"I'm real y sorry,"Elena said gently, feeling the void of Meredith's absence. Meredith would be a great help to both of them now. "So, shal we continue? And where are we heading? I'm al turned around."
Damon stood. "I think we just keep in a straight line. The path is narrow after this - and who knows what the next trial is?"
The path was narrow - and misty. Just as before, it started in filmy veils and ended up blinding them. Elena let Stefan, with his catlike reflexes, go first, and she held on to his pack.
Behind her, Bonnie clung like a burr. Just when Elena thought she was going to scream if she had to keep traveling through the white blanket any farther, it cleared.
They were near the top of some mountain.
Elena took off after Bonnie, who had hurried ahead at the sight of transparent air. She was just fast enough to grab on to Bonnie's pack and pul her backward as she reached the place where the land stopped.
"No way!"Bonnie cried, setting up a clamoring echo from below. "There is no way I'm going across that!"
That was a chasm with a very thin bridge spanning it.
The chasm was frosty white on either side at the top, but when Elena gripped the bridge's ice-cold metal poles and leaned a little forward she could see glacial blues and greens at the very bottom. A chil wind hit her face.
The gap between this bit of the world and the next bit directly in front of them was about a hundred yards long.
Elena looked from the shadowy depths to the slender bridge, which was made of wooden slats and just wide enough for one person to walk on. It was supported here and there by ropes which ran to the sides of the chasm and were sunk with metal posts into barren, icy rock.
It also swooped magnificently down and then back up again.
Even looking at it gave the eye a sort of mini-thril ride. The only problem was that it didn't include a safety belt, a seat, two handrails, and a uniformed guide saying, "Hands and feet must be kept inside the attraction at alltimes!"It did have a single, thin, creeper-woven rope to hold on to on the left.
"Look,"Stefan was saying, as quietly and intently as Elena had ever heard him speak, "we can hold onto each other. We can go go one by one, very slowly - "
"NOOO!" Bonnie put into that one word a psychic shriek that almost defeaned Elena. "No, no, no, no, NO! You don't understand! I can't DO IT!" She flung her backpack down.
Then she began laughing and crying at the same time in a ful -blown attack of hysterics. Elena had an impulse to dash water in her face. She had a stronger impulse to throw herself down beside Bonnie and shriek, "And neither can I!
It's insane!"But what good would that do?
A few minutes later Damon was talking quietly to Bonnie, unaffected by the outburst. Stefan was pacing in circles.
Elena was trying to think of Plan A, while a little voice chanted inside her head, You can't do it, you can't do it, you can't do it, either.
This was al just a phobia. They could probably train Bonnie out of it - if, say, they had a year or two.
Stefan, on one of his circular trips near her, said, "And how are you about heights, love?"
Elena decided to put a brave face on it. "I don't know. I think I can do it."
Stefan looked pleased. "To save your hometown."
"Yes...but it's too bad nothing works here. I could try to use my Wings for flying, but I can't control them - "
And that kind of magic is simply not available here, Stefan's voice said in her mind.
But telepathy is. You can hear me, too, can't you?
They thought of the answer simultaneously, and Elena saw the light of the idea breaking on Stefan's face even as she began to speak.
"Influence Bonnie! Make her think she's a tightrope walker -
a performer since she was a toddler. But don't make her too playful so she doesn't bounce the rest of us off!"
With that light in his face, Stefan looked...too good. He seized both Elena's hands, whirled her around once as if she weighed nothing, picked her up, and kissed her.
And kissed her.
And kissed her until Elena felt her soul dripping off her fingertips.
They shouldn't have done it in front of Damon. But Elena's euphoria was clouding