The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Nightfall (5 page)

As Bonnie moved toward Elena, as shyly as if she’d never been kissed before, Caroline exploded.

“You just keep doing it and doing it and doing it!” She was practically screeching by now, Bonnie thought. “What’s
wrong
with you? Don’t you have any morals at all?”

This, unfortunately, caused another case of the
don’t-laugh-don’t-laugh
choked giggles in Bonnie and Meredith. Even Stefan turned away sharply, his gallantry toward a guest clearly fighting a losing battle.

Not just a guest, Bonnie thought, but a girl he’d gone
pret-ty
darn far with, as Caroline hadn’t been shy about letting people know when she’d gotten her hands on him. About as far as vampires
could
go, Bonnie remembered, which was not the whole way. Something about the blood-sharing substituting for—well, for Doing It. But he wasn’t the only one Caroline had bragged about. Caroline was infamous.

Bonnie glanced at Elena, saw that Elena was watching Caroline with a strange expression. Not as if Elena were afraid of her, but rather as if Elena were deeply worried
about
her.

“Are you all right?” Bonnie whispered. To her surprise, Elena nodded, then looked at Caroline and shook her head. She carefully looked Caroline up and down and her expression was that of a puzzled doctor examining a very sick patient.

Then she floated toward Caroline, one hand extended.

Caroline shied away, as if she were disgusted to have Elena touch her. No, not disgusted, Bonnie thought, but
frightened.

“How do I know what she’ll do next?” Caroline snapped, but Bonnie knew that wasn’t the real reason for her fear. What do we have going on here? she wondered. Elena afraid
for
Caroline, and Caroline afraid
of
Elena. What does that equal?

Bonnie’s psychic senses were giving her gooseflesh. There was something
wrong
with Caroline, she felt, something she’d never encountered before. And the air…it was thickening somehow, as if it were building up to a thunderstorm.

Caroline made a sharp turn to keep her face averted from Elena’s. She moved behind a chair.

“Just keep her freakin’
away
from me, all right? I won’t let her touch me again—” she began, when Meredith changed the whole situation with two quiet words.

“
What
did you say to me?” Caroline said, staring.

D
amon was driving aimlessly when he saw the girl.

She was alone, walking down the side of the street, her titian hair blowing in the wind, her arms weighted down by packages.

Damon immediately did the chivalrous thing. He let the car glide to a stop, waited for the girl to take a few striding paces to catch up with him—
che gambe!
—and then jumped out and hastened to open the passenger side door for her.

Her name, as it turned out, was Damaris.

In moments the Ferrari was back on the road, going so fast that Damaris’s titian hair was flowing behind her like a banner. She was a young woman who fully merited the kind of trance-inducing compliments he’d been
handing out freely all day—which was a good thing, he thought laconically, because his imagination was very nearly drained dry.

But flattering this lovely creature, with her nimbus of red-gold hair and her pure, milky skin, wouldn’t take any imagination at all. He didn’t expect any trouble from her, and he planned to keep her overnight.

Veni, vidi, vici,
Damon thought, and flashed a wicked smile into the middle distance. And then he amended—Well, perhaps I haven’t conquered
yet
, but I’d bet my Ferrari on it.

They stopped by a “scenic view roundabout” and when Damaris had dropped her purse and bent to pick it up, he’d seen the nape of her neck, where those fine titian hairs were startlingly delicate against the whiteness of her skin.

He’d kissed it immediately, impulsively, finding it as soft as a baby’s skin—and warm against his lips. He’d allowed her complete freedom of action, interested to see whether she would slap him, but instead she had just straightened up and taken a few shaky breaths before allowing him to take her in his arms to be kissed into a trembling, heated, uncertain creature, her dark blue eyes entreating and trying to resist at the same time.

“I—shouldn’t have let you do that. I won’t let you again. I want to go home now.”

Damon smiled. His Ferrari was safe.

Her ultimate yielding would be particularly pleasant, he thought as they continued their drive. If she shaped up as well as she seemed to be doing, he might even keep her a few days, might even Change her.

Now, though, he was bothered by an inexplicable disquiet inside. It was Elena, of course. Being so close to her at the boardinghouse and not daring to demand to go to her, because of what he might do. Oh, hell, what I
should
have done already, he thought with a sudden vehemence. Stefan was right—there was something wrong with him today.

