‘Forget we were ever here. Forget what we look like. Forget who brought us in, our names and everything about us.’
‘Who’s us?’ the guard asked, hypnotised but slow on the uptake.
‘The man I came in with,’ Damon snapped, pointing at me. The guard nodded faintly. ‘Forget everything about us. And then – send over the other guard, all right?’
The guard wandered back to his post, somewhat dizzily at first, then cocked his head as if he had just remembered something. He went to one of the guards on patrol and pointed at the jail cell. Not at Damon, through Damon. It was as though Damon didn’t exist anymore in his reality.
‘One down,’ Damon muttered. He looked tense. Again I wondered how many people he really could control at once.
The second guard approached. He had a scar across his face that twisted one eye shut, and he smacked his billy club as he walked. But before Damon could compel him, he said the absolute last thing we expected.
‘Your lawyer is here.’
I looked at my brother. He looked back at me in equal surprise. He raised an eyebrow as if to say: Did you arrange this somehow?
I very slightly shook my head. Damon straightened his shoulders as a clang sounded and the door to the stockade opened. The smell of rotten eggs and death filled the room as another man walked in – the lawyer.
He was huge. Larger than the prisoner Damon had knocked out, with long arms and an enormous chest. His hands were monstrous, with stubby fingers that gripped a leather portfolio.
He came into the room slowly, with the careful tread of someone or something too large and dangerous for its surroundings, like the pace of a panther around its tiny circus cage.
His clothing was of a foreign cut, comfortable, rich linen and silk that allowed his massive body to move easily beneath its folds.
And his eyes…
They were small and blue, but not the clear blue of my brother’s. They were mottled, milky almost, and too ancient for the rest of his body, moving quickly but incorrectly, like a bird’s or a lizard’s gaze, but with a powerful intelligence behind it.
This man was not human.
He didn’t feel like a vampire, not exactly. But there was something just below his surface waiting for a chance to explode. The Power radiating from him was greater than anything I had experienced. And my instincts told me that even though he had come under the auspices of representing us, this man was not here to help us.
He surveyed us in the jail cell and smiled slightly.
‘You may go,’ he said to the guard behind him. His voice didn’t even rise, but quietly reverberated in a way that carried to the far end of the empty holding cells. And yet they went. Quickly, and with something like relief on their faces.
We were left alone with this beast.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said, smiling in a way that made me sick.
‘Who are you?’ Damon asked, clearly trying to sound bored. But I could hear the fear in his voice.
‘Who am I?’ the man repeated in a heavy accent. ‘Does it help to know the name of the one who will kill you? It didn’t seem any comfort to your wives.’
The words fell like stones to the floor, heavy and final. The man casually put a giant hand up to rest on a bar.
‘You killed the Sutherlands,’ I whispered.
‘Yes.’ He smiled and pursed his lips. ‘It was fun.’
‘You tore them apart like paper dolls,’ I said, even though I knew he could tear me apart, too, could scatter my limbs like the petals that had lined my wedding altar. ‘You…broke them.’
‘Young vampire, you must know the hunger of the beast,’ he said with a smile that wasn’t at all amused. ‘There are other hungers, for other things, that once awoken cannot rest until they are satisfied.’
The whites of the man’s eyes glowed red, and there was a hush in the air, as if great Power was being summoned. I could practically smell the fear coiling off Damon in large strips.
But I began to grow angry.
Rage boiled in my stomach and shot out through my body. This man had butchered an innocent family and enjoyed it. This was what my new life as a vampire meant – layers and layers of evil, and even more horror and destruction, just when I felt I had reached the very bottom.
‘Why?’ I demanded, coming forward as far as the bars would let me. ‘What did they ever do to you?’
‘Why?’ the beast asked. He leaned forward, mocking my bravado. As he neared, mere centimetres from my face, a sickening stench of old blood and decay swept over me. It was like a thousand years of death and dismemberment followed him around, a trophy from each corpse he was responsible for.
