by L. J. Smith
“Come in here,” he said, and Matt followed. Once again, it struck Stefan to the heart to see how trusting this young man was—when all Stefan deserved was hatred and suspicion.
“What?” Matt whispered as soon as Stefan shut the door on the cramped space. “Do we have to dress like doctors or something? Get into scrubs?”
“No,” Stefan said, his canines responding to the smell of Matt’s blood. He realized, with a shock, that some part of him was eagerly anticipating biting another human. He already had such a heady mix of Power in his veins that it made him drunk.
“How can I help Elena?” Matt insisted. “What the hell is going—”
Stefan turned smoothly, seized him and Influenced him to be still even before he bit. He was tempted to take more than he needed from Matt, because the blood was rich in chemicals released by panic and haste. To a vampire, adrenaline was a delicious spice, a bit like paprika.
Stefan barely managed to wrestle himself to sanity before he drank too deeply, and dropped his virus into Matt’s undefended mind. Then, not knowing what else to do with him, he ordered Matt to follow him and took him to the dark ICU room where Meredith and Bonnie were sleeping. He propped Matt up against a wall by the window and hastened back toward Elena, only to stop dead in consternation.
Elena’s Aunt Judith was advancing on the central nurses’ reception area. But she was accompanied by more than just her husband Robert.
She had brought a very wide-eyed five-year-old Margaret, too. Probably no time to get a babysitter, Stefan thought, eyeing Elena’s little sister askance. The child had a strange ability—not witchcraft as he understood it—to see certain things that adults missed. Fortunately, he told himself with desperate optimism, Margaret also had a tendency to keep Elena’s secrets to herself.
But the little girl wasn’t the biggest problem, by far. There were two women behind her.
One was Dr. Alpert, who had been such a steady friend in the battle against the fox-spirits and their mind-poisoning creatures called malach, now forgotten by all ordinary townsfolk because the Celestial Court had reset the world so that the war hadn’t happened.
The other woman, walking with a cane but briskly, was Stefan’s one-time landlady: the shape-changing, erudite, and most-thoroughly-perceptive town witch, Mrs. Flowers. Why had Elena’s aunt called her?
Wrong assumption, Stefan thought. Dr. Alpert had probably brought the old woman, who had probably been warned about what was going to happen and called Elena’s physician looking for a lift.
But even this group was nothing compared to the presence that Stefan could sense arriving just above the hospital. Up there the weather had suddenly turned very nasty indeed for September, with thunder clashing like a war of the gods overhead, and freezing, foggy rain cutting the visibility down to a distance of three feet, all lit by greenish-purple clouds in flashes of many-tongued lightning. Stefan could sense it easily with his heightened Power.
Someone out there with a great deal of Power of their own was seriously unhappy, and Stefan recognized the unique signature of the one in the midst of the holocaust.
Damon had arrived.
Stefan had no idea of how to handle him. But handle him he must, and immediately, because Damon’s mental voice was now crashing like a tsunami into Stefan’s mind.
On the roof, little brother. And right this instant. I want to see you coming at a dead run.
* * *
Yes, as Damon had sat in the dimly-lit booth with Kenzy, he recognized the psychic screamer, and it was his own little redbird, Bonnie the brown-eyed enchantress, caught in a moment of unbearable trauma and funneling all her terror and distress into a tight psychic message addressed to him.
Someone was hurting Bonnie, he’d realized, perhaps even killing her. That meant someone was going to be exceedingly sorry exceedingly soon. Whoever it was would learn the meaning of pain in a hundred languages before they would be allowed to die. Damon had flashed his most gorgeous barracuda smile at nothing at all.
“Excuse me for just a bit, will you, sweetheart?”
He had extricated himself from the surprised Kenzy’s embrace and slid out of the booth before she could say a word. “I need to dash off on an errand for maybe half an hour. Then I’ll be back—or you’ll know I’m not coming. Keep the booth warm for me just in case?”
