by L. J. Smith
“Maybe it’s somebody selling something?” Bonnie wondered aloud as they trailed through the untidy herb garden and up the path to the front door.
In the kitchen, they found Mrs. Flowers sipping tea with a girl about their own age. She didn’t look like she was selling anything: She was as tiny as Bonnie herself, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, with wild curly blond hair and a spattering of freckles across her cheeks.
“Hey!” the girl said as soon as she saw them. She put her teacup down a little too hard, sloshing tea into the saucer and onto the table. “Oops,” she added, grinning.
“Hello, children,” Mrs. Flowers said serenely. “Help yourself to some scones. Alysia, if you look behind you, you’ll see napkins to wipe up that spill.”
They settled at the table, Bonnie squirming impatiently as Mrs. Flowers poured two more cups of tea and handed around plates for scones and little sandwiches. She needed to talk to Mrs. Flowers about serious business, but Bonnie couldn’t see a way to bring up the subject of Old Ones in front of this stranger. And who was she, anyway?
From across the table, Alysia kept smiling at her. Bonnie shifted uncomfortably. Next to her, Zander bit happily into a scone. “These are amazing,” he told Mrs. Flowers, who smiled at him.
“Um,” Bonnie began, growing impatient, “Mrs. Flowers, did you manage to find anything on the … problem I called you about?”
“There are some books of protection charms and divination spells on the table in the hall,” Mrs. Flowers said briskly. “You may take them with you when you leave. I’m afraid, though, that I don’t think the spells will do anything Elena can’t do on her own.” She put down her teacup and looked at Bonnie seriously, her blue eyes sharp. “I think Alysia might be able to assist you, though. She works with a group that could help you strengthen your Power.”
“What kind of a group?” Bonnie asked, confused.
Alysia straightened, her voice becoming formal, as if she was reciting a prepared speech. “It’s nice to meet you, Bonnie,” she began. “I represent an association of people who work together through the manipulation of natural forces to oppose negative elements. Mrs. Flowers is”—she shared a look with the older woman—“one of the chief contacts of our group, and she’s recommended that we invite you to join us.” The girl smiled eagerly, making her look even younger. “She had a lot of good things to say about you, Bonnie. You sound like one of the most talented recruits we’ve come across.”
“What do you mean, ‘recruits’?” Bonnie asked suspiciously. “What exactly are you recruiting me for?”
Alysia flushed pink to the tips of her ears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have explained better. This is the first time I’ve coordinated a gathering. We’d like to invite you to our retreat for a few weeks, to share your abilities with others who have a deep connection to the natural elements, and they’ll share their talents with you. If you find it useful, you can come back every year or two and work with the same team. We all help one another focus and hone our abilities. We’re stronger when we work together.”
“Like … a workshop?” Bonnie asked.
“Sort of,” Alysia agreed, dropping the formal tone. “We’re really just a bunch of people who have magic powers and good intentions, and we think that if we work together we can get stronger, and counter some of the bad things in the world.”
“Oh,” Bonnie managed. She wasn’t sure what to say. It sounded like a good idea, but did she really have time to join—what was this, a coven? “I’ve never really worked with anyone else. Except for Mrs. Flowers, of course.”
“It’ll just be for a few weeks. And I can guarantee it’s a great way to take your abilities to the next level. Watch.”
Alysia raised her hand and, her forehead wrinkling in concentration, made a complicated gesture, too quick for Bonnie to follow. There was a flash of red, and Bonnie heard birdsong as something fluttered past her, disappearing near Mrs. Flowers’s china cabinet. Shadows of vines spread across the wall, and the scent of flowers and warm rain blossomed all around them. In the middle of Mrs. Flowers’s kitchen, Alysia had conjured up a pocket of tropical rain forest.
“Wow,” Bonnie said, as the illusion faded and the normal kitchen reassembled around them. “That was really neat.”
“I’m good with illusions,” Alysia said, shrugging. “But I never could have done that before I met the others.”
