook his head. “Under surveillance,” he assured her. “And all your relatives.” Elena sighed hopelessly, suddenly realizing how much time she’d spent thinking about this over the last couple days, and hoping for a different outcome.

“Well, cheer up, I still have a few ideas,” Damon insisted. “And look what I brought you!” He held a book up and Elena came closer so he could hand it to her.

“Murder Most Royal, by Jean Plaidy,” she read, flipping it over to the back eagerly.

“Have you heard of her?” Damon wanted to know, indicating the author. “She’s written some insane number of novels about all the kings and queens of England. Like, at least one book about every single one.”

“Really?” Elena replied with interest. She was so sick of the Reader’s Digests she would’ve read anything else, but as it happened she was quite interested in royal history. It was a fascination she couldn’t really explain, though ironically at the moment she had a lot in common with those princesses who were traded off to a foreign and restrictive land for the purposes of breeding. She tried not to think about that further.

“And there’s this,” Damon added, pulling her attention from the first book to show her another. “Have you read it already?”

It was The Boleyn Legacy by Philippa Gregory. “Actually, yes,” Elena admitted—after she’d pulled it safely across the barrier. “But I can read it again.”

Damon looked slightly disappointed. “Oh. I saw The Other Boleyn Girl on your bookshelf but not this one so I thought—“

“My bookshelf?” Elena interrupted in surprise.

“Well, yeah,” Damon replied, his tone a bit guilty. He tried to cover it up. “Of course, I went to your house after you left. To look around.” The thought of Damon standing in her room, looking around her bookshelves, made Elena’s skin crawl slightly and he could no doubt see this on her face. “Stefan got the house, legally I mean, and packed everything up,” he went on, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “It’s all safe in storage somewhere but I’m not sure when I can get it back for you. We’re not really on negotiating terms right now.”

“Oh.” That was another thing Elena hadn’t considered, what would happen to the house once she and Jeremy had fled. She’d assumed it would go to her grandma or her aunt or uncle, she supposed. She really hadn’t been thinking about real estate at the time.

“But hey, I got you some more books,” Damon prompted in an upbeat tone, trying to draw her back. “How about The Royal Diaries series?” He held out the small gilded hardcover of Kristina, Girl King of Sweden. “I know they’re kind of young, lots of clothing descriptions and all—“

Elena took the book from him quickly. “I love The Royal Diaries,” she asserted. She did not mention she’d read all of them already. She tried to peer through the doorway at an angle, looking at the table in the hall. “Do you have any other books?”

Damon grinned slowly. “Why yes, I do,” he agreed slyly, highly amused by her eagerness. But in a nice way, Elena felt, especially since he immediately picked up the stack of books that had been waiting just out of sight and passed them to her. The barrier made it a bit awkward but Elena didn’t care how ungainly she looked as she dumped them on the nearby dresser top. She felt quite greedy as she skimmed over the ornate bejeweled covers (often headless women in lush gowns, she noted), the novels by Alison Weir, Hilary Mantel, Susan Holloway Scott, Sandra Worth, Diane Haeger, Margaret Campbell Barnes. The desire to consume them was almost literal.

Damon seemed to enjoy her reaction. “Well, Marga has more when you finish those,” he revealed, and chuckled at the slightly covetous look in her eye at the word ‘more.’ He didn’t understand the deprivation she’d been dealing with, she felt. “I also brought you a few more clothes,” he added. “Don’t get too excited, it’s basically more of the same but just… more.”

“Thank you,” Elena finally remembered to say. It was one thing to be terminally bored with her five allotted hoodies; but quite another when they actually started wearing out and Marga began to patch them like they were pioneers on the edge of civilization.

She’d spent a lot of time thinking about the supply lines here and hadn’t figured them out yet; when Damon could travel all over the world, promise her everything, and work magic, why couldn’t he conjure up a larger wardrobe? Or at least walk into a Walmart and buy something. Marga as usual was little help on these matters. And it didn’t seem like the kind of question to accost Damon with, when he’d finally brought her more of what she craved.

“I’ll stick around tomorrow and make sure everything’s okay,” Damon said into the silence that had descended. “Then I’ll be heading out again the next day.”

Elena felt oddly disappointed by this. She longed for a little more human contact, she supposed, more conversation. “I’ve been writing about the Reader’s Digest articles,” she said suddenly, and his look of interest was gratifying.

“Oh? Can I read what you’ve written? If you’d rather not it’s okay,” Damon added quickly when she hesitated.

“No, it would be alright,” she decided, and went to fetch one of the notebooks she’d filled. She ran through it quickly in her mind, trying to remember if she’d gotten into any personal topics, but nothing stood out. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “It’s—well, I don’t know.”

Damon flipped through the filled pages, stiff and crinkly with the added ink. Something caught his eye and he started reading for a moment, then he looked up sheepishly. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your supper,” he realized.

Elena looked back at the food, having forgotten about it, despite her hunger. “It’s okay—“

“Marga won’t like it,” he commented with a knowing smirk, and she found herself returning the expression. “Maybe I could stop by later, in an hour or so,” he suggested. The tentative tone was unusual on him. He held up the notebook. “I’ll read this.”

