07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

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“Oi!” Damon shouted from outside the palanquin. “Is anybody else looking at this?”
Elena was. Both Stefan and Bonnie had their eyes shut; Bonnie was wrapped in blankets
and cuddled against Elena. They had rolled down all the curtains of the palanquin except one.
But Elena had watched through the single window, and had seen how tendrils of fog had
begun drifting by, first just filmy tatters of mist, but then longer, fuller veils, and finally blankets,
engulfing them whole. It seemed to her that they were being deliberately cut off from even the perilous
Dark Dimension, that they were passing a border into a place they weren’t meant to know about, much
less enter.
“How do we know we’re going in the right direction?” Elena shouted to Damon after
Stefan and Bonnie woke. She was glad to be able to talk again.
“The thurgs know,” Damon called back. “You set them on a line and they walk that line
until somebody stops them, or—”
“Or what?” Elena yelled out of the opening.
“Until we get to a place like this.”
This was obviously bait, and neither Stefan nor Elena could resist taking it—especially
when the thurg they were riding stopped.
“Stay here,” Elena said to Bonnie. She pushed a curtain out of the way and found herself
looking too far down at white ground. God, these thurgs were big. The next moment, though, Stefan
was on the ground holding up his arms.
“Jump!”
“Can’t you come up and float me?”
“Sorry. Something about this place inhibits Power.”
Elena didn’t give herself time to think. She launched into the air and Stefan caught her
neatly. Spontaneously, she clung to him, and felt the familiar comfort of his embrace.
Then he said, “Come look at this.”
They had reached a place where the land ended and the mist divided, like curtains being
held to either side. Directly in front of them was a frozen lake. A silvery frozen lake, almost perfectly
round in shape.
“Lake Mirror?” Damon said, cocking his head to one side.
“I always thought that was a fairy tale,” Stefan said.
“Welcome to Bonnie’s storybook.”
Lake Mirror formed a vast body of water in front of them, frozen right into the ice sheet