07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

was proper javelin size, had gone through Damon’s shoulder, which must hurt like hell, in addition to
having splattered a blood drop right at the corner of his mouth. But far more annoying than that was
the fact that he had closed his eyes against her. That was how Elena thought of it. He was shutting
them out deliberately—maybe because he was angry; maybe because of the pain in his shoulder. But it
reminded her of the steel wall feeling she’d gotten the last time she’d tried to touch his mind—and,
damn, couldn’t he tell he was scaring them?
“Open your eyes, Damon,” she said, flushing, because that was what he wanted her to
say. He really was the greatest manipulator of all. “Open your eyes, I said!” Now she was really
irritated. “Don’t play possum, because you’re not fooling anyone, and we’ve really had enough!” She
was about to shake him hard when something lifted her into the air, into Stefan’s line of vision.
Stefan was in pain, but surely not as badly as Damon, so she was looking back to curse
Damon when Stefan said harshly, “Elena, he can’t!”
For just the tiniest fleeting instant the words sounded like nonsense to her. Not only
garbled, but meaningless, like saying someone couldn’t stop their appendix from doing—whatever it
was an appendix did. That was all the respite that she got, and then she had to deal with what her eyes
were showing her.
Damon wasn’t pinned by his shoulder. He’d been staked, just slightly to the left of center
of his torso.
Exactly where his heart was.
Words drifted back to her. Words that someone had once said—although she couldn’t
remember who right now. “You can’t kill a vampire so easily. We only die if you stake us through
the heart….”
Die? Damon die? This was some kind of mistake…
“Open your eyes!” “Elena, he can’t!”
But she knew, without knowing how, that Damon wasn’t dead. She wasn’t surprised that
Stefan didn’t know it; it was a hum on a private frequency between her and Damon.
“Come on, hurry, give me your axe,” she said, so desperately, and with such an air of
knowledge that Stefan handed it over wordlessly, and obeyed when she told him to steady the curving
spider-leg branch from above and below. Then with a few quick strokes of the axe she cut through the
black branch that was thick enough in circumference that she couldn’t have clasped her fingers around
it. It was done in a spurt of pure adrenaline, but she knew it awed Stefan and allowed him to let her
continue doing it.
When she was finished, she had a loose spider-leg branch that drooped back to the tree,
anchored to nothing—and something that looked more like a proper stake in Damon.
It wasn’t until she began pulling upward on the stake that a horrified Stefan made her
stop.
“Elena! Elena, I wouldn’t lie to you! This is just what these branches are for. For
intruders who are vampires. Look, love—see.” He was showing her another of the spider legs that
was anchored in the sand, and the barbs on it. Just like the backward-facing tines of a primitive stone
arrowhead.
“These branches are meant to be like this,” Stefan was saying. “And if you pulled up on
it hard enough, you’d just—just end up pulling out chunks of—his heart.”
Elena froze. She wasn’t sure she really could understand the words—she couldn’t allow
herself to, or she might picture it. But it didn’t matter.
“I’ll destroy it some other way,” she said shortly, looking at Stefan but not able to see the