Authors: L. J. Smith
Elena bit her lip and nodded. She wanted to see Damon for herself—she was
desperate
to see him, to know what was wrong with him, wanting to fix it—but he wasn’t taking her calls. Maybe what Damon needed right now from Elena was space. She hoped that Stefan, at least, could get through to him.
W
hen Stefan knocked on the door of Damon’s apartment, Damon opened it almost immediately, glared at Stefan, and tried to slam the door shut in his face.
“Stop,” Stefan said, inserting his shoulder in the doorway. “You must have been able to sense that it was me.”
“I knew you’d keep knocking or find a way in if I didn’t answer,” Damon said fiercely. “So I’m answering. Now
go away
.”
Damon looked wrecked. Nothing could take away from the elegance of his features, but they were tense and drawn, the skin over his cheekbones white with strain. His lips were pale, his dark eyes bloodshot, and his usually sleek black hair disarranged. Stefan ignored his words and leaned closer, trying to make his brother meet his eyes.
“Damon,” he said. “I found the girl in the woods last night.”
Anyone who hadn’t known Damon as long and as well as Stefan had—and so
anyone
except Stefan—would have missed the split second of stillness before Damon’s face settled into cool disdain. “Have you come to preach to me, baby brother?” he asked. “I’m afraid I don’t have the time just now, but perhaps another day? Next week sometime?”
He slid his eyes over Stefan, then glanced away dismissively. Just like that, Stefan felt like a child again, back home all those centuries ago, and his daring, charming, despicable, infuriating older brother was putting him in his place.
“She was still alive,” Stefan said steadily. “I took her home. She’s all right.”
Damon shrugged. “How nice for you. Always the
parfait
knight.”
Stefan’s hand shot out and gripped Damon’s arm. “Dammit, Damon,” he said, frustrated, “stop playing with me. I came to tell you that you have to be
careful
. If you had killed that girl, it would have caught up with you.”
Damon blinked at him. “That’s it?” he asked, his voice the smallest bit less hostile. “You want me to be careful? Don’t you have an overwhelming urge to scold me, little brother? Threaten me, maybe?”
Stefan sighed and slumped against the doorframe, his urgency sucked away. “Would scolding you do any good, Damon?” he asked. “Or threatening you? It’s never worked before. I just don’t want you to kill anyone. You’re my brother, and we need each other.”
Damon’s face tightened again, and Stefan reconsidered his words. Sometimes talking to Damon was like walking through a minefield. “
I
need
you
, anyway,” he said. “You saved my life. Which, in case you didn’t notice, you’ve done a lot this past year.”
Damon leaned against the opposite side of the doorframe and studied Stefan, his face thoughtful, but remained silent. Wishing he knew what Damon was thinking, Stefan sent a questing tendril of Power toward his brother, trying to catch his mood, but Damon merely sneered, easily shutting him out.
Stefan bowed his head and kneaded the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Was it always going to be like this, for the next long centuries together? “Look,” he said. “There’s enough going on with the other vampires on campus without you starting to hunt again. Ethan’s still alive, and he’s planning to try to bring back Klaus tomorrow night.”
Damon’s frown deepened for a moment, then smoothed out. His face could have been carved from stone.
“We can’t stop him without you,” Stefan continued, his mouth dry.
Damon’s night-dark eyes gave nothing away and then he flashed his briefest, most brilliant smile. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not interested.”
“What?” Stefan felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. He had expected Damon’s defensiveness and sarcasm. But after Damon had saved him from Ethan, the last thing he had expected was indifference.
Damon shrugged, straightening up and adjusting his clothes, brushing an imagined speck of dust from the front of his black shirt. “I’ve had enough,” he said, his tone casual. “Meddling in the affairs of your pet humans has gone stale for me. If Ethan brings back Klaus, then he can deal with him. I doubt it’ll go well for him.”
“Klaus will remember that you attacked him,” Stefan said. “He’ll be after you.”
Cocking one eyebrow, Damon smiled again, a quick, savage baring of his white teeth. “I doubt I’ll be his first priority, little brother,” he said.
And it was true, Stefan remembered. In that hideous last battle with Klaus, Damon had stabbed the Old One with white ash, keeping him from striking the final blow against Stefan. But
he
hadn’t been responsible for Klaus’s death. Stefan had engineered the fight against Klaus, had done his best to kill him. But, in the end, he had failed, too. It was Elena, bringing an army of the dead against the Original vampire, who
had
killed him.
“Elena,” Stefan said desperately. “
Elena
needs you.”
He was positive that would do it, that Damon’s armor would crack. Damon
always
came through for Elena. But this time Damon’s lip curled in a sneer. “I’m sure you can handle things,” he said lightly, his voice brittle. “Elena’s well-being is your responsibility now, not mine.”
