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But after an endless ti Elena back up into light Real light

Not the terrible green half-light of the Tree Even through shut eyelids she could see it, feel its heat A yel ow sun Where was she? She couldn’t re inside her that the gentle darkness was better But then she remembered a name

Stefan

Stefan was?

Stefan was the one whothe one she loved But he’d never understood that love was not singular He’d never understood that she could be in love with Dae an atom’s worth of her love for hi and painful that she had felt torn into two different people at times

But now, even before she opened her eyes, she realized that she was drinking She was drinking the blood of a va unique in this blood It was deeper and spicier andher eyes For some reason she didn’t understand, they flew open and she tried i and color of whoever was bending over her, holding her

She couldn’t understand, either, her sense of letdohen she slowly realized that it was Sage leaning over her, holding her gently but securely to his neck, with his bronze chest bare and warht

But she was lying down flat, on grass, from what her hands could feeland for some reason her head was cold Very cold

Cold and wet

She stopped drinking and tried to sit up The light grip becae’s voice say, and felt the ru in his chest as he said it, "Ma pauvre petite, you must drink more in a moment or so And your hair has Stillsome of the ashes in it"

Ashes? Ashes? Didn’t you put ashes on your head fornohat had she been thinking about? It was as if there was a block in herBut she wasn’t going to be told what to do

Elena sat up

She was in - yes, she was very sure - the kitsune paradise, and until a o her body had been arched back, so that her hair had been in the clear little stream that she had seen earlier Stefan and Bonnie had been washing soed with black as well: Stefan had a big swath across one cheekbone, and Bonnie had faint gray streaks below her eyes

Crying Bonnie had been crying She was Stillcrying, in little sobs that she was trying to suppress And now that Elena looked harder she could see that Stefan’s eyelids were swol en and that he had been crying too

Elena’s lips were nue, iping his eyes furtively Her throat ached, not just inside, where sobbing and gasping ht make it hurt, but outside, too She had a picture of herself slashing at her own neck with a knife

Through her nue said unsteadily "Not yet But Stefan and I, we both had to give you massive amounts of blood You ht on the brink"

That explained how she felt Probably Da that she would become one, wicked boy Instinctively, she held out her hand to Stefan Maybe she could help hi for a little while,"she said "You don’t have to be sad"But she herself Stillfelt very wrong She hadn’t felt this wrong since she’d seen Stefan in prison and had thought that he would die at any moment