The Hunters: Phantom

by L. J. Smith

Chapter 28

 

  No one answered the door at the Smalwoods' house. The driveway was empty and the house looked

  deserted, the shades pul ed down.

  "Maybe Caleb's not here," Matt said nervously. "Could he have gone somewhere else when he got out of the hospital?"

  "I can smell him. I can hear him breathing," Stefan growled. "He's in there, al right. He's hiding out. "

  Matt had never seen Stefan look so angry. His usual y calm green eyes were bright with rage, and his fangs seemed to be involuntarily extended, little sharp points showing every time he opened his mouth. Stefan caught Matt looking at them and frowned, running his tongue selfconsciously across his canines. Matt glanced at Alaric, who he'd been thinking of as the only other normal person left in their group, but Alaric was watching Stefan with what was clearly fascination rather than alarm. Not entirely normal, then, either, Matt thought.

  "We can get in," Meredith said calmly. She looked to Alaric. "Let me know if someone's coming. " He nodded and positioned himself to block the view of anyone walking past on the sidewalk. With cool efficiency, Meredith wedged one end of her fighting stave in the crack of the front door and started to pry it open.

  The door was made of heavy oak, and clearly had two locks and a chain engaged inside, and it withstood Meredith's leverage against it. Meredith swore, then muttered, "Come on, come on," redoubling her efforts. The locks and chains gave suddenly against her strength, and the door flew open, banging into the wal behind it.

  "So much for a quiet entrance," Stefan said. He shifted restlessly on the doorstep as they filed past him.

  "You're invited in," Meredith said, but Stefan shook his head.

  "I can't," he said. "It only works if you live here. "

  Meredith's lips tightened, and she turned and ran up the stairs. There was a brief shout of surprise and some muffled thumping. Alaric glanced at Matt nervously, and then up the stairs.

  "Should we help her?" he said.

  Before Matt could answer - and he was pretty sure Meredith wasn't the one who needed help - she returned, shoving Caleb down the stairs before her, twisting one of his arms tightly behind his back.

  "Invite him in," she ordered as Caleb stumbled to the bottom of the stairs. Caleb shook his head, and she yanked his arm up higher so that he yelped in pain.

  "I won't," he said stubbornly. "You can't come in. "

  Meredith pushed him toward Stefan, stopping him just at the threshold of the front door.

  "Look at me," Stefan said softly, and Caleb's eyes flew to his. Stefan's pupils widened, swal owing his green irises in black, and Caleb shook his head frantical y, but seemed unable to break his gaze.

  "Let. Me. In," Stefan ordered.

  "Come in, then," said Caleb sul enly. Meredith released him and his eyes cleared. He turned and dashed up the stairs.

  Stefan burst through the door like he'd been shot through a gun and then stalked up the stairs. His smooth, stealthy movements reminded Matt of a predator's - of a lion or a shark. Matt shivered. Sometimes he forgot how truly dangerous Stefan was.

  "I'd better go with him," Meredith said. "We don't want Stefan doing anything he'd regret. " She paused. "Not before we find out what we need to know, anyway. Alaric, you're the one who knows the most about magic, so you come with me. Matt, keep an eye out and warn us if the Smal woods pul into the drive. " She and Alaric fol owed Stefan up the stairs.

  Matt waited for the screaming to start, but it remained ominously quiet upstairs. Keeping one eye on the driveway through the front windows, Matt prowled through the living room. He and Tyler had been friends once upon a time, or at least had hung out, because they were both first-string on the footbal team. They'd known each other since middle school.

  Tyler drank too much, partied too hard, was gross and sexist toward girls, but there had been something about him that Matt had sometimes enjoyed. It was the way he'd thrown himself into things, whether it was the no-holdsbarred tackle of an opposing team's quarterback or throwing the absolutely craziest party anyone had ever seen. Or the time when they'd been in seventh grade and he'd gotten obsessed with winning at Street Fighter on PlayStation 2. Every day he'd had Matt and the rest of the guys over, al of them spending hours sitting on the floor of Tyler's bedroom, eating chips and talking trash and pounding the buttons of the control er until Tyler had figured out how to win every fight.

  Matt heaved a sigh and peered out the front window again.

  There was a brief muffled thump from upstairs, and Matt froze. Silence.

  As he turned back to pace across the living room again, Matt noticed a particular photo among the neat row of frames on top of the piano. He crossed over and picked it up.

  It must have been the footbal banquet, junior year. In the picture, Matt's arm was around Elena, who he'd been dating then, and she was smiling up at him. Next to them stood Tyler, hand in hand with a girl whose name Matt couldn't remember. Alison, maybe, or Alicia. She'd been older than them, a senior, and had graduated that year and left town. They were al dressed up, he and Tyler in jackets and ties, the girls in party dresses. Elena had worn a white, deceptively simple short dress, and looked so lovely that she'd taken Matt's breath away.

  Things had been so easy then. The quarterback and the prettiest girl in school. They'd been the perfect couple. Then Stefan came to town, a cold, mechanical voice whispered to him, and destroyed everything.

  Stefan, who had pretended to be Matt's friend. Stefan, who had pretended to be a human being.