“It sounds interesting,” Bonnie said carefully. “Would you mind, though, if I checked something out for myself? No offense, Mrs. Flowers.”
The older woman waved away the disclaimer. “I understand perfectly, my dear,” she said.
“Don’t be scared,” Bonnie told Alysia, then turned to Zander. “Can you see if she’s telling the truth?”
Zander got to his feet, accidentally jostling the table so that the delicate cups rattled, and took a deep breath. Then suddenly his body twisted, his face lengthening into a snout, his hands forming into claws. Alysia gave a startled yelp. In just a few seconds, a huge, beautiful white wolf stood beside them, gazing intently at Alysia with his sky-blue eyes.
“Oh, my God,” Alysia said faintly, scooting her chair back from the table. Her face had paled so that the freckles stood out like little dark dots.
“Just stay still for a minute,” Bonnie said. “He won’t hurt you.”
Zander walked around the table to sniff at Alysia, his furred jaw almost pressing against hers.
“Is everything you’ve told me the truth?” Bonnie asked. Alysia nodded. “You have to answer out loud,” Bonnie added gently.
“Y-yes.” Alysia’s voice shook.
“Do you have any evil intent toward me?”
“No.”
Zander changed back—always, Bonnie thought, a less painful-looking process than turning into a wolf—and rolled his shoulders, stretching. “She’s good,” he told Bonnie.
Alysia had her hand pressed against her chest and was breathing hard. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “You control a werewolf?”
“What? No,” Bonnie said. “I don’t control him.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Zander said affably. “She totally owns me.”
“It sounds good,” Bonnie said, ignoring her boyfriend. “I’d like to be able to channel more Power.” She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she’d sort of plateaued—she was handy with herbs and charms, and could work a finding or protection spell pretty well, but her Power hadn’t grown much in the last few years. “When does it start?”
“Tomorrow,” Alysia said. “I know it’s short notice, but we had some trouble getting the whole group that we wanted together.”
“Tomorrow?” Bonnie shook her head, giving an incredulous little laugh. “I can’t. I have a job. And Elena’s in danger; I can’t leave her now.”
Mrs. Flowers’s lips thinned. “Your best chance of helping Elena is by expanding your Power. You need to give this serious consideration, Bonnie.”
“I don’t—tomorrow’s too soon,” Bonnie said.
“I think you should go,” Zander broke in unexpectedly. Bonnie turned to stare at him.
“You do?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, obviously, I’d miss you like crazy, but this seems like something you need to do. You owe it to yourself to try. And the school year just ended, so you have time off work.”
Zander was right. Bonnie envisioned herself full of Power, protecting Elena, protecting everyone. In her imagination, she waved one hand and a shimmering, clear wall came down around her friends, separating them from danger.
She thought of how she’d felt the other day—that no one needed her, that she wasn’t useful anymore in protecting Dalcrest from the supernatural. This was her chance.
“Okay,” she said, turning to Alysia, who clapped her hands and smiled. Mrs. Flowers nodded approvingly. “I’m in.”
“I can’t believe Bonnie just took off like that,” Elena said, swinging Stefan’s hand as they walked. They’d h
ad lunch with Meredith, but then she had gone to the law library to do some studying—law school seemed to mean constant deadlines—and now they were heading back to their apartment alone. Zander had driven Bonnie to the airport that morning.
“She’ll be back,” Stefan said. Bonnie had left them with as many safety provisions as she could: charm bags for their cars and apartments, herb mixtures to drink or scatter for protection. She must have been up all night making them.
“I know. But I’ll still miss her.” Elena leaned against Stefan for a moment. “I just worry that someday … I’ll lose her for good. And Aunt Judith told me the house is officially listed with the realtor now. She’s looking for a place in Richmond.”
“Bonnie will be back,” Stefan said reassuringly. “And your family won’t be far away.”
“I know,” Elena said, sighing. “But can you indulge my self-pity, please?”
