Stefan argued. "Besides, Bonnie's hair is red, not pink."
Meredith nodded grudgingly. "I guess you're right. White for Matt, though."
"Real y?" Stefan asked. He didn't know what he would have chosen for Matt. American-flag patterned, maybe, if they had had it.
"He's the purest person I know," Meredith said softly. Alaric raised an eyebrow at her and she elbowed him.
"Pure in spirit, I mean. What you see is what you get with Matt, and he's good and truehearted al the way through."
"I suppose so," said Stefan, and he watched without comment as Meredith chose a dark brown candle for herself.
Alaric shuffled through the bag and picked a dark green candle, and Celia selected one of pale lavender. Mrs. Flowers took the bag with the remaining candles and stashed it on a high shelf near the garage doors, between a bag of potting soil and what looked like an old-fashioned kerosene lantern.
They al sat down on the garage floor in a semicircle, outside the diagram, facing toward the empty inner circle, holding their unlit candles. The sleepers lay behind them, and Meredith held Bonnie's candle in her lap as wel as her own; Stefan took Elena's, and Alaric Matt's.
"Now we anoint them with our blood," Alaric said. They al looked at him, and he shrugged defensively. "It's what the book says."
Meredith removed a smal pocketknife from her bag, cut her finger, and quickly, matter-of-factly, smeared a stripe of blood from the top to the bottom of her brown candle, then passed the knife to Alaric along with a little bottle of disinfectant. One by one, the others fol owed her lead.
"This is real y unsanitary," Celia said, wincing, but she fol owed through.
Stefan was very aware of the smel of human blood in such an enclosed space. Even though he'd just fed, his canines prickled in an automatic response.
Meredith picked up the candles and walked to their sleeping friends, crossing from one to the next and raising their hands to make a swift cut and wipe their blood against their candles. Not one of them even flinched. When she had finished, Meredith redistributed the sleepers' candles and returned to her spot.
Alaric began to read, in Latin, the first words of the spel . After a few sentences, he hesitated at a word and Stefan silently took the grimoire. Smoothly he picked up where Alaric had left off. The words flowed off his tongue, the feel of the Latin on his lips reminding him of hours spent with his childhood tutor hundreds of years ago, and of a period when he lived in a monastery in England during the early days of his struggle with vampirism.
When the time came, he snapped his fingers and, with a touch of Power, his candle lit itself. He handed it to Meredith, who dripped a little of the melted wax onto the garage floor at the edge of the diagram and stuck the candle there. One by one, at the appropriate points in the ritual, he lit a candle and she placed it, until there was a little row of multicolored candles bravely burning between them and the chalk outlines of the diagram.
Stefan read on. Suddenly the pages of the book began to flutter. A cold, unnatural wind rose inside the closed garage, and the flames of the candles flickered wildly and then blew out. Two candles fel over. Meredith's long hair whipped around her face.
"This isn't supposed to happen," Alaric shouted. But Stefan just squinted his eyes against the gale and read on.
The pitch-blackness and the unpleasant sensation of fal ing lasted for only a moment, and then Elena landed jarringly on both feet and staggered forward, clutching Matt's and Bonnie's hands.
They were in a dim octagonal room lined with doors. A single piece of furniture sat in the center. Behind the lone desk lounged a tanned, beautiful, amazingly muscular, bare-chested vampire with a long, spiraling mane of bronze hair fal ing past his shoulders.
Instantly Elena knew where she was.
"We're here." She gasped. "The Gatehouse!"
Sage leaped to his feet on the other side of the desk, his face almost comical y surprised. "Elena?" he exclaimed.
"Bonnie? Matt? What's going on? Qu'est-ce qui arrive?"
Usual y, Elena would have been relieved to see Sage, who had always been kind and helpful to her, but she had to get to Damon. She knew where he must be. She could almost hear him cal ing to her.
She strode across the empty room with barely a glance at the startled gatekeeper, pul ing Matt and Bonnie along with her.
"Sorry, Sage," she said as she reached the door she wanted. "We've got to find Damon."
"Damon?" he said. "He's back again?" and then they passed through, ignoring Sage's shouts of "Stop! Arretezvous!"
The door closed behind them, and they found themselves in a landscape of ash. Nothing grew here, and there were no landmarks. Harsh winds had blown the fine black ash into shifting hil s and val eys. As they watched, a strong gust caught at the light top layer of ash and sent it flying in a cloud that soon settled into new shapes. Below the lighter ash, they could see swamps of wet, muddy ash. Nearby was an ash-choked pool of stil water. Nothing but ash and mud, except for an occasional scorched and blackened bit of wood.
Above them was a twilit sky in which hung a huge planet and two great moons, one a swirling bluish white, the other silvery.
"Where are we?" said Matt, gaping up at the sky.
"Once this was a world - a moon, technical y - that was shaded by a huge tree," Elena told him, walking steadily forward. "Until I destroyed it. This is where Damon died."
She felt rather than saw Matt and Bonnie exchange a glance. "But, uh, then he came back, right? You saw him in Fel 's Church the other night, didn't you?" Matt said hesitantly. "Why are we here now?"
"I know that Damon's close," Elena said impatiently. "I can feel him. He's come back here. Maybe this is where he began his search for the phantom." They kept walking. Soon they were not so much walking as wading through black ash that stuck to their legs in nasty thick clumps. The mud underneath the ash clung to their shoes, releasing them at each step with a wet sucking sound.
They were almost there. She could feel it. Elena picked up the pace, and the others, stil linked to her, hurried to keep up. The ash was thicker and deeper here because they were approaching where the trunk had been, the very center of this world. Elena remembered it exploding, shooting up into the sky like a rocket, disintegrating as it went. Damon's body had lain underneath and had been completely buried in the fal ing ash.