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40<br />
But after an endless time in the soft, kind darkness, something was forcing Elena back up into light.<br />
Real light. Not the terrible green half-light of the Tree. Even through shut eyelids she could see it, feel<br />
its heat. A yellow sun. Where was she? She couldn’t remember.<br />
And she didn’t care. Something was saying inside her that the gentle darkness was better.<br />
But then she remembered a name.<br />
Stefan.<br />
Stefan was…?<br />
Stefan was the one who…the one she loved. But he’d never understood that love was not<br />
singular. He’d never understood that she could be in love with Damon and that it would never change<br />
an atom’s worth of her love for him. Or that his lack of understanding had been so wrenching and<br />
painful that she had felt torn into two different people at times.<br />
But now, even before she opened her eyes, she realized that she was drinking. She was<br />
drinking the blood of a vampire, and that vampire wasn’t Stefan. <strong>The</strong>re was something unique in this<br />
blood. It was deeper and spicier and more heavy, all at once.<br />
She couldn’t help opening her eyes. For some reason she didn’t understand, they flew<br />
open and she tried immediately to focus on the scent and feeling and color of whoever was bending<br />
over her, holding her.<br />
She couldn’t understand, either, her sense of letdown when she slowly realized that it<br />
was Sage leaning over her, holding her gently but securely to his neck, with his bronze chest bare and<br />
warm from the sunlight.<br />
But she was lying down flat, on grass, from what her hands could feel…and for some<br />
reason her head was cold. Very cold.<br />
Cold and wet.<br />
She stopped drinking and tried to sit up. <strong>The</strong> light grip became firmer. She heard Sage’s<br />
voice say, and felt the rumbling in his chest as he said it, “Ma pauvre petite, you must drink more in a<br />
moment or so. And your hair has still some of the ashes in it.”<br />
Ashes? Ashes? Didn’t you put ashes on your head for…now what had she been thinking<br />
about? It was as if there was a block in her mind, keeping her from getting close to…something. But<br />
she wasn’t going to be told what to do.<br />
Elena sat up.<br />
She was in—yes, she was very sure—the kitsune paradise, and until a moment ago her<br />
body had been arched back, so that her hair had been in the clear little stream that she had seen
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