Authors: L. J. Smith
Meredith felt her face twist, and her voice came out thick and fierce. “Sometimes I feel like it’s never going to stop,” she told Alaric. “There’s always more monsters. And now Klaus is back, even though we killed him. He should be
gone
.”
“I know,” Alaric said. “I wish I could make things better. Klaus destroyed your family, and you defeated him. You’re right, this should have ended then.” They paused by a bench underneath a clump of trees, and he sat, pulling Meredith down beside him. Taking her hand, he looked into her eyes, his face filled with love and concern. “Tell me the truth, Meredith,” he said. “Klaus destroyed your family. How are you feeling?”
Meredith caught her breath, because that fact was exactly what she had been avoiding ever since Klaus stepped out of the fire.
Klaus had attacked Meredith’s grandfather and driven him into madness. He had kidnapped her twin brother, Cristian, and made him into a vampire. And he had made Meredith herself into a living half vampire, something every hunting family had a right to loathe.
And then the Guardians had changed everything, making a reality out of what would have happened if Klaus had never come to Fell’s Church. Cristian was a human now—Meredith didn’t remember ever meeting him, but he had grown up with her in this reality—and in army boot camp in Georgia. Their grandfather was happy and sane, living in a retirement village down in Florida. And Meredith didn’t need blood, didn’t have sharp kitten teeth. But she and her friends still remembered the way things used to be. No one else in her family remembered, but she did.
“I’m terrified,” Meredith confessed. She twisted her hand around, playing with Alaric’s fingers. “There’s nothing Klaus wouldn’t do, and knowing that he’s out there somewhere, waiting, planning something, is . . . I don’t know what to do with that.”
She clenched her jaw and looked up, meeting Alaric’s eyes. “He has to die,” she said softly. “He can’t start over, not now.”
Alaric nodded. “Okay,” he said, shifting from sympathetic to businesslike. “I have some good news, I think.” He unzipped the black messenger bag he’d been carrying over his shoulder and pulled out his notebook, flipping over a few pages until he found the information he wanted. “We know that white ash wood is the only wood deadly to Klaus, right?” he asked.
“That’s what they say,” Meredith told him. “Last time, we made Stefan a weapon of white ash, but it didn’t turn out to be that useful.” She remembered Klaus tearing the white ash spear out of Stefan’s hand, breaking it, and using it to stab at Stefan himself. Stefan’s screams as a thousand deadly splinters had torn into him had been . . . unforgettable. He had almost died.
Damon had wounded Klaus with the spear of white ash after that, but in the end, Klaus had managed to pull the bloody wood out of his own back and had stood triumphant, still powerful, still able to bring Stefan and Damon to their knees.
And this time, we don’t even have Damon,
Meredith thought bleakly. She’d given up on asking Elena and Stefan where Damon was. He’d always been unpredictable.
“Well,” said Alaric with a little smile, “there’s an Appalachian folk legend I found in my research that says a white ash tree planted at the full moon under certain conditions is more powerful against vampires than any other wood. A white ash with that kind of magic in its origins ought to pack a real punch against Klaus.”
“Sure, but how are we going to find something like that?” Meredith asked, and then she cocked an eyebrow. “Oh. You already know where one is, don’t you?”
Alaric’s smile grew wider. After a second, Meredith wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. “You’re my hero,” she said.
Alaric blushed, the pink rising from his neck to his forehead, but he looked pleased. “
You’re
the hero,” he said. “But with luck, we’ll have a real weapon against Klaus.”
“Road trip,” Meredith said. “But not until we’ve made sure the campus is as safe as we can get it. Klaus is lying low and we don’t have any leads on where he is, so we have to focus on the newly made vampires for now.” She smiled ruefully at Alaric, scuffing her sneakers below the bench. “It’s important to face the immediate threat first. But this is good.”
Alaric pressed her hand between both of his. “Whatever you need, I’ll help,” he said earnestly. “I’ll stay here as long as I’m useful. As long as you want me.”
Despite the seriousness of their problems, despite the gory mess that was her past and the almost definite horror of her future, Meredith had to laugh. “As long as I want you?” she said, flirting, glancing up at him through her lashes, basking in Alaric’s smile. “Oh, you’re never getting away from me now.”
C
hloe stalked silently through the forest, every move precise. She tilted her head alertly, her eyes tracking some near-invisible movement in the undergrowth.