‘Recompense.’ He said each syllable carefully.
‘Recompense?’ I echoed.
He bared his teeth. ‘Yes, recompense. For taking Katherine. And destroying any chance to break the curse.’
Katherine? What did she have to do with all of this, with this abomination in front of us? With the Sutherlands? And what curse?
I looked over at Damon. She had always shared more details of her life, of being a vampire, with him. But my brother was wide-eyed and gaping like a fish, even more stunned by hearing her name than I was.
I thought about the blissful, ignorant weeks I’d spent as her slave and lover, never imagining that she would lead me straight into hell.
The man backed up a few steps, including Damon in his foul stare.
‘Yes, you understand now,’ he said, nodding. But we didn’t.
‘I—’ Damon began to speak.
‘SILENCE!’ the man roared. Suddenly he was pressed up against the bars, a blackened fingernail inches from Damon’s throat. ‘Do you dare deny it?’
With a chilling deliberateness he pushed an iron bar aside like it was a curtain. The metal screamed in agony. In a flash of darkness he had stepped through, and wrapped a giant hand around each of our throats.
‘You took Katherine. I take your new life from you. An eye for an eye, as you people are fond of saying. Right?’
‘I…don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, choking.
The monster threw back his head and laughed.
‘Of course you don’t.’ He snapped his head back, suddenly fixing me with his eyes and a sneer on his lips. He didn’t believe me. ‘Katherine never mentioned Klaus?’
Even after her death, Katherine continued to haunt us. I looked over at Damon. There was a pained, heartbroken look on his face. It was gone in an instant, but for that one moment I thought I saw through to my old brother. He was shocked by the fact that Katherine, the love of his life, had been involved with a creature as heartless as the one that stood before us. I felt for him.
Unbidden, half a dozen images of Katherine came to my mind. Her amber eyes that commanded attention. Her long black hair hanging in waves around her neck, as if she had just done something that might have dishevelled it. Her tiny waist and mischievous smile. She had been irresistible. And Damon and I weren’t the only ones to have felt her pull.
The man tightened his grip on my throat, and I could hear the groaning of vertebrae. In a moment we would be on the floor, our necks snapped as easily as that of the prisoner Damon had killed.
Then suddenly I was free. Damon fell to the ground beside me, also released from the stony grip that held him.
From outside the cell, the monster smiled viciously.
‘I will see you two later,’ he promised.
And then, almost as an afterthought, with one finger he delicately pushed the jail bars back into place.
‘And remember, I am always watching.’
CHAPTER 21
Damon and I remained in the cell for several minutes after the man left, too stunned to even contemplate escaping. The guards didn’t come back in with the keys. I didn’t blame them.
I cursed, slamming the bars. It seemed that no matter what I decided to do, which way I turned, things got worse. And the Sutherlands…they had been innocent bystand
ers, swept up in the path of destruction just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. While my brother didn’t actively cause their deaths, he was no less responsible. I turned on him, ready to tear him apart.
And then I saw the look on his face.
Damon’s eyes had glazed over and he leaned against the wall for support. He’d worn the same dazed expression for weeks after he’d woken up as a vampire and discovered that Katherine was dead.
‘What was that?’ he whispered, finally looking at me.
But I had no idea what that was. All I knew was that it was more powerful, more dangerous, more deadly than any creature I’d ever encountered. Anger at my brother drained away and something like exhaustion set in. ‘I’m not sure, though I think he left me a message,’ I said, remembering the bloody scrawl on the side of the Sutherlands’ home. ‘But what was that about Katherine? What was he to her?’
Damon shrugged. ‘I have no idea. She never told me about that…thing.’
‘He said we took her from him. What the hell does that mean? What curse is he talking about? Did Emily cast a spell on someone?’ I said. I began to pace, my mind racing.
‘I’m guessing it means he believes we killed her. Which you did, brother,’ Damon said.