But I won’t be hungry when I get back, he thought, pocketing his hipflask—it would never do to let humans reverse engineer Black Magic—and walking with swift grace to the surly bartender. He dropped a crisp hundred dollar bill on the bar, said, “See that my friend gets everything she needs and nothing she doesn’t want,” and was out of the door before the man could gather his wits for a response.
Outside, Damon had sniffed the air: brisk and chilly, and getting colder by the minute in response to his mood. He didn’t even glance at his beloved matte black Ferrari 458 Spider blending into the shadows at the back of the parking lot. Instead, he took a bearing on the direction of the psychic scream, and then promptly disappeared.
Where a compact young man with dark hair and eyes had been standing, a single, downy crow’s feather fluttered. It glinted for an instant in rainbow iridescence before alighting, black as midnight, on the dirty sidewalk. By that time, however, the crow itself was high in the air, winging its way toward the town of Campbell, as storm clouds piled up suddenly in what had been a moonless but clear and starlit sky.
Damon-the-crow admired his clouds from underneath by lightning flashes: their shape; their menace; their unusual and inventive color scheme.
Meanwhile he was making his best speed toward Campbell using the Power he’d gained from Kenzy in the last few hours, and the Power he’d gained from Grace at supper, and the Power he’d gained from Arianna at lunch to boost his own considerable natural Power. He couldn’t teleport; not even he had found a way to do that, but he could fly much faster than any ordinary bird, which often gave others the impression that he could travel instantaneously.
And right this minute he was dive-bombing a building where just a short while ago Bonnie had released her deafening shriek of terror. It seemed to be a hospital, he noted, and another surge of fury washed over him. He needed to be invited in to any building where humans lived and slept, and waiting around for an invitation did not appeal in the least.
In mid-dive however, he sensed something that overwhelmed his fury with a surge of baffled frustration. He was close enough to the hospital to get a range of energy signatures, but what he saw didn’t make any sense. He could see every life-force in the building clearly, and Bonnie was in a room, lying down on a bed perfectly still. The only other readings he got in the room were from Meredith, Bonnie’s roommate and childhood protector, and Mutt Honeycutt, a completely harmless human, whose surname Damon had at last been able to master because it was so much like a brand of ham.
Even weirder, when he tried to contact Bonnie psychically, he got an answer that would have fooled lesser telepaths into thinking they’d achieved a connection and everything was fine. Damon was too powerful and skeptical to be misled. He was accessing an answering machine. Bonnie’s real brain was shut down, comatose, but a layer at the top had been added that reassured a shallow probe that she was fine, just fine, just very fine.
Then Damon caught other familiar life readings and his dive almost turned into a spin.
Elena! Elena was there, but her aura was so dim that he could hardly get a fix on it. Normally, it shone out warm and bright and all shades of gold, from antique to platinum, like the silken web of her hair.
For an instant, horror and astonishment set Damon’s rage on the back burner. Gods, he thought, stricken, what had happened last night? He didn’t bother trying to contact Elena psychically; she was too weak even to sustain an answering-machine proxy.
And then—finally—Damon noticed the aura he should have seen first. He had been so focused on Bonnie and her surroundings, and then he’d spread out his probe over just a little more physica
l space . . . but still, he rebuked himself, that was no excuse. Any ordinary visitor would have seen in the hospital one aura that overshadowed all the others, one so strong that Damon had to zoom his out perception several times so that he could view all of it.
That was when he found that except for the sheer dimensions of the swollen aura, it was familiar to him. Too familiar, as a matter of fact. He’d known it all his life. It belonged to his younger brother, Stefan.
Instantly, rage washed over Damon again. There was only one way that Stefan’s aura could have gotten the way it was, and it explained why Elena’s life-force was so dim, and why Bonnie had sent that telepathic scream toward Damon.
Damon landed, changed into human form and sent his demand on a tight beam directly to Stefan, making no attempt to hide his feelings of contempt and white-hot fury. On the roof, little brother. And right this instant.