  Stefan, who had pursued Matt's girlfriend, the only girl Matt had ever real y been in love with. Probably the only girl he would ever feel that way about. Sure, they'd broken up just before Elena met Stefan, but Matt might have gotten her back, if not for him.

  Matt's mouth twisted, and he threw the photo to the floor. The glass didn't break, and the photo just lay there, Matt and Elena and Tyler and the girl whose name he didn't remember smiling innocently up at the ceiling, unaware of what was heading toward them, of the chaos that would erupt less than a year later. Because of Stefan. Stefan. Matt's face was hot with anger. There was a buzzing in his head. Stefan the traitor. Stefan the monster. Stefan who had stolen Matt's girl.

  Matt stepped deliberately onto the picture and ground it beneath his heel. The wooden frame snapped. The feel of the glass shattering under his foot was oddly satisfying. Without looking back, Matt stomped across the living room toward the stairs. It was time for him to deal with the monster who had ruined his life.

  "Confess!" Stefan growled, doing his best to compel Caleb. But he was so weak and Caleb kept throwing up mental blocks. No doubt about it - this boy had access to Power.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Caleb said, pressing his back against the wal as if he could tunnel into it. His eyes flicked nervously from Stefan's angry face to Meredith, who was holding her staff balanced between her hands, ready to strike, and back to Stefan. "If you just leave me alone, I won't go to the police. I don't want any trouble. "

  Caleb looked pale and shorter than Stefan remembered. There were bruises on his face, and one of his arms was in a cast and supported by a sling. Despite everything, Stefan felt a twinge of guilt as he looked at him.

  He's not human, he reminded himself.

  Although. . . Caleb didn't seem al that wolfish either, for a werewolf. Shouldn't there be a little more of the animal in him? Stefan hadn't known many werewolves, but Tyler had been al big white teeth and barely repressed aggression. Next to him, Alaric blinked at the injured boy. Cocking his head to one side and examining him, he echoed Stefan's thoughts, asking skeptical y, "Are you sure he's a werewolf?"

  "A werewolf?" said Caleb. "Are you al crazy?"

  But Stefan was watching Caleb careful y, and he saw a tiny flicker in Caleb's eyes. "You're lying," Stefan said coldly, reaching out with his mind once more, final y finding a crack in Caleb's defenses. "You don't think we
're crazy. You're just surprised that we know about you. "

  Caleb sighed. His face was stil white and strained, but a certain falseness went out of it as Stefan spoke. His shoulders slumped and he stepped away from the wal a little, head hanging wearily.

  Meredith tensed, ready to spring, as he moved forward. He stopped and held up his hands. "I'm not going to try anything. And I'm not a werewolf. But, yeah, I know Tyler is, and I'm guessing that you know that, too. "

  "You've got the werewolf gene," Stefan told him. "You could easily be a werewolf, too. "

  Caleb shrugged and looked Stefan straight in the eye. "I guess. But it didn't happen to me; it happened to Tyler. "

  "Happened to?" Meredith asked, her voice rising with outrage. "Do you know what Tyler did to become a werewolf?"

  Caleb glanced at her warily. "What he did? Tyler didn't do anything. The family curse caught up with him, that's al . "

  His face was shadowed and anxious.

  Stefan found his tone gentling despite himself. "Caleb, you have to kil someone to become a werewolf, even if you carry the gene. Unless you're bitten by a werewolf yourself, there are certain rituals that have to be performed. Blood rituals. Tyler murdered an innocent girl. "

  Caleb's knees seemed to give out, and he slid to the floor with a muffled thump. He looked sick. "Tyler wouldn't do that," he said, but his voice was unsteady. "Tyler was like a brother to me after my parents died. He wouldn't kil anyone. I don't believe you. "

  "He did," Meredith confirmed. "Tyler murdered Sue Carson. We negotiated for her to come back to life, but it doesn't change the fact that he did kil her. "

  Her voice held the unmistakable ring of truth, and al the fight seemed to go out of Caleb. He sank lower and rested his forehead against his knees. "What do you want from me?"

  He looked so thin and rumpled that, despite the urgency of their mission, Stefan was distracted. "Weren't you tal er than this?" he asked. "Bigger? More. . . put together? The last time I saw you, I mean. "

  Caleb mumbled something into his knees, too muffled and distorted for even a vampire to hear properly. "What?"

  Stefan asked.

  Caleb looked up, his face smudged with tears. "It was a glamour, okay?" he said bitterly. "I made myself look better because I wanted Elena to want me. " Stefan thought of Caleb's glowing, healthy face, his height, his crowning halo of golden curls. No wonder he had seemed suspicious; subconsciously Stefan must have known how unlikely it was that an ordinary human would look that much like an archangel. No wonder he felt so much lighter than I expected when I threw him across the graveyard, Stefan thought.

  "So you are a magic user, even if you aren't a werewolf,"

  Meredith said swiftly.

  Caleb shrugged. "You knew that already," he said. "I saw what you did to my workroom in the shed. What more do you want from me?"