He was frustrated to a degree that he wouldn’t have imagined possible. What he
should
have done was to have ground his little brother’s face in the dirt, wrung his neck like a fowl, and then gone up those narrow tacky stairs to
take
Elena, willing or no. He hadn’t done it before because of some syrupy nonsense, caring about her screaming and carrying on as he lifted that incomparable chin and buried his swollen, aching fangs in her lily-white throat.

There was a noise going on in the car. “—don’t you think?” Damaris was saying.

Annoyed and too busy with his fantasy to go over what his mind might have heard of her speech, he shut her off, and she was instantly quiet. Damaris was lovely but
una stomata
—a ditz. Now she sat with her titian hair whipping
in the wind, but with blank eyes, the pupils contracted, absolutely still.

And all for nothing. Damon made a hissing sound of exasperation. He couldn’t get back into his daydream; even in silence, the imagined sounds of Elena’s sobbing prevented him.

But there would be no more sobbing once he’d made her into a vampire, a little voice in his mind suggested. Damon cocked his head and leaned back, three fingers on the steering wheel. He’d once sought to make her his princess of darkness—why not again? She would belong to him utterly, and if he had to give up her mortal blood…well, he wasn’t exactly getting any of that right now, was he? the insinuating voice said. Elena, pale and glowing with a vampire’s aura of Power, her hair almost white-blond, a black gown against her satiny skin. Now there was a picture to make any vampire’s heart beat faster.

He wanted her more than ever now that she had been a spirit. Even as a vampire she would retain most of her own nature, and he could just picture it: her light for his darkness, her soft whiteness in his hard, black-jacketed arms. He would stop that exquisite mouth with kisses, smother her with them—

What was he
thinking
about? Vampires didn’t kiss like that for enjoyment—especially not other vampires. The blood, the hunt was all. Kissing beyond whatever was
necessary to conquer their victim was pointless; it could lead nowhere. Only sentimental idiots like his brother bothered with such foolishness. A mated vampire pair might share the blood of a mortal victim, both striking at once, both controlling the victim’s mind—and joined together in mind-link, too. That was how they found their pleasure.

Still, Damon found himself excited by the idea of kissing Elena, of forcing kisses on her, of feeling her desperation to get away from him suddenly pause—with the little hesitation that came just before response, before yielding herself completely to him.

Maybe I’m going crazy, Damon thought, intrigued. He had never gone crazy before that he could recall, and there was some appeal in the idea. It had been centuries since he’d felt this kind of excitement.

All the better for you, Damaris, he thought. He had reached the point where Sycamore Street cut briefly into the Old Wood, and the road there was winding and dangerous. Regardless, he found himself turning to Damaris to wake her again, noting with approval that her lips were naturally that soft cherry color, without lipstick. He kissed her lightly, then waited to gauge her response.

Pleasure. He could see her mind go soft and rosy with it.

He glanced at the road ahead and then tried it again,
this time holding the kiss. He was elated with her response, with both of their responses. This was amazing. It must have to do with the amount of blood he’d had, more than ever before in one day, or the combination—

He suddenly had to wrench his attention from Damaris to driving. Some small russet animal had appeared as if by magic on the road in front of him. Damon normally didn’t go out of his way to run over rabbits, porcupines, and the like, but this one had annoyed him at a crucial moment. He grasped the steering wheel with both hands, his eyes black and cold as glacial ice in the depths of a cave, and headed straight for the russet thing.

Not all
that
small—there would be a bit of a bump.

“Hang on,” he murmured to Damaris.

At the last instant, the reddish thing dodged. Damon wrenched the wheel round to follow it, and then found himself faced with a ditch. Only the superhuman reflexes of a vampire—and the finely tuned response of a very expensive vehicle—could have kept them out of the ditch. Fortunately Damon had both, swinging them in a tight circle, tires squealing and smoking in protest.

And no bump.

Damon leaped over the car door in one fluid motion and looked around. But whatever it was, had vanished completely, as mysteriously as it had appeared.

Sconosciuto
. Weird.

He wished he wasn’t heading into the sun; the bright afternoon light cut down his visual acuity severely. But he’d had a glimpse of the thing as it got close, and it had looked deformed. Pointed at one end and fan-like at the other.

Oh, well.