It never occurred to him for a moment to be afraid. The tremendous aura didn’t threaten him, it challenged.
It excited.
And just this minute it was moving toward him, as Stefan himself walked—rapidly and sinuously—out of a door on the roof.
“What in Hell happened?” Damon shouted at him. “What happened here?”
Stefan regarded him with eerily calm green eyes and spoke with no particular emphasis. “I killed Elena. I mean—a little—she might have been technically dead for an instant. She came right back. But I did it, yes. Basically, I exsanguinated her.”
Damon was taking in every aspect of Stefan’s behavior. Stefan was obviously and entirely insane. Damon pulled in his raging aura and took a couple of deep breaths. You had to step carefully around madmen in a conversation. Damon knew that because he’d so often been the madman himself. Insanity didn’t frighten him, but he had a healthy respect for it, especially when it was backed up by as much Power as Stefan had right now.
“And—Bonnie?” he said very softly, having an instant’s strange trouble getting the name out.. “You killed her—a little—too?”
“I didn’t hurt Bonnie.”
Suddenly Damon was a lot closer to Stefan than he had been and he was shouting; he had grabbed a fistful of Stefan’s shirt at the neck and he was twisting it, forcing Stefan up on his toes.
“Don’t you dare lie to me, you damned puerile little worm! I heard her scream! I felt her terror before she blacked out!”
Stefan did—something—and suddenly he was out of Damon’s grip and standing five feet away from him. His expression never changed and his strange green eyes never left Damon’s as he absently smoothed out his shirt.
“Bonnie was frightened,” he acknowledged. “But I didn’t hurt her, not really. I held her to keep her still and I bit her so that I could Influence her more easily. But her life-force is perfectly normal. Look at her and you’ll see.”
Damon looked down into the hospital. It meant taking his eyes off Stefan’s, but he had begun wondering if the stare-out was such a good idea, anyway. And something inside him was crouching in astonishment, muttering, Oh, yes, grab the crazy guy and yell at him. Brilliant survival policy. Where did you learn that, then? Suicide school?
Examining Bonnie, who was lying on a bed in a dim room, Damon could now sense her life force directly, and it was strong. He supposed he had really known this all along, but seeing her, feeling her heart beating steadily and her breath coming and going reassured him. The madman was right. She was only sleeping deeply.
“Still, you bit her,” he said coldly.
“I had to bite her,” Stefan repeated. He was gazing at something very far away. “I had no choice.”
Then he shut up and just went on gazing. Damon stared at his brother for a moment, and then worked his way back to the beginning of the conversation.
“But you told me that you bit Elena more than a little. You said you drained her.”
Was it his imagination, or had Stefan just flinched slightly at the word “drained?”
Better be careful here, he thought. “Why,” he asked quietly, did you do that? Did you two have some kind of fight?” Or, he thought cynically, safe behind a wall of very, very thick and complicated mental shielding, did you just finally realize how much Power you could get by taking that amount of human blood, especially blood from a teenager like Elena?
Stefan did the uncanny stare-out thing again. His green eyes were almost glowing.
“No,” he said, “to both suggestions. It wasn’t a fight and it wasn’t for gaining Power. It was an accident. It was . . . love.”
Suddenly Damon could taste the unpleasant copper of his own blood in his mouth. A whole host of vulgar words for what he wanted to say jostled for his attention, but he couldn’t bring himself to apply any of them to Elena.
“You were . . . having sex with her,” he said finally, with difficulty. White-hot anger seemed to hang just above his reach, but he was too tired to try to grasp it.
“No,” Stefan said again. “We just—we hadn’t been alone together since we moved into college. Fourteen days—no, fifteen, I think. We were just kissing.”
Kissing? thought Damon. O-kay. All right, then. Dangerous kissing. “And then?” he prompted.
“And then I bit her. She wanted me to. I wanted to. And I wanted to do whatever she wanted.”
“O-kay,” Damon said, aloud this time. “And then?”
“And then we stayed up there too long, high up, in the light. In the sunrise. We were so happy.”