“Damon—”
“No.” Damon held up a warning hand. “I told you. I’m done.” And with one quick motion, he slammed the door in Stefan’s face.
Stefan rested his forehead against the door, feeling defeated.
“Damon,”
he said again. He knew Damon could hear him, but there was only silence from inside the apartment. Slowly, he backed away from the door. It would be best not to push Damon, not when he was in this mood.
In this mood, Damon might do
anything.
“I’m so glad you came to see me, Elena,” Professor Campbell said. “I was worried about you after”—he glanced around surreptitiously and lowered his voice, although they were alone in his office—“our last talk.” He peered at her cautiously, his usually inquisitive and rather smug face clouded with uncertainty.
“I’m sorry I ran off like that, James,” Elena told him, staring down into the cup of sweet, milky coffee he had given her. “It’s just . . . when you told me I was a Guardian and the truth about what happened to my parents, I needed some time to think. Last summer, I
met
a few Guardians. They were powerful, but so inhuman.”
She still couldn’t accept that she was supposed to become like them. The whole idea was so big and horrifying that her mind kept scuttling away from it, focusing on solid and immediate concerns like the vampires on campus instead.
Elena’s hands shook a little, making the coffee swirl and eddy. She carefully steadied her cup.
James patted her gently on the shoulder. “Well, I have been doing some research, and I think I have good news,” he said.
“I could use good news,” she said softly, almost pleadingly. “I don’t really understand what a human Guardian would be like. Would I be different than a Celestial Guardian?”
James smiled for the first time since she had walked into his office. “After we spoke,” he said, “I started to contact all my old colleagues who have studied mythology or magic, anyone who I thought might know something about the Guardians.”
Now that he had information to impart, James lost his tentativeness and seemed to expand, his shoulders relaxing as he hooked his thumbs into his suit vest. “Legend has it,” he said, his voice taking on its lecturing tone, “that human Guardians are rare, but there are always two or three in the world. Generally, their parents are recruited in the same way the Guardians recruited your parents, and then the children are handed over to the Guardians for training as they enter adolescence.”
Elena closed her eyes for a moment, wincing. She couldn’t imagine being given to the Guardians and losing her human life so young. But if she had been, her mother and father would still be alive.
“When the human Guardians reach young adulthood—about your age, Elena,” James continued, “they’re stationed where there are high concentrations of ley lines and, therefore, large amounts of supernatural activity.”
“Like here,” Elena said. “And Fell’s Church.”
James nodded. “The evidence shows pretty strongly that the Guardians recruit prospective parents from ley line–heavy places,” he said. “So the human Guardians can stay near their homes.”
“But what are the human Guardians for?” Elena asked. “What am I supposed to do?” She realized she was gripping her cup so tightly she might break it, so she put it down on James’s desk and held on to the arms of her chair instead.
“The role of the human Guardians is to protect the innocent from the supernatural on Earth,” James said. “They maintain balance. And it seems that the Guardians develop different powers depending on what is needed where they live. So we won’t know what your exact powers are until they begin to form.”
“Protecting the innocent, I can handle,” Elena said. She gave James a shaky smile. She wasn’t so sure about “maintaining balance.” In her opinion, the Guardians of the Celestial Court had been so obsessed with balance and order that they had forgotten about the innocent. Or perhaps the innocent were only the concern of the Guardians on Earth. But if that was true, wouldn’t someone have looked out for her parents?
James smiled back. “That’s what I thought. And,” he said, with an air of having saved the best for last, “my colleague has located one of the other Guardians on Earth.” He pulled a sheet of paper from a folder on his desk and passed it to her.
It was a printout of a color photograph, a little grainy. In it, a dark-haired man, maybe a year or two older than Elena, smiled at the camera. His brown eyes were narrowed in the sun’s glare and his teeth were bright white against his tan skin.
“His name is Andrés Montez, and he’s a human Guardian who lives in Costa Rica. My sources didn’t have a lot of personal information about him, but they’re going to try contacting him. I’m hoping he’ll be willing to come to Dalcrest to teach you what he knows.” James hesitated, then added, “Although, as a Guardian, I imagine he probably already knows all about you.”
Elena traced Andrés’s face in the picture. Did she want to meet another Guardian? Those dark eyes seemed kind, though.
“It would be good to talk to someone who could tell me what to expect,” she told James, looking up. “Thank you for finding him.”
James nodded. “I’ll let you know as soon as I can get him here,” he said.
Despite the news that there was someone else out there like her, someone who might understand, Elena’s stomach lurched and she felt like she was falling, spiraling down into something deep and dark and unknown. Would Andrés be able to tell her what she most needed to know? Would she still be Elena once her fate caught up with her?