In a pique, he sat down, stretched his legs out and put his hands behind his head, pillowing it against the stone. I would get no more answers out of him.
I slid down against the bars and buried my head in my hands, thinking of my time with Katherine. Had she ever said anything about her past? Let anything slip? But I had been so completely under her thrall that it was impossible to know what had been real and what she had compelled me to believe. Though I remembered biting her, I didn’t have any memory of her feeding me her blood. But she must have often, as I had enough of her blood in my system to come back as a vampire after my father shot me. In a funny way, Katherine had made me. We were almost like her children.
My mind snagged. ‘Did Katherine ever tell you about her sire?’ I asked, putting words to a horrible thought forming in my mind. ‘The vampire who made her?’
Damon looked up at me, shocked out of his sulk. ‘You think. .. ?’
I nodded.
He leaned back and knocked his head against the wall. He had been genuinely in love with Katherine. I wondered if meeting her maker made our little tryst in Mystic Falls seem like a speck in the vastness of eternity.
‘I suppose we should call a guard over and compel him to free us,’ he said tiredly.
A sound of commotion from the lobby stopped us. There were muffled thuds, like bodies hitting the floor.
There was a scream. It was high-pitched and hard to tell whether it came from a woman or a man, so great was the pain. Then came the grating sound of a desk being moved, and what might have been a wooden chair being shattered against the wall.
I stood. So did Damon.
We glanced at each other. The pocket watch Winfield had given me ticked loudly in the sudden silence.
The door to the stockade opened once again and in came a girl wearing men’s trousers and black braces, a long blonde braid over her shoulder.
‘Lexi!’ I gasped.
‘I’m growing tired of bailing you boys out,’ she said as she shook the key at us. ‘I should leave you in there overnight, teach you a lesson about making trouble,’ she joked.
I reached through the bars to grab her free hand. ‘I’ve never been happier to see anyone.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Lexi said drily, but a small smile curved the edges of her lips.
Damon rolled his eyes. ‘We were just about to free ourselves, thank you very much.’
‘I don’t doubt that, either. Just figured I’d speed up the escape,’ she said. Her nose twitched, and her flat tone indicated she didn’t entirely approve of his existence. The last time she’d seen him, he’d just gotten through killing Callie and was starting in on me.
‘So did you knock out the entire precinct?’ Damon asked, straightening the shoulders of his jacket.
She undid the final lock on the door. It sprang open and I rushed to hug her. ‘No, only some of them. The rest I compelled. Some of us don’t like needless violence – or messes that need to be explained later,’ she said into my shoulder. I released her and she motioned us towards the door. ‘Now let’s get out of here before anyone else shows up.’
‘I always cover my tracks,’ Damon said defensively as we rushed through the door of the containment area and into the front offices. Several policemen sat at their desks, poring over ledgers, oblivious to the two prisoners escaping and the general state of disarray. Desks had been pushed aside and among the splintery remains of what had once been a chair, the man who had sat there was lying on the floor, a rivulet of blood leaking from his head. But his eyes were open and he appeared to be whispering some word over and over again.
‘Strong-willed, that one,’ Lexi said.
‘How were you able to find us?’ I asked, following her down the stairs.
‘A mysterious Italian count with black hair and ice-blue eyes and a flair for the dramatic sweeps into the New York social scene and very quickly marries the most eligible society girl?’ she said, sarcastically. ‘They ran your picture in the social pages.’
Damon at least had the grace to look sheepish.
‘I always cover my tracks,’ she mimicked. ‘There are a lot of ways to live rich and powerfully as a vampire…none of which involve sweeping into the New York social scene…’
‘…and marrying the most eligible society girl. Fair enough,’ he conceded. ‘At least I did it with style.’
We exited the prison, and the cold evening air washed over me. The stars were just beginning to flicker in the night sky, and the gaslights cast a warm glow over the street. It was a beautiful night, the like of which Bridget, Lydia, Winfield and Mrs Sutherland would never enjoy again – all because of me, Damon and Katherine.
