“Bonnie?” Meredith’s voice was the voice of every big sister who ever had come to her younger sibling’s rescue. That gentle. That controlled. “Can you try to pretend it’s a candle flame…a candle flame…a candle flame…and then try to trance?”
“I’m in trance already.” Bonnie’s voice was somehow distant — far away and almost echoing.
“Then ask for help,” Meredith said softly.
Bonnie was whispering, over and over, clearly oblivious to the world around her: “Please, come help us. Damon, if you can hear me, please accept our apologies and come. You gave us a terrible scare, and I’m sure we deserved it, but please, please help. It hurts, Damon. It hurts so bad I could scream. But instead I’m putting all that energy into Calling you. Please, please, please help…”
For five, ten, fifteen minutes she kept it up, as the branches grew, enclosing them with their sweet, resinous scent. She kept it up far longer than Matt had ever thought she could endure.
Then the light went out. After that there was no sound but the whisper of the pines.
You had to admire the technique.
Damon was once again lounging in midair, even higher this time than when he’d entered Caroline’s third-story window. He still had no idea of the names of trees, but that didn’t stop him. This branch was like having a box seat over the drama unfolding below. He was starting to get a little bored, since nothing new was happening on the ground. He’d abandoned Damaris earlier this evening when she had gotten boring, talking about marriage and other subjects he wished to avoid. Like her current husband. Bo-ring. He’d left without really checking to see if she’d become a vampire — he tended to think so, and wouldn’t that be a surprise when hubby got home? His lips trembled on the edge of a smile.
Below him, the play had almost reached its climax.
And you really had to admire the technique. Pack hunting. He had no idea what sort of nasty little creatures were manipulating the trees, but like wolves or lionesses, they seemed to have gotten it down to an art. Working together to capture prey that was too quick and too heavily armored for one of them alone to manage. In this case, a car.
The fine art of cooperation. Pity vampires were so solitary, he thought. If we could cooperate, we’d own the world.
He blinked sleepily and then flashed a dazzling smile at nothing at all. Of course, if we could do that — say, take a city and divvy up the inhabitants — we’d finish it off by divvying up one another. Tooth and nail and Power would be wielded like the blade of a sword, until there was nothing left but shreds of quivering flesh and gutters running with blood.
Nice imagery, though, he thought, and let his eyelids droop to appreciate it. Artistic. Blood in scarlet pools, magically still liquid enough to run down white marble steps of — oh, say, the Kallimarmaron in Athens. An entire city gone quiet, purged of noisy, chaotic, hypocritical humans, with only their necessary bits left behind: a few arteries to pump the sweet red stuff out in quantity. The vampire version of the land of milk and honey.
He opened his eyes again in annoyance. Now things were getting loud down there. Humans yelling. Why? What was the point? The rabbit always squeals in the jaws of the fox, but when has another rabbit ever rushed up to save it?
There, a new proverb,and proof that humans are as stupid as rabbits, he thought, but his mood was ruined. His mind slid away from the fact, but it wasn’t just the noise below that was disturbing him. Milk and honey, that had been…a mistake. Thinking about that had been a blunder. Elena’s skin had been like milk that night a week ago, warm-white, not cool, even in the moonlight. Her bright hair in shadow had been like spilled honey. Elena wouldn’t be happy to see the results of this night’s pack hunting. She would cry tears like crystal dewdrops, and they would smell like salt.
Suddenly Damon stiffened. He sent one stealthy query of Power around him, a circle of radar.
But nothing bounced back, except the mindless trees at his feet. Whatever was orchestrating this, it was invisible.
Right, then. Let’s try this, he thought: Concentrating on all the blood he’d drunk in the last few days, he blasted out a wash of pure Power, like Vesuvius erupting with a deadly pyroclastic explosion. It encircled him completely in every direction, a fifty-mile-per-hour bubble of Power like superheated gas.