He turned back to the car, where Damaris was having hysterics. He wasn’t in the mood to coddle anyone, so he simply put her back to sleep. She slumped back into the seat, tears left to dry on her cheeks unheeded.

Damon got back into the car feeling frustrated. But he knew now what he wanted to do today. He wanted to find a bar—either seedy and sleazy or immaculate and expensive—and he wanted to find another vampire. With Fell’s Church being such a hot spot on the ley-line map, that shouldn’t be difficult in the surrounding areas. Vampires and other creatures of darkness were drawn to hot spots like bumblebees to honeysuckle.

And then he wanted a fight. It would be completely unfair—Damon was the strongest vampire left that he knew of, plus he was tick-full of a cocktail of the blood of Fell’s Church’s finest maidens. He didn’t care. He felt like taking his frustrations out on something, and—he flashed that inimitable, incandescent smile at nothing—some werewolf or vampire or ghoul was about to meet its
quietus
. Maybe more than one, if he were only lucky enough to
find them. After which—delicious Damaris for dessert.

Life was good, after all. And unlife, thought Damon, his eyes glinting dangerously behind the sunglasses, was even better. He wasn’t just going to sit and sulk because he couldn’t have Elena immediately. He was going to go out and enjoy himself and get stronger—and then sometime soon, he was going to go over to his pathetic milksop of a younger brother’s place and
take
her.

He happened to glance in the car’s rearview mirror for a moment. By some freak of light or inversion of the atmosphere, it seemed that he could see his eyes behind his sunglasses—burning red.

“I
said,
get out
,” Meredith repeated to Caroline, still quietly. “You’ve said things that never should have been said in any civilized place. This happens to be Stefan’s place—and, yes, it’s his
place
to order you out, too. I’m doing it for him, though, because he never would ask a girl—and a former girlfriend, I might add—to get the hell out of his room.”

Matt cleared his throat. He’d stepped back into a corner and everyone had forgotten about him. Now he said, “Caroline, I’ve known you way too long to be formal, and Meredith’s right. You want to say the kind of things you’ve been saying about Elena, you do it somewhere far
away
from Elena. But, look, there’s one thing I know. No matter what Elena did when she was—was down
here
before”—his voice dropped a little in wonder, and Bonnie knew that
he meant, when Elena was here on Earth before—“she’s as close to an angel
now
as you can get. Right now she’s…she’s…completely…” He hesitated, stumbling for the right words.

“Pure,” Meredith said easily, filling in the blank for him.

“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “Yeah, pure. Everything she does is pure. And it’s not like any of your nasty words could stain her, anyway, but the rest of us just don’t like hearing you try.”

There was a low “Thank you” from Stefan.

“I was already going,” Caroline said, now through her teeth. “And don’t you
dare
preach at
me
about
purity
! Here, with all this going on! You probably just want to watch it going on yourself, two girls kissing. You probably—”

“Enough.” Stefan said it almost expressionlessly, but Caroline was swept off her feet, up and out of the door, and deposited there by invisible hands. Her purse trailed after her.

Then the door quietly shut.

Fine hairs rose on the back of Bonnie’s neck. This was Power, in such amounts that her psychic senses were stunned and temporarily paralyzed. Moving Caroline—and she wasn’t a small girl—now that took
Power
.

Maybe Stefan had changed just as much as Elena had. Bonnie glanced at Elena, whose pool of serenity was
rippling because of Caroline.

Might as well take her mind off it, and maybe make herself worthy of a
thank you
from Stefan, Bonnie thought.

She tapped Elena’s knee, and when Elena turned, Bonnie kissed her.

Elena broke the kiss very quickly, as if afraid to set off some holocaust again. But Bonnie saw at once what Meredith had said about it not being sexual. It was…more like being examined by someone who used all her senses to the fullest. When Elena moved away from Bonnie she beamed at her just as she had at Meredith, all the distress washed away by—yes, the
purity
of the kiss. And Bonnie felt as if some of Elena’s tranquility had soaked into her.

“…should have known better than to bring Caroline,” Matt was saying to Stefan. “Sorry about butting in. But I
know
Caroline, and she could have gone on ranting for another half hour, never actually leaving.”

“Stefan took care of that,” Meredith said, “or was that Elena, too?”