“Okay,” Elena nodded. As much as she wanted to talk to someone, someone who seemed more interested in her thoughts than Marga did, there was still a danger about Damon, the repugnance of being his captive in his game with his brother. Just when she thought she’d put that aside it came rushing back, and she stepped further back into her room, towards her food.

“Okay,” agreed Damon, reading her body language. He lingered a moment longer, then left. Elena shut the door between them quickly; to say she felt conflicted was an understatement. Her diary was definitely getting a workout tonight.

**

Talking to Damon could be a surreal experience, even if the subject of her torrid family history or destiny never came up. Given how old he looked—mid to late twenties—she kept forgetting how long he’d been around, enough to discuss the events and attitudes from her ‘ancient’ Reader’s Digest articles with a perspective at once historical and personal. And generally without drifting into patronizing know-it-all territory, except on purpose for effect.

“Well, it seems like you’ve learned a lot from them, anyway,” he finally suggested.

“Reading them makes me feel like I’m in a timewarp,” Elena admitted. “I look up and forget I’m really in the twenty-first century.” As soon as she said it she realized it sounded like a complaint about her accommodations, and she was embarrassed. Then she remembered she was being held captive in a stone tower, so complaints were nothing to be embarrassed about.

There was a pause, and then Damon said, “You’re very insightful. You’ve retained a lot of the knowledge you’ve picked up and can synthesize it into original ideas.”

It started as a compliment and morphed into psychologist-speak by the end, Elena felt. “Oh. Thank you.”

He passed the notebook back through the barrier. “Do you have any others I can read?”

She felt shy and uncomfortable now, squirming in her chair just inside the doorway. “No, not right now,” she decided.

Damon nodded in understanding. “Have you tried writing any fiction yet?” he probed.

“Yes,” Elena told him, “but I’m not ready for anyone else to see it.”

“Did you ever write fiction before?” he asked curiously.

“No, not really,” she admitted. It seemed like he was getting at something, but she didn’t know what. “Why?”

Damon shrugged nonchalantly. At first it seemed like that was that; but then he leaned forward purposefully. “I know you don’t want to be here, and you think it’s wrong, just a stupid competition between me and Stefan,” he began, and Elena tensed even though she knew he couldn’t cross the barrier. “That’s not all there is to it. You need to be here,” he claimed. “To reach your full potential. To unlock your talents.” Elena’s skepticism easily showed on her face. “Last month you wrote your first short story,” he went on, a slight exaggeration. “Next month you’ll write a novel. You have to be focused, to be taken out of the world so you can concentrate—“

Elena stood abruptly. “Do not tell me I am here for my own good,” she hissed, with a cold clarity she didn’t know she possessed. “This is your doing. The whole thing.” She turned and walked away, towards her desk. There was really no escape in that direction, however.

She heard Damon’s chair creak as he stood. “I enjoyed talking to you,” he said, in a conciliatory tone. She refused to turn around. “I’ll be around tomorrow, then I’m going out again.” He paused to see if she would respond. “Good night.”

Elena waited until she heard his footsteps go down the stairs, then she shut the door and stood in front of it for a long moment, thinking. Then she grabbed her latest diary notebook from the pile on the floor and laid down on the bed, scribbling away.

**

She didn’t dream about Jeremy again, not that she realized anyway, but when she woke up she lay in bed thinking about him, and Damon. She had always been smart, yes—booksmart, a reader. But she’d never read as fast as she did here. She’d never written so much about what she’d read, going back to read things over again, citing sources in an essay for fun! Not exactly fun, she corrected herself—she was trying to save her sanity. There was so little to do here, she had to make the best use of her resources that she could. She’d always daydreamed when she couldn’t read but she’d never felt the urge to write down stories, fiction before; again, it was something to do here, when she had little beyond pen and paper and her own mind.

And time, endless time—Elena felt she didn’t sleep as much here, often only six hours a night now. But she didn’t feel groggy in the morning or sleepy at mid-afternoon; she’d thought it was because she was using less energy physically, but somehow that didn’t make sense, really. She felt—productive. Focused, like Damon said.

She glanced over at the piles of Reader’s Digests on the floor, now joined by a new stack of royal novels. Her hands literally ached to be holding one of those books, to be knowing what was inside it, to dive in to another world and add to her accumulated stock of knowledge. And at the same time, perversely, she wanted to wait, to draw out the anticipation as much as possible.

When Marga came in with breakfast, Elena had showered and dressed in fresh clothes, and was several chapters into Wolf Hall. She had also made a decision, at least for the short term.

“Are those my new clothes?” she asked with interest, watching Marga slowly transfer items from a laundry basket to her dresser.

“New t-shirts, socks, underwear, bras,” Marga confirmed, putting them away. “Pants too. Old ones were getting worn and stained.” Elena rolled her eyes, not expecting Marga to be discreet. “And new hoods.”

“Hoodies,” Elena tried to correct, which was met with a derisive snort.

“I tell Damon you need more clothes,” Marga said suddenly.