I only came to New York to escape. Escape Damon, memories of Callie, vampires, Mystic Falls, Katherine…and yet it all still followed me like an onerous shadow. I knew then that I’d never escape my past, not fully. Such dark things don’t fade with time – they merely reverberate through the centuries.
I could only hope that Margaret was safe somewhere, away from the hell-beast that had violently murdered her entire family.
CHAPTER 22
Once we had put several blocks between us and the police precinct, we stopped in the shadows of a bare maple tree. ‘Well, thanks for the rescue – not that I couldn’t have done it myself, eventually,’ Damon said. ‘And now, I think I’m ready for a drink. Adieu, mes amis,’ he saluted us, and spun on his heel, disappearing into the night.
‘Good riddance,’ Lexi muttered.
‘What now?’ I asked.
‘You heard the man. Let’s go for a drink,’ she said, grinning, and put her arm in mine. I walked with Lexi, but it felt wrong, somehow, to be able to go on with my existence so casually knowing that the Sutherlands had been murdered, and it had been partly my doing. What would I tell Margaret? She deserved to know some version of the truth, despite the fact that there would be no justice here. Creatures like the one who killed her family did not suffer consequences for their actions. Human lives were much shorter than vampire lives, but that didn’t make them less valuable. In fact, it made their lives more precious.
‘So catch me up,’ she said, squeezing my arm and pulling me out of my dark thoughts. ‘What’s been going on since you left our fair city?’
‘I got married today,’ I said.
Her eyes widened.
‘Now I really do need a drink,’ she declared. ‘Stefan Salvatore, you are going to be the death of me. I have heard of a lovely new place that gets its vodka straight from St. Petersburg and freezes it in a fancy little ice-bottle…’
She prattled on, leading me through what I had thought was my city, but New York with Lexi was an entirely different animal. Whereas I’d stuck to the shadows and back a
lleys, Lexi knew her way around glittering nightlife. Soon we came to what looked like an elegant private club. Thick red carpets covered every square inch of the floor, and gold, black and red lacquer covered everything else, including a giant carving of a firebird that hung from the ceiling.
A maître d’ came up and after one look at Lexi ushered us over to the most extravagant booth. It had velvet and cloth-of-gold pillows with far too many tassels to be perfectly comfortable. The strains of a piano filtered from the next room over, and I understood why she’d chosen this bar – Lexi always asked Hugo, a member of her vampire family in New Orleans, to play piano for her.
‘Married? ’ she said as soon as we were settled in and she had ordered us something.
The image of the Sutherlands’ bloody bodies scorched my vision for a moment.
‘How did you know where we were, really?’ I asked, changing the subject. News didn’t travel that fast unless it was about the war. It still should have taken her at least a week to get from Louisiana to New York, whether by train or vampiric speed.
‘I set one of my friends after Damon. I worried about you,’ she admitted, a sheepish look on her face. ‘I know you can take care of yourself, but Damon is dangerous, Stefan, and I don’t want anything to happen to you.’
The waiter came over with our drinks. As promised, the bottle was encased in a block of bluish ice with flowers and herbs pressed inside, as fresh as the day they were frozen. I couldn’t help touching a fingertip to a blossom that was near the surface, and feeling the ridge of rime that separated it from my skin. A human’s heat would have melted the ice. A vampire’s flesh was colder, kept in a similar state of perpetual frozen perfection.
The waiter poured us each a shot in goblets carved from solid green malachite.
I put my hand over hers. ‘Thank you, Lexi. For everything you’ve done. I can never repay you.’
‘No, you can’t,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But you can start by telling me everything. As I said before: married?’
So I told her about my discovery of Bridget and being inducted into the Sutherland household, and Damon’s insane plans. She giggled and gasped at every detail. I guess from an outsider’s perspective, particularly a much older vampire, Damon’s machinations might seem mild in comparison.
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