Matt followed her, messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He was trying to walk quietly, too, but sticks and leaves crackled under his feet, and he winced.
Stopping, Chloe blinked for a moment, sniffed the air, and then stretched her hands out toward the bushes to their left. “Come on,” she murmured, almost too low for Matt to hear.
There was a rustling, and slowly a rabbit nosed its way out from between the leaves, staring up at Chloe with wide, dark eyes, its ears quivering. With a quick swoop, Chloe snatched it up. There was a shrill squeak, and then the little animal was still and docile in her arms.
Chloe’s face was buried in the rabbit’s light brown fur, and Matt watched with a sort of detached approval as she swallowed. A drop of blood made a long, sticky track down the animal’s side before dripping to the forest floor.
Waking from its doze, the rabbit spasmed once, kicking out with its hind legs, and then lay still. Chloe wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and laid the rabbit onto the ground, looking down at it mournfully.
“I didn’t mean to kill it,” she said, her voice low and sad. She pushed back her short ringlets of hair and looked up at Matt beseechingly. “I’m sorry. I know how gross and weird this is.”
Matt opened his messenger bag and pulled out a bottle of water to hand to her. “You don’t have to apologize,” he said. Yeah, watching her feed on animals was sort of weird and gross, but less so now than the first time he’d seen it. And it was a hundred percent worth it: Chloe hadn’t relapsed at all, seemed content with drinking animal blood instead of hunting humans. That was all that mattered.
Chloe rinsed out her mouth, spitting pink-tinged water into the bushes, then took a drink. “Thanks,” she said shakily. “It’s been hard, I guess. Sometimes I dream about blood. Real human blood. But the things I did, in those days with Ethan, I can’t really forgive myself for. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. And Ethan—why did I ever trust him?” Her Cupid’s-bow mouth trembled.
“Hey.” Matt caught her arm and shook it lightly. “Ethan had us all fooled. If Stefan hadn’t saved me, I’d be in the same situation you are.”
“Yeah.” Chloe leaned against him. “I guess you’re saving me, too.”
Matt tangled his fingers with hers. “I wasn’t ready to lose you.”
Chloe tipped her face up to his, her eyes widening. Matt brushed his mouth against her cheek and then her mouth, just a light brush of lips at first, and then more deeply. Matt closed his eyes, feeling the softness of her lips against his. He felt like he was falling. Each day he spent with Chloe, helping her turn toward the light, seeing her strength, he loved her just a little more.
Meredith stretched and groaned quietly to herself. The room was dark, except for the light of her laptop screen. Elena and Bonnie were fast asleep in their beds, and Meredith glanced longingly at her own bed. Nights of patrolling and days spent at the gym meant that she had been collapsing gratefully into deep dreamless sleep as soon as she lay down lately.
But unlike many of the classes on campus, her English section was still meeting, and Meredith had a paper due. She’d been a straight-A student in high school, and her pride wouldn’t let her miss the deadline on a paper or do a shoddy job, no matter how tired she was. Forcing herself back into student mode, Meredith yawned and typed:
From their first encounter Anna and Vronsky’s relationship is clearly doomed to end in mutual destruction.
Student mode or not, she was still a hunter, still an exquisitely balanced weapon, still a Sulez, and she snapped to attention as soon as Bonnie’s voice rose from her bed on the other side of the room.
“He doesn’t like to be alone,” Bonnie said abruptly. Her usually expressive voice had that flat, almost metallic quality that signaled one of her visions.
“Bonnie?” Meredith said tentatively. Bonnie didn’t answer, and Meredith turned on her desk light to illuminate the rest of the room, careful not to shine it directly in Bonnie’s face.
Bonnie’s eyes were shut, although Meredith could see them moving beneath their lids as if she were trying to wake, or trying to see something in her dreams. Her face was strained, and Meredith made a soothing sound in her throat as she crept across the room and shook Elena gently by the shoulder.
Elena gave a half-asleep
mmph
rolling over, and muttered, “What?
What?
” in irritation before she blinked all the way awake.
“Shh,” Meredith told her, and said gently to Bonnie, “Who doesn’t like to be alone, Bon?”
“Klaus,” Bonnie answered in that same deadened voice, and Elena’s eyes widened in comprehension. Elena sat up, her golden hair tousled with sleep, and reached for a notebook and pen on her desk. Meredith sat down on Bonnie’s bed and waited, staring at the smaller girl’s sleeping face beside her.