“And then?” But Damon was beginning to have uncomfortable feelings of déjà vu. In the Dark Dimension, in the mansion of the Silver Nightingale, he had bitten Elena. He couldn’t even remember if he had kissed her first. And he had drunk Elena’s blood, thirstily, desperately, because he had been fighting back the pain of massive blood loss himself.
She had tried to pull back from him, he remembered, but he’d clung to her until she scarcely had the strength to move. Afterward, she’d fainted and needed transfusions—and that in a culture which was barely more advanced than medieval.
Who was he to judge Stefan?
But it still didn’t make sense. He could understand that Stefan had fallen under the spell of bliss and taken far too much blood. What he couldn’t understand was Bonnie, lying motionless in a dark room along with Meredith and Mutt, also as still as waxworks.
“After you realized that Elena was—a little dead—you drove her to the hospital,” he coaxed Stefan.
“It was the fastest way, driving,” Stefan agreed in a level voice. “But the police followed me. I had to Influence them, and then Influence the doctors here to give Elena a massive transfusion instead of cutting her open to find internal bleeding.”
Ha. Yes, Damon thought. Elena must have posed quite a puzzle to the first doctors who saw her. Stefan was too smart to have left a mark on her, so it would have been The Case of the Vanishing Blood.
“You didn’t bite the doctors, though, I presume.”
The sarcasm went right over Stefan’s head. “No, of course not. I had plenty of Power. I just put the right ideas in their minds and then I blurred myself in their memories and removed my name.”
“But Bonnie. Why did you have to bite Bonnie? Did she come with you?”
“No,” Stefan said, doing the eerie, ageless serenity thing that was beginning to drive Damon crazy. “I called our friends at Dalcrest when Elena was out of danger. I’d had plenty of time with Elena; I sat with her for hours during the transfusions. I found a way to make a sort of neurological virus. Well, I say a virus, but I mean a friendly one.”
“To help Elena get her strength back, you mean,” Damon hazarded.
“Oh, I was doing that all along,” Stefan said.
Damon had a sense of having gone astray or missing something important.
“But you bit Bonnie and others—why?”
“To make them forget me.”
“Forget what about you?”
“Everything about me. I bit them to gain more Power to Influence them and I put
this seek-and-destroy virus in their minds. It erases all memories of me and puts in a little bit of blurriness around where the memory was. It should be as effective as when I worked it out bit by bit with Elena.”
Without looking at all less weird Stefan suddenly looked very earnest. “I had to,” he said. “I’m too dangerous for Elena—and if I left her friends’ memories intact they would just try to remind her of me. She wouldn’t believe them because all her memories of me are gone. Not just inaccessible, but completely gone, blasted away. Lots of tricky work there. But if they kept insisting on something that she knew wasn’t true . . . well, I guess she might end up in an insane asylum.” He cocked his head to one side.
Hairs were standing up on the nape of Damon’s neck. It wasn’t an experience he was used to and he suppressed the desire to back away slowly. This is Stefan, only Stefan, my little brother, he told himself. I know how to deal with him; I’ve dealt with him hundreds of times before. Usually just by beating him up, all right, yes, but I must have learned some other strategies sometime.
Unfortunately his brain seemed to be as blank as the ones that Stefan had meddled with tonight. Reply hazy; ask again later.
“Listen,” he said, carefully keeping his voice low and devoid of inflection. “I’m sure you know—Elena must have told you—that I did the same thing to her five or six weeks ago. It seems much longer, but it was just the first time we went to the Dark Dimension. One night I took so much blood from her that she collapsed and had to be transfused. I did even worse than you did because there wasn’t even a modern hospital to take her to—”
Damon noticed that his voice was rising. He reined himself in and found that he was holding up his hands like a negotiator entering a hostage situation.
“Anyway, Elena forgave me, and we put it behind us.”
Stefan hadn’t blinked throughout Damon’s monologue, not once. Now, he did blink, once, as if deliberately. Then he glanced up.