Because it was back. Unbelievably, the parasite was trying to do it again, to get into his mind. It had to be.
Lulling him, he supposed, rubbing the back of his neck with absentminded fury, while its pack mates finished off their prey in the car. Whispering things into his mind to keep him still, taking his own dark thoughts and echoing them back a shade or two darker, in a cycle that might have ended in him flying off to kill and kill again for the pure black velvet enjoyment of it.
Now Damon’s mind was cold and dark with fury. He stood, stretching his aching arms and shoulders, and then searched carefully, not with a simple radar ring, but with a blast of Power behind each stab, probing with his mind to find the parasite. It had to be out there; the trees were still going about their business. But he could find nothing, even though he’d used the fastest and most efficient method of scanning he knew: a thousand random stabs per second in a Drunkard’s Walk search pattern. He should have found a dead body immediately. Instead he’d found nothing.
That made him even angrier than before, but there was a tinge of excitement to his fury. He’d wanted a fight; a chance to kill where the killing would be meaningful. And now here was an opponent who met all the qualifications — and Damon couldn’t kill it because he couldn’t find it. He sent a message, lambent with ferocity, in all directions.
I have already warned you once. Now I CHALLENGE you. Show yourself— OR ELSE STAY AWAY FROM ME!
He gathered Power, gathered it, gathered it again, thinking of all the different mortals who had contributed it. He held it, nurturing it, crafting it for its purpose, and raising its strength with all that his mind knew of fighting and of the skill and expertise of war. He held the Power until it felt as if he were holding a nuclear bomb in his arms. And then he let it go all at once, an explosion speeding in the opposite direction, away from him, nearing the speed of light.
Now, surely, he would feel the death throes of something enormously powerful and cunning — something that had managed to survive his previous strafings designed only for eldritch creatures.
Damon expanded his senses to their widest reach, waiting to hear or feel something shattering, combusting — something falling blind, with its own blood tumbling nearby, from a branch, from the air, from somewhere. From somewhere a creature should have plummeted to the ground or raked at it with huge dinosaur-like claws — a creature half-paralyzed and completely doomed, cooked from the inside out. But although he could feel the wind rising to a howl and huge black clouds pooling above him in response to his own mood, he still could sense no dark creature close enough to have entered his thoughts.
How strong was this thing? Where was it coming from?
Just for a moment, a thought flashed through his mind. A circle. A circle with a dot at its center. And the circle was the blast he’d shot away in all directions, and the dot was the only place his blast didn’t reach.Inside him alre Snap! Suddenly his thoughts went blank. And then he began, sluggishly, slightly bewildered, to try to put the fractured pieces together. He had been thinking about the blast of Power he’d sent out, yes? And how he’d expected to feel something fall and die.
Hell, he couldn’t even sense any ordinary animals bigger than a fox in the woods. Although his sweep of Power had been carefully made to affect only creatures of his kind of darkness, the ordinary animals had been so spooked that they’d gone running wildly from the area. He peered down. Hm. Except the trees around the car; and they weren’t after him. Besides, whatever they were, they were only the pawns of an invisible killer. Not really sentient — not within the boundaries he had crafted so carefully.
Could he have been wrong? Half his fury had been for himself,
for being so careless, so well-fed and confident that he’d let down his guard.
Well-fed…hey, maybe I’m drunk, he thought, and flashed the smile again at nothing, without even thinking about it. Drunk and paranoid and edgy. Pissed and pissed off.
Damon relaxed against the tree. The wind was screaming now, swirling and freezing, the sky full of roiling black clouds that cut out any light from the moon or stars. Just his kind of weather.
He was still edgy, but he couldn’t find any reason to be. The only disturbance in the aura of the woods was the tiny crying of a mind inside the car, like a trapped bird with only one note. That would be the little one, the redheaded witch with the delicate neck. The one who’d been whining about life changing too much.
