Phantom Page 0,87

Elena clutched her stomach. Bonnie lost her balance and fel back to a sitting position on the ground, her eyes clenched shut. Matt gave a choked-off exclamation and gasped. "What is that?"

Elena waited for the pain to fade again before she answered him. Her knees were wobbling. She felt dizzy and sick. "Another reason we need to get out of here," she said.

"The phantom's using us to increase its power. I think it needs us here to do that. And if we don't find the gate soon, we might be too weak to make it home."

She looked around again, the uniformity almost dizzying. Each rosebush was centered in a smal circular bed of richlooking dark loam. Between these circles, the grass of the field was velvety smooth, like the lawn of an English manor house or a real y good golf course.

"Okay," Elena said, and took a deep, calming breath.

"Let's spread out and look careful y. We'l stay about ten feet apart from one another and go from one end of this rose garden to the other, searching. Look around careful y

- anything that's at al different from the rest of the field could be the clue we need to find the way out."

"We're going to search the whole field?" Bonnie asked, sounding dismayed. "It's huge."

"We'l just do one little bit at a time," Elena said encouragingly.

They started in a spread-out line, gazing intently back and forth, up and down. At first there was only the silence of focused concentration as they searched. There was no sign of a gate. Step by step through the field, nothing changed. Endless rows of identical rosebushes stretched in al directions, spaced about three feet from one another, enough room between them for one person to easily pass. The eternal midday sun beat down uncomfortably on the tops of their heads, and Elena wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead. The scent of roses hung heavily in the warm air; at first Elena had found it pleasant, but now it was nauseating, like a too-sweet perfume. The perfect stalks of grass bent under her feet, then sprang up again, uncrushed, as if she had never passed.

"I wish there were a breeze," Bonnie complained. "But I don't think the wind ever blows here."

"This field must come to an end sometime," Elena said desperately. "It can't just go on forever." There was a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, though, that suggested to her that maybe it could go on forever. This wasn't her world, after al . The rules were different here.

"So where's Damon now?" Bonnie asked suddenly. She wasn't looking at Elena. She was keeping up the same steady pace, the same careful, systematic gaze. But there was a note of strain in her voice, and Elena broke her own search to glance at her quickly.

Then one possible answer to Bonnie's question hit Elena and she stopped dead. "That's it!" she said. "Bonnie, Matt, I think Damon might be here. Or not here, not in the rose garden, but somewhere in the Nether World, in the Dark Dimension." They looked at her blankly.

"Damon was going to try to come here to look for the phantom," Elena explained. "He thought it fol owed us home from here when we came back to our own world, so this is probably where he'd start searching for its physical body. The last time I saw him, he told me that he thought he would be able to fight it better from here, where it came from. If he is here, maybe he can help us get back to Fel 's Church."

Damon, please be here somewhere. Please help us, she begged silently.

Just then, something caught her eye. Ahead of them, between two rosebushes that looked just the same as any other two rosebushes in the garden, there was the slightest shift, the tiniest distortion. It looked like the heat shimmer that would sometimes appear over the highway on the hottest, most stil days of summer as the sun's rays bounced off the asphalt.

No asphalt here to radiate back the sun's heat. But something had to be causing that shimmer.

Unless she was imagining it. Were her eyes playing tricks on her, showing her a mirage among the rosebushes?

"Do you see that?" she asked the others. "Over there, just a little to the right?"

They stopped and peered careful y.

"Maybe?" Bonnie said hesitantly.

"I think so," Matt said. "Like hot air rising, right?"

"Right," Elena said. She frowned, estimating the