S
tefan, Elena, and five werewolves watched alertly from a hill overlooking the Vitales’ darkened safe house. They were waiting for any sign that would indicate Meredith and her team’s part of the plan was working and that the Vitale vampires were being driven through their secret tunnels and into the house.
When consulted over the phone, Alaric had suggested that the Vitale vampires would perform the resurrection ritual at midnight on the night of the equinox, so Stefan and Meredith had decided to go on the offense before sunset, when the vampires would be more likely underground and inside, avoiding the daylight. Now late afternoon sunlight reflected off the windows of the safe house, shielding any movement inside from view.
One of Zander’s Packmates, Chad, a chemistry major, had been instrumental in making the gas out of Meredith’s stash of vervain and the bomblike time-release gadgets that would unleash it into the tunnels. Somewhere beneath their feet, Stefan thought, Meredith and her team—Matt, Zander, and three more werewolves—were placing container after container of the gas, closing off one escape route after another until the vampires would have nowhere to go but the house. Bonnie, protected by another member of Zander’s Pack, was at the library, working her spells and charms to keep the vampires from coming up through the tunnel there. Stefan shifted restlessly, wishing he was with the others beneath ground. He could hear distant explosions underfoot, although only someone with a vampire’s hearing could have. By his side, Chad stirred, and Stefan amended his thought: a vampire’s hearing, or a werewolf’s.
Chad, like Zander, was one of the werewolves who could change form without the moon’s influence. He was a wolf now, padding around silently past Stefan and Elena, eyes on the house. He whuffed gently through his nose and sat down, his ears twitching back.
“Chad says the vervain gas should have filled the tunnels by now,” one of the other werewolves—this one in human form—said, translating the wolf’s language. “We ought to see something soon.”
Elena moved closer to Stefan and they shared a glance. It was weird seeing the Pack at work: they’d changed from a bunch of scuffling, swearing, goofy boys into a serious, competent team. Each of the wolf-form werewolves was alert and active, their sleek, powerfully muscled bodies clearly attuned to every sound or scent coming toward them. And the human-form werewolves were swift to react to their wolf-brethren’s every movement, acting as if there was a constant, silent communication among the Pack.
Maybe that was true. Stefan didn’t know, but he thought that being a werewolf was probably a lot less lonely than being a vampire. If you had a Pack.
Chad rose to his feet, the hair along his back bristling, his ears pricked up.
“They’re in,” one of the human-form werewolves—Stefan thought his name was Daniel—said briefly, and Stefan nodded. He’d heard the trapdoor in the house’s basement open, too, and the noise of Meredith, Matt, and the other half of the Pack climbing out of the tunnels. If the vervain bombs had worked, the vampires should have been herded into the house ahead of them.
“Let’s go,” Stefan said. Zander had ordered the Pack to defer to Stefan on this mission, and they fell in line behind him without argument, the humans shoulder-to-shoulder, the wolves ranging out beside them.
Elena nodded in reply to Stefan’s questioning look: Stefan should hurry and leave her to follow. Meredith and the others were walking into a fight, and he should be with them. Stefan turned away from her with what felt like a physical wrench—she’d been in danger so often—but he knew he would hear her if she needed him.
Stefan channeled his Power and began to run. The werewolves kept up with him easily, men and wolves strangely alike with their long, loping strides. Their Power, so incomprehensibly different than his own, was strong and focused. The full blast of it, alive and wild and raw, wrapped around Stefan. It was exhilarating.
They stopped short in the clearing by the Vitale Society’s safe house, isolated in the woods near campus. Something was wrong.
Chad cocked his head and gave a soft, low whine. The other wolves picked up on it as well, two anxiously pacing past the front of the house.
“They say the vampires aren’t there,” Daniel reported.
Stefan had already realized that. Listening hard, he could hear footsteps and muffled swearing as Meredith and her team walked through the small house. But nothing else. More than that, Stefan’s Power should have been able to pick up on a group of vampires as large as the Vitale.
“Come on,” Stefan said, heading for the front door. He was able to break the lock with a quick flick of his wrist, and entered easily—no human had lived here for a long time. The faint scent of vervain rising from the tunnel entrance in the basement clouded his head for a moment, but he shook it off.
“It’s us,” he called softly as their friends’ feet hesitated upstairs, and one of the wolves curled a long lip as if he was laughing at him. They, of course, had no need to alert the others; their Packmates always knew exactly where they were.
The whole group trooped upstairs to meet the others, crowding the narrow hall of what had probably once been a hunting cabin. Zander, who had turned out to be a stunningly beautiful wolf, pure white with the same sky-blue eyes he had as a human, growled quietly, and his Pack moved closer to him while Stefan made his way to Meredith and Matt.