Damon gave a little more of his weight to the tree. He’d followed the car with his mind out of absent interest. It wasn’t his fault that he’d caught them talking about him, but it did degrade their chances of rescue a bit.
He blinked slowly.
Odd that they’d had an accident trying not to run over a creature in approximately the same area he’d almost crashed the Ferrari trying to run one over. Pity he hadn’t had a glimpse of their creature, but the trees were too thick.
The redheaded bird was crying again.
Well, do you want a change now or don’t you, little witch? Make up your mind. You have to ask nicely.
And then, of course, I have to decide what kind of change you get.
11
Bonnie couldn’t remember any more sophisticated prayer and so, like a tired child, she was saying an old one: “…I pray the Lord my soul to take….” She had used up all her energy calling for help and had gotten no response at all, just some feedback noise. She was so sleepy now. The pain had gone away and she was simply numb. The only thing bothering her was the cold. But then, that could be taken care of, too. She could just pull a blanket over herself, a thick, downy blanket, and she would warm up. She knew it without knowing how she knew.
The only thing that held her back from the blanket was the thought of her mother. Her mother would be sad if she stopped fighting. That was another thing she knew without knowing how she knew. If she could just get a message to her mother, explaining that she had fought as hard as she could, but that with the numbness and the cold, she couldn’t keep it up. And that she had known she was dying, but that it hadn’t hurt in the end, so there was no reason for Mom to cry. And next time she would learn from her mistakes, she promised…next time…
Damon’s entry was meant to be dramatic, coordinated with a flash of lightning just as his boots hit the car. Simultaneously, he sent out another vicious lash of Power, this time directed at the trees, the puppets who were being controlled by an unseen master. It was so strong that he felt a shocked response from Stefan all the way back at the boardinghouse. And the trees…melted backward into the darkness. They’d ripped the top off as if the car had been a giant sardine can, he mused, standing on the hood. Handy for him.
Then he turned his attention to the human Bonnie, the one with the curls, who ought by rights to have been embracing his feet by now, and gasping out “Thank you!”
She wasn’t. She was lying just as she had been in the embrace of the trees. Annoyed, Damon reached down to grab her hand, when he got a shock of his own. He sensed it before he touched it, smelled it before he felt it smear on his fingers. A hundred little pinpricks, each leaking blood. The evergreen’s needles must have done that, taking blood from her or — no, pumping some resinous substance in. Some anesthetic to keep her still as it took whatever was the next step in its consumption of prey — something quite unpleasant, to judge by the manners of the creature so far. An injection of digestive juices seemed most likely.
Or perhaps simply something to keep her alive, like antifreeze for a car, he thought, realizing with another nasty shock just how cold she was. Her wrist was like ice. He glanced at the two other humans, the dark-haired girl with the disturbing, logical eyes, and the fair-haired boy who was always trying to pick a fight. He might just have cut this one too fine. It certainly looked bad for the other two. But he was going to save this one. Because it was his whim. Because she had called for his help so piteously. Because those creatures, those malach, had tried to make him watch her death, eyes half-focused on it as they took his mind off the present with a glorious daydream.Malach — it was a general word indicating a creature of darkness: a sister or brother of the night. But Damon thought it now as if the word itself were something evil, a sound to be spat or hissed.
He had no intention of letting them win. He picked Bonnie up as if she were a bit of dandelion fluff and slung her over one shoulder. Then he took off from the car. Flying without changing shape first was a challenge. Damon liked challenges.
He decided to take her to the nearest source of warm water, and that was the boardinghouse. He needn’t disturb Stefan. There were half a dozen rooms in that warren that was making its genteel decline into the good Virginia mud. Unless Stefan was snoopy, he wouldn’t go walking in on other folks’ bathrooms.
As it turned out, Stefan was not only snoopy but fast. There was almost a collision: Damon and his burden came around a corner to find Stefan driving down the dark road with Elena, floating like Damon, bobbing behind the car as if she were a child’s balloon.