“I’ll indulge.” Stefan tugged her closer as they reached the building. “Let me distract you for a while. Tell me what we’ll do once we get rid of Solomon.”
Hand in hand, they wandered through the double doors of their apartment building and started up the two flights of stairs.
“I’d like to go back to Paris,” Elena said dreamily. “I spent the summer there just before we met, did you know that?”
Stefan, putting his key in the door, was about to answer—of course he knew that, he remembered everything Elena had ever told him, everything he’d ever been told about her—when he stopped.
“Stefan, what’s wrong?” Elena asked, sounding worried, and he held up his hand to quiet her. He smelled blood.
“Stay here.” He heard Elena’s heart begin to pound faster, and he squeezed her hand reassuringly before letting go. “There’s blood in there. I need to check it out.” He carefully opened the front door and went inside. Everything looked normal, but the scent of blood grew stronger. Elena gave a faint, choked-off cry, and he knew that she could smell it now, too.
Gesturing at her to stay back, Stefan crept silently toward the kitchen, staying close to the wall. He sent tendrils of Power through the apartment, but found nothing—no one, human or otherwise, inside. But the smell of blood was overwhelming, hot and sticky and flooding through his senses. He felt his canines lengthening, beginning to ache, and his senses sharpened.
There were drops of blood scattered across the kitchen floor, leading toward the closed bedroom door.
Not just drops, he realized, as his heart sank. Paw prints.
Stefan swung open the bedroom door and the smells of blood, of pain, hit him like a physical blow. There was something small and pale on the bed. Blood was spattered across the comforter, leaving it soaking wet and dark red in places. The pale thing, Stefan realized, was Sammy. Their cat had been torn to pieces, his white fur matted with gore.
“Stefan?” Elena’s voice reached him from the kitchen.
“Wait—” he said, but it was too late. A soft, hurt cry burst from Elena as she stepped inside. She rushed to the bed, to the sad remains of her pet.
“Elena!” Stefan said. “Don’t look.”
But Elena shook her head and stretched out a hand, carefully touching Sammy’s head with one finger. The blood was dripping—Stefan could hear it falling off the comforter to pool on the floor. “Who would have done this?” Elena asked, tears running down her face. “He was just a harmless cat.”
“Elena,” Stefan whispered in warning, pulling her close to him. Something was very wrong.
With a loud crack, the windows began to frost over. The mirror turned silver with ice. Elena shuddered, and Stefan could see her breath coming in small clouds of vapor.
“What’s happening?” she whispered. Stefan just held tight to her. He wanted to protect her, but how could he when he didn’t know what they were facing? He turned toward the door, but that was freezing over, too, the lock encased in frost.
Everything was turning to ice, even the pool of blood on the floor hardening at the edges. As Stefan looked around helplessly, the ice over the windows and mirror gave a loud snap and split from top to bottom, the cracks forming a jagged S.
In the sudden stillness, Stefan and Elena stared at each other, shocked. Her face was pale, her lapis lazuli eyes wide with terror.
“Solomon,” she said, her voice shaking. “S is for Solomon. He’s been here again.”
#TVD11SolomonWasHere
The walls were dripping. Matt wiped the floor below the kitchen window with a dish towel, but the long trails of water from the melting ice had streaked the paint all the way down the wall. It was too big a mess to fix with a few minutes and a towel. After swiping at it a few times, he gave up and settled for taking a cup of tea out to Elena.
She was sitting on the sofa between Stefan and Meredith, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “Thanks,” she said weakly when he handed her the cup. Matt had known Elena long enough to see that her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Poor little Sammy’s body had been tucked into a box by the front door; they would bury him tomorrow when it was light out.
Alaric and Zander came back in the front door of the apartment, the door banging behind them. They’d been patrolling the halls of Stefan and Elena’s building, checking to see if there were any other signs of Solomon’s invasion.
“Not a whiff of a scent,” Zander said, in response to the others’ anxious looks. “And no one I talked to had seen any strangers.”
