market and make a fortune.
"We look at things...differently," Shinichi had said, fixing Damon with those strange golden eyes. "Money doesn't mean much to us. What does? The deathbed agonies of an old rogue who fears he's going to hell. Watching him sweat, trying to remember encounters he's long forgotten. A baby's first conscious tear of loneliness. The emotions of an unfaithful wife when her husband catches her with her lover. A maiden's...well, her first kiss and her first night of discovery. A brother willing to die for his brother. Things like that."
And many other things that couldn't be mentioned in polite company, Damon thought. A lot were about pain. They were emotional leeches, sucking up the feelings of mortals to make up for the emptiness of their own souls.
He could feel the sickness inside him again as he tried to imagine - to calculate - the pain Elena must have felt, leaping out of his car. She must have expected an agonizing death - but it was still better than staying with him.
This time, before entering the door that had been a white-tiled bathroom, he thought,Kitchen, modern, with plenty of ice packs in the freezer.
Nor was he disappointed. He found himself in a strongly masculine kitchen, with chrome appliances and black-and-white tiling. In the freezer: six ice packs. He took three back to Elena and put one around her shoulder, one at her elbow, and one around her ankle. Then he went back into the kitchen's spotless beauty for a glass of ice-cold water.
Tired. So tired.
Elena felt as if her body were weighted with lead.
Every limb...every thought...lapped in lead.
For instance, there was something she was supposed to be doing - or not doing - right now. But she couldn't make the thought come to the surface of her mind. It was too heavy. Everything was too heavy. She couldn't even open her eyes.
A scraping sound. Someone was near, on a chair. Then there was liquid coolness on her lips, just a few drops, but it stimulated her to try to hold the cup herself and drink. Oh, delicious water. It tasted better than anything she'd ever had before. Her shoulder hurt terribly, but it was worth the pain to drink and drink - no! The glass was being pulled away. She tried, feebly, to hang onto it, but it was pulled out of her grasp.
Then she tried to touch her shoulder, but those gentle, invisible hands wouldn't let her, not until they had washed her own hands with warm water. After that they packed the ice packs around her and wrapped her like a mummy in a sheet. The cold numbed her immediate feelings of pain, although there were other pains, deep inside....
It was all too difficult to think about. As the hands removed the ice packs again - she was shivering with cold now - she let herself lapse back into sleep.
Damon treated Elena and dozed, treated and dozed. In the perfectly appointed bathroom, he found a tortoiseshell hairbrush and a comb. They looked serviceable. And one thing he knew for certain: Elena's hair had never looked like this in her life - or unlife. He tried to stroke the brush gently through her hair and found that the tangles were much harder to get out than he'd imagined. When he pulled harder on the brush, she moved and murmured in that strange sleep-language of hers.
And, finally, it was the hair brushing that did it. Elena, without opening her eyes, reached up and took the brush from his hand and then, when it hit a major tangle, frowned, reached up to grasp a fistful and try to get the brush through it. Damon sympathized. He'd had long hair at times during his centuries of existence - when it couldn't be helped, and though his hair was as naturally fine as Elena's, he knew the frustrated feeling that you were ripping your hair out by the roots. Damon was about to take the brush from her again, when she opened her eyes.
"What - ?" she said, and then she blinked.
Damon had tensed, ready to push her into mental blackout if it were necessary. But she didn't even try to hit him with the brush.
"What...happened?" What Elena was feeling was clear: she didn't like this. She was unhappy about another awakening with only a vague idea of what had been going on when she slept.
As Damon, poised for fight or flight, watched her face, she slowly began to put together what