Their first exchange of words was neither brilliant nor witty.
“What the hell are you doing?” exclaimed Stefan.
“What the hell are you doing?” Damon said, or began to say, when he noticed the tremendous difference in Stefan — and the tremendous Power that was Elena. While most of his mind simply reeled in shock, a small part of it immediately began to analyze the situation, to figure out how Stefan had gone from a nothing to a — a Good grief. Oh, well, might as well put a brave face on it.
“I felt a fight,” Stefan said. “When did you become Peter Pan?”
“You should be glad you weren’t in the fight. And I can fly because I have the Power, boy.”
This was sheer bravado. In any case, it was perfectly correct, back when they were born, to address a younger relative asragazzo, or “boy.”
It wasn’t now. And meanwhile the part of his brain that hadn’t simply shut down was still analyzing. He could see, feel, do everything but touch Stefan’s aura. And it was…unimaginable. If Damon hadn’t been this close, hadn’t been experiencing it firsthand, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible for one person to have so much Power.
But he was looking at the situation with the same ability of cold and logical assessment that told him that his own Power — even after making himself drunk with the variety of women’s blood he had taken in the last few days — his Power was nothing to Stefan’s right now. And his cold and logical ability was also telling him that Stefan had been pulled out of bed for this, and that he hadn’t had time — or hadn’t been rational enough — to hide his aura.
“Well, now, look at you,” Damon said with all the sarcasm that he could call up — and that turned out to be quite a lot. “Is it a halo? Did you get canonized while I wasn’t looking? Am I addressing St. Stefan now?”
Stefan’s telepathic response was unprintable. “Where are Meredith and Matt?” he added fiercely.
“Or,” continued Damon, exactly as if Stefan hadn’t spoken, “could it be that you merit congratulation for having learned the art of deception at last?”
“And what are you doing with Bonnie?” Stefan demanded, ignoring Damon’s comments in turn.
“But you still don’t seem to have a grasp of polysyllabic English, so I’ll put this as simply as I can. You threw the fight.”
“I threw the fight,” Stefan said flatly, apparently seeing that Damon wasn’t going to answer any of his questions until he’d told the truth. “I just thanked God that you seemed to be too mad or drunk to be very observant. I wanted to keep you and the rest of the world from figuring out just exactly what Elena’s blood does. So you drove away without even trying to get a good look at
her. And without suspecting that I could have shaken you off like a flea from the very beginning.”
“I never thought you had it in you.” Damon was reliving their little combat in all-too-vivid detail. It was true: he had never suspected that Stefan’s performance had been entirely that — a performance — and that he could have thrown Damon down at any time and done whatever he’d wanted.
“And there’s your benefactress.” Damon nodded up to where Elena was floating, secured by — yes, it was true — secured by clothesline to the clutch. “Just a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor,” he remarked, unable to help himself as he gazed up at her. Elena was, in fact, so bright that to look at her with Power channeled to the eyes was like trying to stare straight into the sun.
“She seems to have forgotten how to hide as well; she’s shining like a G0 star.”
“She doesn’t know how to lie, Damon.” It was clear that Stefan’s anger was steadily mounting. “Now tell me what’s going on and what you’ve done to Bonnie.”
The impulse to answer,Nothing. Why, do you think I should? was almost irresistible — almost. But Damon was facing a different Stefan than he’d ever seen before. This is not the little brother you know and love to trample into the ground, the voice of logic told him, and he heeded it.
“The other two huuu-mans,” Damon said, drawing the word out to its full obscene length, “are in their automobile. And”—suddenly virtuous—“I was taking Bonnie to your place.”
Stefan was standing by the car, at a perfect distance for examining Bonnie’s out flung arm. The pinpricks turned into a smear of blood when he touched them, and Stefan examined his own fingers with horror. He kept repeating the experiment. Soon Damon would be drooling, a highly undignified behavior that he wished to avoid.
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