  Meredith stepped forward warningly, stave at the ready, her gaze clear and pitiless, and Caleb flinched away from her. "What we want," she said, enunciating every word distinctly, "is for you to tel us how you summoned the phantom, and how we can get rid of it. We want our friends back. "

  Caleb stared at her. "I swear I don't know what you're talking about. "

  Stefan prowled toward Caleb on his other side, keeping him off balance so that the boy's eyes flicked nervously back and forth between Stefan and Meredith.

  Then Stefan stopped. He could see that Caleb looked genuinely confused. Was it possible that he was tel ing the truth? Stefan knelt so that he was at eye level with Caleb and tried a softer tone. "Caleb?" he asked, depleting his last remnants of Power to compel the boy to speak. "Can you tel us what kind of magic you did? Something with the roses, right? What was the spel supposed to do?"

  Caleb swal owed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I had to find out what happened to Tyler," he said. "So I came here for the summer. No one seemed worried, but I knew Tyler wouldn't just drop out of sight. Tyler had talked about you, al of you, and Elena Gilbert. Tyler hated you, Stefan, and at first he liked Elena, and then he real y hated her, too. When I came here, though, everyone knew Elena Gilbert was dead. Her family was stil mourning her. And you were gone, Stefan; you'd left town. I tried to put the pieces together about what had happened - there were some pretty strange stories - and then lots of other weird things happened in town. Violence, and girls going crazy, and children attacking their parents. And then, suddenly, it was over; it just stopped, and it was like I was the only one who remembered it happening. But I also remembered just a normal summer. Elena Gilbert had been here the whole time, and no one thought anything of it, because they didn't remember her dying. Only I seemed to have two sets of memories. People who I'd seen get hurt" - he shuddered at the memory - "or even kil ed were fine again. I felt like I was going crazy. "

  Caleb pushed his shaggy dark blond hair back out of his face, rubbed his nose, and took a breath. "Whatever was going on, I knew you and Elena were at the center of it. The differences between the memories told me that. And I figured that you must be connected to Tyler's disappearance, too. Either you'd done something to him, or you knew something about what had happened to him. I figured if I could pul you and your friends apart, something would come out. Once you were set against one another, I'd be able to work my way in and find out what was going on. Maybe I could get Elena to fal for me with a glamour, or one of the other girls. I just had to know. " He looked from one to another of them. "The rose spel was supposed to make you irrational, turn you against one another. "

  Alaric frowned. "You mean you didn't summon anything?"

  Caleb shook his head. "Look," he said, pul ing a thick leather-bound volume from under his bed. "The spel I used is in here. That's al I did, honest. "

  Alaric took the book and flipped through the pages until he found the right spel . He studied it, his forehead crinkling, and said, "He's tel ing the truth. There isn't anything about summoning a phantom in this book. And the spel here fits what we saw in Caleb's workshop and what I've been reading in his notebooks. This rose spel is a fairly low-level discord spel ; it would make whatever negative emotions we were feeling - hate, anger, jealousy, fear, sorrow - just a little bit stronger, make us a little more likely to blame one another for anything that went wrong. "

  "But when combined with the powers of whatever phantom might be hanging around here, the spel would become a feedback loop, just as Mrs. Flowers said could happen, strengthening our emotions and making the phantom more powerful," Stefan said slowly.

  "Jealousy," said Meredith thoughtful y. "You know, I hate to admit it, but I was horribly jealous of Celia when she was here. " She glanced apologetical y at Alaric, who reached out and gently touched her hand.

  "She was jealous of you, too," Stefan said matter-offactly. "I could sense it. " He sighed. "And I've been feeling jealous as wel . "

  "So perhaps a jealousy phantom?" Alaric said. "Good, that'l give us more of a basis for researching banishing spel s. Although I haven't been feeling jealous at al . "

  "Of course not," Meredith said pointedly. "You're the one who's had two girls fighting over you. "

  Suddenly Stefan felt so exhausted that his legs shook. He needed to feed, immediately. He nodded awkwardly to Caleb. "I'm sorry. . . for what happened. "

  Caleb looked up at him. "Please tel me what happened to Tyler," he implored. "I have to know. I'l leave you alone if you just tel me the truth, I promise. "

  Meredith and Stefan glanced at each other, and Stefan raised his eyebrows slightly. "Tyler was alive when he left town this past winter," Meredith said slowly. "That's al we know about him, I swear. "

  Caleb stared up at her for a long moment, then nodded.

  "Thank you," he said simply.

  She nodded back at him crisply, like a general acknowledging the troops, and led the way out of his room. Just then a muffled, cutoff shout came from downstairs, fol owed by a thud. Stefan and Alaric raced after Meredith down the stairs, almost bumping i
nto her as she pul ed to a sudden halt.

  "What is it?" Stefan asked. Meredith drew aside. Matt was lying facedown at the foot of the stairs, his arms flung out as though to catch himself. Meredith stepped quickly the rest of the way down the stairs to him and turned him over gently.

  His eyes were closed, his face pale. He was breathing, slowly but steadily. Meredith felt his pulse, then shook him gently by the shoulder. "Matt," she cal ed. "Matt!" She looked up at Stefan and Alaric. "Just like the others," she said grimly. "The phantom's got him. "