“Klaus wants his old friends,” Bonnie told them. “He’s calling for one now.” Still sleeping, she raised one thin, white arm out above her and crooked her finger, beckoning into the darkness. “There’s so much blood,” she added in that flat voice, as her hand flopped back down by her side. The skin on Meredith’s arms pebbled into goose bumps.
Elena scribbled something in her notebook and held it up: in big letters she’d written
ASK HER WHO
. They’d found in the past that it was better for just one person to question Bonnie when she was seeing visions, to keep her from getting confused and snapping out of her trance.
“Who is Klaus calling for?” Meredith asked, keeping her voice calm. Her heart was pounding hard at the idea, and she pressed one hand against her chest as if to calm it. Anyone Klaus considered a friend was definitely dangerous.
Bonnie’s mouth opened to answer, but she hesitated. “He calls them to join his fight,” she said after a moment, her voice hollow. “The fire’s so bright, there’s no way to tell who’s coming. It’s just Klaus. Klaus and blood and flames in the darkness.”
“What is Klaus planning?” Meredith asked. Bonnie didn’t answer, but her eyelids fluttered, her lashes looking thick and dark against the paleness of her cheeks. She was breathing more heavily now.
“Should we try to wake her up?” Meredith wondered. Elena shook her head and wrote on the pad again.
ASK HER WHERE KLAUS IS
.
“Can you tell where Klaus is right now?” Meredith asked.
Restlessly, Bonnie moved her head back and forth against the pillow. “Fire,” she said. “Darkness and flames. Blood and
fire
. He wants them all to join his fight.” A thick chuckle forced its way out of her mouth, although her expression did not change. “If Klaus has his way, everything will end in blood and fire.”
“Can we stop him?” Meredith asked. Bonnie said nothing, but grew more restless. Her hands and feet started to drum against the mattress, lightly and then more heavily, a rapid patter. “Bonnie!” Meredith said, and leaped to her feet.
With a great gasp, Bonnie’s body stilled. Her eyes flew open.
Meredith grabbed the smaller girl’s shoulders. A second later, Elena was beside them on the bed, reaching out and taking hold of Bonnie’s arm.
Bonnie’s brown eyes were wide and blank for a moment, and then she frowned and Meredith could see the real Bonnie flooding back in.
“Ow!” Bonnie complained. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night!” She pulled away from them. “Cut it out,” she said indignantly, rubbing at her arm where Elena had grabbed her.
“You had a vision,” Elena said, shifting back to give her some room. “Can you remember anything?”
“Ugh.” Bonnie made a face. “I should have known. My mouth always tastes funny when I come out of one of those. I
hate
that.” She looked at Elena and Meredith. “I don’t remember anything. What’d I say?” she asked tentatively. “Was it bad?”
“Oh, blood and fire and darkness,” Meredith said dryly. “The usual sort of thing.”
“I wrote it down,” Elena said, and handed Bonnie her notebook.
Bonnie read Elena’s notes and paled. “Klaus is calling someone to come to him?” she asked. “Oh, no. More monsters. We can’t—there’s no way this is good for us.”
“Any guesses about who he might be calling?” Elena wondered.
Meredith sighed and stood, beginning to pace between the beds. “We don’t really know that much about him,” she said.
“Thousands of years of being a monster,” Elena added. “I imagine Klaus has a lot of evil in his past.”
Despite her quick strides across the room, a cold shiver ran down Meredith’s back. One thing was certain: anyone Klaus wanted to join him would be the last person they would want here. Decisively, she clicked her laptop closed and went to her closet to pull out the weapons trunk. There was no time to be a student now. She had to prepare for war.
“
I
think I can see better in the dark now,” Elena told Stefan as she pushed back a tree branch and held it so that he could pass.
The night seemed alive with sounds and motion, from the rustle of leaves to the scurry of some sort of tiny rodent in the undergrowth. It felt so different from the last time she and Stefan had patrolled the woods together. Elena didn’t know if this new awareness was directly linked to the Power she could feel spreading steadily inside her, or if knowing she had the Power just made her more alert to everything else.
Stefan smiled, but didn’t answer. She could tell that he was focused on sending out his own Power, looking for vampires in the woods.
When she concentrated, she could see that Stefan’s aura was a beautiful clear blue, shot with tendrils of soft gray that she thought might be the doubts and guilt that never fully left him. But the living blue was so much stronger than the gray. She wished that Stefan could see his aura for himself.