This didn’t seem to be connected to the previous conversation, so Elena looked over at her. “What?”

“Some old clothes around here, I fit them for you,” she went on, glacially hanging each hoodie in the closet.

This gruff statement struck Elena as extremely generous. “Oh—thank you, Marga,” she replied, genuinely touched. Though the cynical part of her reminded herself to wait and see what the clothes looked like first. Elena was still thinking about this and almost missed Marga leaving the room. “Marga? Is Damon still here? Could you tell him I’d like to speak to him, please?”

“I tell,” Marga grunted, and shuffled from the room.

Damon appeared at the doorway a few minutes later. “What’s up?” he wanted to know. He seemed a bit tense, not his usual easy-going self.

“Is something wrong?” Elena asked. She turned in her chair to face him but didn’t leave the table, nibbling on her toast.

“No, I’m—I’m restocking,” Damon answered in a preoccupied tone. “Making sure you guys have enough supplies before I go.”

“Should I be worried about that?” Elena wanted to know, business-like. “Marga mentioned we were running low—“

Damon made a noise of exasperation. “No, don’t worry about it,” he assured her, which she could have guessed. “Marga can always go to the village market, it’s just less convenient.” Elena indicated her curiosity. “It’s several miles away, and she has to go by horse-cart,” he explained. “No cars. But she has a garden and orchard on site, and some farm animals. Don’t worry about going hungry.”

“Marga takes care of farm animals?” Elena asked in amazement. “And a garden? By herself?”

Damon smirked. “She’s a tough old bird,” he said affectionately. “Cooks everything from scratch, too, though I swear she hasn’t learned a new recipe in three hundred years.”

“She offered to fit some old clothes for me,” Elena told him, now feeling slightly guilty about adding to the old woman’s duties.

“She loves it,” Damon insisted. “Seriously, when she has no one to look after she’s a menace.” He paused a moment to see if there was anything else. “Well, I hate to be so abrupt, but—“

“My mom and brother and I spent a few months living in England,” Elena finally revealed, carefully. “She was doing research for her book on medieval church paintings.” Damon’s eyes narrowed. “There was a really nice professor there, something Peabody, like Alex or August. Kind of a grandfather figure to me and Jeremy. He said if we ever needed anything we should contact him in London.”

Damon stared through her for a minute. “Thank you,” he finally said, and dashed away. Elena went back to her breakfast, hoping she’d done the right thing.

**

A few days later, Damon reappeared at Elena’s door. She glanced up from her Royal Diaries book with hope but was discouraged by the expression on his face. “You didn’t find Jeremy,” she guessed.

“Almost,” he responded, drawing up a chair. “Almost!” He sounded alternately frustrated and triumphant. “I was so close. I found that professor—Alistair Peabody—and followed him to his little country cottage. Of course he claimed he hadn’t seen Jeremy in years, but he was lying.”

“Did you actually see Jeremy?” Elena asked eagerly.

“Caught a glimpse as he putted away on a scooter,” Damon admitted. The thought cheered Elena considerably, that her brother was still in one piece out there. “Then Stefan showed up,” Damon went on, rolling his eyes, “and I had to concentrate on keeping him from getting Jeremy, so we both lost him.”

Elena was unimpressed. “I’d think you’d be better at this, what with all your experience,” she judged coolly, going back to her book.

“Hey now, don’t get all snooty,” Damon warned. “I came to bring you some stuff.”

Elena peered over the edge of her book. “What stuff?”

“A cluttered room leads to a cluttered mind,” Damon pontificated, nodding to the side. Elena turned and did a triple-take as she realized there was now a large, elaborate set of bookcases around the window between the bed and the bathroom, which had not been there before.

She scrambled off the bed and went to examine them—one tall case on either side of the window, and a long low case underneath the window, with a padded top that functioned as a bench and windowseat. Her piles of books and notebooks had been moved aside. “Thought you’d want to arrange those yourself,” Damon told her, in a self-satisfied way.

“Wow,” Elena sighed. “I really like it.” She imagined the shelves totally filled with books—something to dream about later.

“And check out what’s behind door number two,” he instructed, indicating the bathroom door.

Suspiciously Elena opened the door—which had not been closed before—and noticed the room was brighter and more spacious. There was more counterspace around the sink and a stack of drawers under it—not that Elena really had much to put there—and most impressive of all, the bathtub had been enlarged.

“I think I could actually take a nice bath in that tub,” Elena enthused, walking back into the main room. She was by no means a large person, but the typical bathtub she’d experienced in her life did not work like the ones people on TV had, where they could really sink down into the hot water and soak. She couldn’t wait to try it.

“Don’t forget door number three,” Damon teased, looking towards the other side of the room. At first Elena thought he meant the closet, then she realized there was an entirely new door in that wall, towards the outside, and the desk was now located in between it and the closet.

Elena hurried over to the new door and threw it open, revealing a room about the size of her current one, with the same bare stone walls and floor, and two windows. Inside was a treadmill, a rowing machine, and a padded floor mat. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t be enough to make Elena misty-eyed, but these circumstances were hardly normal.