Alaric carried a small brass triangle, from which hung a crystal on a chain. He tilted it from one side to the other, the crystal swinging, then shook his head. “There’s nothing paranormal resonating anywhere in the building, so far as I can tell,” he said. “Not even in here.”
“Jack said that Solomon could go anywhere without leaving a trace,” Meredith said.
“Are we sure it was him?” Matt asked, his gaze drawn to the sad box by the door. “I don’t understand how he’s getting in and out of the apartment. No one invited him.”
Elena drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, resting her pointed chin on top. “I don’t know,” she said. “But who else could it be? In some ways, it’s more frightening to think that we might have two enemies.”
“Or maybe,” Matt began, hesitant, “maybe he doesn’t need to be invited.”
They all fell silent as the implication sank in. If Solomon could come into their homes without an invitation, then the normal rules that governed vampires didn’t apply to him. Nowhere was safe.
There was a soft knock on the door. Zander answered it, his usually genial expression tense and wary. If he’d been in wolf form, Matt thought, the fur on his hackles would have been bristling.
“It’s Jack and his team,” Stefan told him, rising to greet them, and Zander stepped back to let them enter.
“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Stefan said, clasping Jack’s hand. He gestured back toward Matt and the others. “We haven’t found anything yet.”
Jack’s face was grim. “Meet my team. This is Roy, and Alex”—two tall dark-haired men who might have been brothers each raised a hand in greeting—“Darlene”—an Asian woman probably in her thirties smiled tightly at them—“and Trinity.” Trinity, younger than the others, had light brown shoulder-length hair and large blue eyes. She gave a dorky little wave when Jack introduced her.
They were all different physically, but Matt thought that he would have recognized them as hunters without being told. They shared a kind of competent grace, as if they were fully in control of what every part of their bodies was doing at any time. They all had those wary, alert eyes that took in everyone in the room.
“Give me all the details,” Jack said, looking at Meredith. She told him in just a few sentences about the slaughter of Elena’s cat and the ice that had cracked to reveal the letter S.
“Thank you, that was very clear,” Jack said approvingly. Meredith’s olive cheeks flushed slightly with pleasure, and Matt felt his eyebrows lifting. It wasn’t like cool, suspicious Meredi
th to care what a newcomer thought of her.
Then again, Meredith was a hunter by nature. Her parents had cut off contact with others of their kind when they stopped hunting themselves. Of course Meredith would be excited to finally meet more hunters.
“Are you sure it was Solomon?” Elena asked. “You said he wasn’t flashy like the other Old Ones, that he hardly left a trace. This was flashy, and took a lot of Power. And the blood …” Her voice trailed off unhappily, and she twisted the edge of her shirt between her fingers.
The young brown-haired hunter named Trinity knelt down next to Elena. “I’m so sorry about your pet,” she said sympathetically, laying her hand on Elena’s arm and stilling her anxious movement. Trinity’s eyes were warm with sympathy. Elena smiled weakly at her.
“It’s definitely Solomon,” Jack said. “You’re right; he doesn’t usually show off like this. As long as I’ve been tracking him, he’s managed to be practically invisible.”
“He doesn’t even leave bodies behind,” Darlene added. “People just disappear into thin air if he wants them to. He doesn’t typically leave any evidence at all.”
“So he wanted you to know he was here,” Jack said. “He’s sending you a clear message. He wants you to know he’s after you.”
“I have tracking Powers,” Elena said. “Usually. But I haven’t been able to find him.”
“I wish Bonnie were here,” Zander said. “Maybe she could do a spell that would show us something.”
But Jack was shaking his head. “We’ve tried magic,” he said. “Somehow Solomon’s able to block it. It’s like he’s invisible and intangible to every sense we have, even the magical ones.”
“How can we search for someone who’s invisible?” Meredith snapped. Her hands had balled into fists, and she looked ready to leap up and start fighting.
“I wish I knew,” Jack said, sighing.
“There’s a funny smell in here,” Zander said suddenly, cocking his head.