She reached out and touched it, her hand hovering right above his skin. The blue enveloped her hand, but she couldn’t feel anything. She wiggled her fingers, watching Stefan’s aura flow around them.
“What’re you doing?” Stefan said, turning his hand to thread his fingers between hers. He still looked out at the darkness around them.
“Your aura—” Elena said, and then stopped.
Something was coming.
Stefan made a soft questioning noise and when Elena drew a breath to speak again, something dark and clammy swept over her, chilling her as thoroughly as if she’d been swept beneath an icy river.
Evil.
She was sure of it.
“This way,” she said urgently, and pulling Stefan by the hand, started to run through the forest. Branches slapped at her as she pushed past them, one leaving a long stinging scratch on her cheek. Elena ignored it. She could feel something tugging at her, its urgency claiming all her attention.
Evil. She needed to stop it.
Her feet slipped and skidded on the dead leaves underfoot, and Stefan caught her by the arm before she could fall, pulling her upright. She stood still for a moment, gasping to catch her breath.
Ahead, she could see streaks of a dirty rust-red cut with sickly bile-yellow. Nothing like the soothing colors of Stefan’s or Andrés’s auras, not at all. As Elena watched, the rust-red—the color of dried, old blood—contracted and expanded around the bilious yellow in a steady pulse. Two auras, she realized—one dominating the other. Elena’s sense of urgency grew.
“I can see it,” she said desperately. “Something bad is happening. Come on.”
They ran on. Elena could tell when Stefan’s Power picked up on what she was sensing, because he suddenly sped up, pulling her on instead of following her.
A vampire was pressing his victim back against a tree; the two figures huddled together into one dark, hulking shape. The pulsating auras wrapped around them, almost nauseating to watch. Elena barely had a moment to realize she’d found what she’d been hunting when Stefan yanked the vampire off the human and snapped his neck with one efficient twist of his hands. Then he tore a branch from the tree and staked him through the chest.
The vampire’s victim fell to his hands and knees with a muffled thump. His yellowish aura lost its sickly tint almost immediately, but dimmed to a thin gray as the guy slumped down into the heap of leaves beneath the tree.
Elena dropped to her knees beside him and dug out her flashlight to check him over as Stefan dragged the vampire’s body—one of the Vitale pledges—away into the bushes. The victim had very short black hair and was pale, but his pulse was steady, and his breathing shallow but regular. Blood trickled from a bite on his neck, and Elena pulled off her jacket and used it to put pressure against the wound.
“I think he’s okay,” she told Stefan when he came back to stand beside her.
“Good work, Elena,” he told her, and then inhaled deeply. “There’s blood still flowing somewhere on him, though.”
Elena ran the flashlight over the guy. He was wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt and his feet were bare. The soles of his feet were bleeding.
“The vampire must have compelled him out of his dorm,” she realized. “That’s how he ended up in the woods.”
“They’re getting more skilled,” Stefan said. “We’ll organize more patrols around campus. Maybe we can stop some of them before they catch their victims in the first place.”
“For now, we’d better get this guy back home,” Elena said. The black-haired guy whimpered as Stefan and Elena gently pulled him up. The grayness of his aura began to fill with agitated strands of color, and Elena could tell he was starting to wake. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly, and felt a whisper of Stefan’s Power as he began to murmur to him, calming him for the trip back to his dorm.
She couldn’t focus on helping him, though. Her skin itched and she felt a tugging deep inside. There was still something out there. Evil, close by. Elena let Stefan take the full weight of the vampire’s victim and stepped away, reaching out with her Power to try to sense in what direction the evil lay.
Nothing. Nothing specific, anyway—just that heavy, dreadful certainty that something was
wrong
, not too far away. She strained her senses, looking and feeling for a trace of some aura.
Nothing.
“Elena?” Stefan asked. He was supporting the vampire’s victim easily and giving her a questioning look.
Elena shook her head. “There’s something,” she said slowly. “But I don’t know where.” She stared out into the darkness for a moment, but there was still no clue to tell her where the oppressive feeling was coming from. “We should call it a night,” she said finally.
“Are you sure?” Stefan asked. At her nod, he hiked the guy higher on his shoulder and turned back toward campus. As Elena followed him, she took one last uneasy glance around. Whatever it was, it was shielding itself from her and from Stefan better than the young vampires could.