“The tunnels were empty when we went through,” Meredith said grimly. “Either they had other exits we didn’t know about, or they weren’t there when we set off the gas.”
“Do you think they’re all out hunting?” Matt asked, his eyes wide and worried.
Stefan shook his head. “Even with their Vitale pledge pins protecting them from the sun, they wouldn’t hunt during the day. The sunlight’s too tiring for new vampires,” he said flatly. “We’re too late. They must have already left to begin the resurrection spell. Maybe they’re doing it at moonrise instead of midnight.” Frustrated, he turned and smashed his fist against the wall, leaving a long crack running through its plaster.
There was the sound of a brief startled movement somewhere on the other side of the now-cracked wall. All the wolves’ heads went up at once, and Stefan stiffened with them.
“There’s someone here,” Daniel translated. “Zander says she’s in the room at the end of the hall.”
She
. Not Ethan, then, but one of his followers.
Stefan led the way toward the door quietly, Zander padding at his side, Meredith just behind him with her stave ready. He was aware of Matt and the rest of the Pack, tense and alert, hanging back to give them room.
With a sudden brutal kick, Stefan burst through the door, raising his arms to fend off an attack.
At the end of the room farthest from the door, a curly-haired girl cowered, her arms up to protect her face, her eyes wide with fright. She looked so vulnerable that Stefan hesitated for a moment, even though he knew immediately what she was.
Meredith shot past him and held her stave to the girl’s chest, right above her heart.
“No!” Matt shouted from the doorway, pushing his way through the crowd of werewolves. “Stop, you guys.” He crossed the room and stopped in front of the girl. The girl lowered her arms, her face wondering.
“Matt?” she whispered.
“Oh, Chloe,” Matt said mournfully. He raised a hand toward her but hesitated before making contact, his hand hanging in midair.
Matt’s friend Chloe,
Stefan remembered. Chloe, the first girl Matt had seemed to care about since he’d dated Elena, since before Stefan had met him.
Matt’s hand dropped back to his side and Stefan wondered if Matt was remembering the vicious murderer his friend Beth had become, if he was already resigning himself to Chloe’s fate.
“Where are the other vampires?” Meredith asked coldly, pressing the stave against the other girl’s chest.
“They’ve gone to the woods,” Chloe said in a small, terrified voice. “They’re going to do the resurrection spell there.”
Stefan shook his head. “Ethan can’t do the resurrection spell without Damon’s blood,” he said, hearing the almost pleading tone in his own voice.
Chloe half shrugged, looking back and forth between him and the others. “I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He said he had everything he needed.”
Ethan had cut Damon during the fight. It was just possible that he had managed to collect some blood, or find enough after the battle, for what he needed. Stefan swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Why aren’t you with them?” Meredith asked.
“I didn’t want to go,” the girl said, her voice shaking. Her gaze settled on Matt, and she frowned anxiously, as if it was important that Matt understand her. “I feel like . . . with part of me I feel like Ethan is the center of the universe, but with my
mind
, I know how terrible he is. I’m trying to fight it. I don’t want to hurt
anyone
.” Her eyes were full of tears, and Matt clenched his jaw, looking miserable and uncertain.
“You’re trying to fight off the sire bond,” Stefan said gently. “It’s hard, but it can be done. And your compulsion toward Ethan will wear off before long. You can reject this life if you really want to.”
“I
want
to,” Chloe said desperately. “Please. Can you help me?”
Stefan began to speak, but Matt broke in. “Stop,” he said again. “Stefan, Beth said the same thing—that she didn’t want to hurt anyone, that she needed help. But she was lying.”
Zander, swift and silent, padded forward. Approaching Chloe slowly, he sniffed at her hands. He rose up on his back legs, placing his front paws on Chloe’s shoulders. She cringed, but he nosed her face unconcernedly and, for a long moment, stared directly into her eyes.
“Is she telling us the truth?” Meredith asked.
The huge white wolf dropped back to all fours and turned away, glancing at the human-formed members of his Pack.
“He says she’s being honest,” Daniel reported, “but that she’s weak. Fighting her nature is almost too much for her.”
Chloe sobbed, a rough, hopeless sound.
Meredith, still poised with her stave for the kill, raised a questioning eyebrow at Stefan, irresolute. Matt turned to him, too, his eyes shining with anxious hope. They were all looking to him, he realized, to make the decision.
“We’ll help you,” he said slowly, “but first you need to help us.”
Matt let out a breath of relief and closed the distance between him and Chloe. She leaned against him gratefully but nodded at Stefan, tears running down her face. “If you want to stop Ethan,” she said, “we’ll have to hurry.”