“It was me,” Stefan said. “Matt had it right: she could keep on talking forever without actually leaving. And I’d just as lief nobody run Elena down like that in my hearing.”

Why are they talking about those things? Bonnie wondered. Of all people, Meredith and Stefan were least inclined to chatter, but here they were, saying things that
didn’t really need to be said. Then she realized it was for Matt, who was moving slowly but with determination toward Elena.

Bonnie got up as quickly and as lithely as if she could fly, and managed to pass Matt without looking at him. And then she was joining Meredith and Stefan in small talk—well, medium-small talk—about what had just happened. Caroline made a bad enemy, everyone agreed, and nothing seemed to teach her that her schemes against Elena always backfired. Bonnie would bet that she was hatching a new scheme right now against all of them.

“She feels lonely all the time,” Stefan said, as if trying to make excuses for her. “She wants to be accepted, by anyone, on any terms—but she feels—apart. As if nobody who really got to know her would trust her.”

“She’s defensive,” Meredith agreed. “But you’d think she’d show
some
gratitude. After all, we did rescue her and save her life just over a week ago.”

There was more to it than that, Bonnie thought. Her intuition was trying to tell her something—something about what might have happened
before
they had been able to rescue Caroline—but she was so angry on Elena’s behalf that she ignored it.

“Why should anybody trust her?” she said to Stefan. She sneaked a peek behind her. Elena was definitely going to know Matt anywhere, and Matt looked as if he
were fainting. “Caroline’s beautiful, sure, but that’s it. She never has a good word to say about anybody. She plays games all the time—and—and I
know
we used to do some of that, too…but hers are always meant to make other people look bad. Sure, she can take most
guys
in”—a sudden anxiety swept over her, and she spoke more loudly to try to push it away—“but if you’re a girl she’s just a pair of long legs and big—”

Bonnie stopped because Meredith and Stefan had frozen, with identical
Oh-God-not-again
expressions on their faces.

“And she also has very decent hearing,” said a shaking, threatening voice from somewhere behind Bonnie. Bonnie’s heart leaped into her throat.

That was what you got for ignoring premonitions.

“Caroline—” Meredith and Stefan were both trying for damage control, but it was too late. Caroline stalked in on her long legs as if she didn’t want her feet to touch Stefan’s floorboards. Oddly, though, she was carrying her high heels.

“I came back in to get my sunglasses,” she said, still in that trembling voice. “And I heard enough to know now what my so-called ‘friends’ think of me.”

“No, you didn’t,” Meredith said, as rapidly eloquent as Bonnie was stunned mute. “You heard some very angry people letting off steam after you’d just insulted them.”

“Besides,” Bonnie said, suddenly able to speak again, “admit it, Caroline—you
hoped
you’d hear something. That’s why you took off your shoes. You were right behind the door, listening, weren’t you?”

Stefan shut his eyes. “This is my fault. I should have—”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Meredith said to him, and to Caroline she added, “And if you can tell me one word we said that isn’t true, or was exaggerated—except maybe for what Bonnie said, and Bonnie is…just being Bonnie. Anyway, if you can point to one word of what the rest of us said that isn’t true,
I’ll
beg your pardon.”

Caroline wasn’t listening. Caroline was twitching. She had a facial tic, and her lovely face was convulsed, dark red, with fury.

“Oh, you’re
going
to beg my pardon all right,” she said, wheeling to point her long-nailed forefinger at each of them. “You’re
all
going to be sorry. And if you try that—that witchcraft-vampire type thing on me again,” she said to Stefan, “I have friends—real friends—who’d like to know about it.”

“Caroline, just this afternoon you signed a contract—”

“Oh, who gives a damn?”

Stefan stood up. It was dark now inside the small room with its dusty window, and Stefan’s shadow was thrown before him by the bedside lamp. Bonnie looked at it and
then poked Meredith, as the hairs tingled on her arms and neck. The shadow was surprisingly dark and surprisingly tall. Caroline’s shadow was weak, transparent, and short—an imitation shadow beside Stefan’s very real one.

The thunderstorm feeling was back. Bonnie was shaking now; trying not to, but unable to stop the shivering that had come on as if she had been thrown into icy water. It was a cold that had gotten directly into her bones and was ripping layer after layer of heat off them like some greedy giant, and now she was beginning to shake
hard
….