Something old, then. And evil. Was Klaus nearby? If he wanted to, he could kill them right now, Elena realized with a dizzying flare of panic. He was stronger than Elena and Stefan were. The woods around her looked darker, more ominous, as if Klaus might be lurking behind any tree. She walked faster, sticking close to Stefan, eager to see the lights of campus ahead.
Bonnie kept hold of Zander’s hand as they followed Meredith around the edge of the soccer field. They hadn’t seen any vampires tonight, but the stars were incredibly bright above them.
“I like patrolling with you,” she told him. “It’s almost like a romantic stroll, except for, you know, the possibility of being attacked by vampires.”
Zander grinned down at her and swung their clasped hands. “Don’t you worry yourself, little lady,” he said in a terrible imitation of a western drawl. “I’m the toughest werewolf in this here town and I’m looking out for you.”
“Is it weird that I find that voice sexy?” Bonnie asked Meredith.
Meredith, striding along ahead of them, looked back to raise an expressive eyebrow at Bonnie. “Yes,” she said simply. “Very weird.”
A long, drawn-out howl echoed from the direction of the hills just outside of campus and Zander cocked his head, listening. “The guys haven’t found anything,” he said. “They’re heading out to get some pizza once Camden changes back.”
“Do you want to meet up with them?” Bonnie asked.
Zander pulled her closer, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Not unless you do,” he said. “I thought maybe we could hang out in my room, watch a movie or something.”
“Passing up food, Zander?” a dry voice said behind them. “It must be true love.” Meredith whipped around, and Bonnie knew she was kicking herself for not sensing the girl coming up to them.
“Hi, Shay,” Bonnie said resignedly. “Meredith, meet Zander’s old friend Shay.”
Werewolf,
she mouthed to Meredith when she was sure Shay wasn’t looking.
“I hope you don’t mind me catching up with you,” Shay said, falling into step with them on Zander’s other side. “Spencer told me you’d be patrolling over here.”
“The more the merrier,” Bonnie told her, very consciously
not
gritting her teeth.
“I’d love to get some fighting in,” Shay said, rolling her shoulders. “Feels like I’ve been doing nothing but sitting around since I got here. Zander could tell you how restless we get when we’re cooped up.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Bonnie said. Zander had sped up his pace to match Shay’s quicker one, and his arm dropped from Bonnie’s shoulders. She took his hand again, but found herself having to hurry to keep up.
Meredith hesitated, glancing between them, and was just opening her mouth to say something to Shay when Shay suddenly stopped.
“Hear that?” she said, and Zander, Meredith, and Bonnie all stopped and listened, too.
Bonnie didn’t hear anything, but Zander smiled and nudged Shay with one elbow. “White-tailed deer on the ridge,” he said.
They shared a private smile.
“What are you guys talking about?” Bonnie asked.
Shay turned to Bonnie. “The High Wolf Council divides us into Packs-to-be when we’re children, and we grow up playing together. When Zander and I and the others were about fifteen, our Pack spent a week roaming the mountains near where we grew up.” She grinned at Zander, and Bonnie tensed at the intimacy that was clear between them.
“Anyway,” Shay went on, “on this trip, after we’d been out running with the Pack all night, Zander and I went to drink from a pond tucked away in the pinewoods. We found deer there, and we could have killed one of them easily—we were wolves right then, and it’s natural for us to hunt in that form—but they just looked at us, the sun coming up behind them. And”—she shrugged—“they were beautiful. It was like that moment was just for us.” She smiled, and for once, it didn’t seem like she was trying to needle Bonnie. Shay was just remembering. She tipped her face into the breeze. “Smell that?” she asked Zander.
Bonnie didn’t smell anything, but Zander sniffed the breeze and shot Shay another nostalgic smile. “Pine,” he said. Shay grinned back, her nose crinkling.
After a moment, Meredith cleared her throat and they started walking again, scanning the area for trouble, and Zander squeezed Bonnie’s hand. “So,” he said. “Movie?”
“Sure,” Bonnie said, distracted. She couldn’t help seeing the similarities in Zander’s and Shay’s movements and how, even when Zander was talking to her, he had one ear cocked for faraway sounds Bonnie would never be able to hear. There was a distance between Bonnie and Zander, she thought, that they might never be able to cross.
Maybe Bonnie would never belong in Zander’s world. Not like Shay.