Something was happening to Caroline in the darkness—something was coming from her—or coming
for
her—or maybe both. In any case, it was all around her now, and all around Bonnie, too, and the tension was so thick that Bonnie felt choked, her heart pounding. Beside her, Meredith—practical, level-headed Meredith—stirred uneasily.

“What—?” Meredith began in a whisper.

Suddenly, as if it had all been exquisitely choreographed by the things in the dark—the door to Stefan’s room slammed shut…the lamp, an ordinary electric one, went off…the ancient rolled-up shutter over the window came rattling down, dropping the room into sudden and complete darkness.

And Caroline screamed. It was an awful sound—raw, as if it had been stripped like meat from Caroline’s backbone
and yanked out of her throat.

Bonnie screamed, too. She couldn’t help it, although her scream sounded too faint and too breathless, like an echo, not the coloratura job that Caroline had done. Thank God that at least Caroline wasn’t screaming any longer. Bonnie was able to stop the new scream building in her own throat, even though her shaking was worse than ever. Meredith had an arm around her tightly, but then, as the darkness and the silence went on and Bonnie’s shaking only continued, Meredith got up and heartlessly passed her to Matt, who seemed astonished and embarrassed, but tried awkwardly to hold her.

“It’s not as dark once your eyes get used to it,” he said. His voice was creaky, as if he needed a drink of water. But it was the best thing that he could have said, because of all things in the world to fear, Bonnie was most afraid of the dark. There were
things
in it, things that only she saw. She managed, despite the terrible shaking, to stand with his support—and then she gasped, and heard Matt gasp, too.

Elena was glowing. Not only that, but the glow extended out behind her and far to either side of her in a pair of what were beautifully defined, and undeniably
there
…wings.

“She h-has wings,” Bonnie whispered, the stutter caused by her shaking rather than by awe or fear. Matt
was clinging to
her
now, like a child; he obviously couldn’t answer.

The wings moved with Elena’s breathing. She was sitting on thin air, steady now, one hand held out with her fingers all spread in a gesture of denial.

Elena spoke. It wasn’t any language that Bonnie had heard before; she doubted it was any language people on Earth used. The words were sharp, thin-edged, like the splintering of myriad shards of crystal that had fallen from somewhere very high and very far away.

The shape of the words
almost
made sense in Bonnie’s head as her own psychic abilities were sparked by Elena’s tremendous Power. It was a Power that stood tall against the darkness and now was sweeping it aside…making the things in the dark scamper away before it, their claws scritching in all directions. Ice-sharp words followed them all the way, dismissive now….

And Elena…Elena was as heartbreakingly beautiful as when she’d been a vampire, and seemed almost as pale as one.

But Caroline was shouting, too. She was using powerful words of Black Magic, and to Bonnie it was as if the shadows of all sorts of dark and horrible things were coming from her mouth: lizards and snakes and many-legged spiders.

It was a duel, a face-off of magic. Only how had Caroline learned so much dark magic? She wasn’t even a
witch by lineage, like Bonnie.

Outside Stefan’s room, surrounding it, was a strange sound, almost like a helicopter.
Whipwhipwhipwhipwhip…
It terrified Bonnie.

But she had to do something. She was Celtic by heritage and psychic because she couldn’t avoid it, and she had to help Elena. Slowly, as if making her way against gale-force winds, Bonnie stumbled to put her hand on Elena’s hand, to offer Elena her power.

When Elena clasped hands with her, Bonnie realized that Meredith was on her other side. The light grew. The scrabbling lizard things ran from it, screaming and tearing at each other to get away.

The next thing Bonnie knew, Elena had slumped over. The wings were gone. The dark scrabbling things were gone, too. Elena had sent them away, using tremendous amounts of energy to overwhelm them with White Power.

“She’ll fall,” Bonnie whispered, looking at Stefan. “She’s been using magic so strong—”

Just then, as Stefan started to turn to Elena, several things happened very fast, as if the room was caught in the flashes of a strobe light.

Flash. The window shade rolled back up, rattling furiously.

Flash. The lamp went back on, revealing it was in Stefan’s hands. He must have been trying to fix it.

Flash. The door to Stefan’s room opened slowly, creaking, as if to make up for slamming shut before.

Flash. Caroline was now on the floor, on all fours, groveling, breathing hard. Elena had won….

Elena fell.