The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unseen (17 page)

The Guardian was heavier than she would have guessed. He was practically asleep, dead weight against her. Matt gave her a brief, distracted smile, then slid through the crowd and was gone.

“All right there, Andrés?” Meredith asked, nudging him into an easier position and slipping her arm around him. “What does Matt think he’s doing, taking off
now
?”

She wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Andrés smiled at her. “Matt has been wrestling with his conscience,” he murmured. “He’s between a rock and a hard place, as I think the expression goes …”

Meredith tightened her grip on him. “What do you mean?” But the Guardian only hmmed softly, his gaze foggy with exhaustion. His thick black lashes fluttered against the shadows beneath his eyes.

They were ready to move Trinity now, the werewolves carrying her carefully, Jack and Stefan keeping pace beside her makeshift stretcher. Jack was holding Trinity’s hand. As they left, he cast a swift glance over the room. “Can you take care of this place?” he asked Darlene.

Meredith looked around the room at the floor coated with blood and gore, the windows shattered, Solomon’s body in pieces, vampire corpses scattered through the hallways. Water was running in long dirty stains through the bloody wallpaper. Andrés’s magic vines, wilting, ran across the floor. Even the suckling pig had smashed. There was no way they could leave the museum this way for innocent curators to find in the morning.

“What does he mean, take care of it?” she asked Darlene.

The older woman smiled grimly, the flamethrower hanging from her hand. “He means burn it to the ground,” she said. “Want to help me find some gasoline?”

#TVD11SaveTrinity

T
rinity moaned and thrashed her head against the pillow, trying to pull away. Beneath her eyelids, her eyes moved rapidly. She was still trying to fight.

“You’re safe now,” Elena murmured, trying to soothe her. “We’ve got you.” She stroked Trinity’s hair carefully back from her forehead, and the girl stilled a little, whimpering. She was terribly pale. “It’s taking her a long time to heal,” Elena said nervously, looking up at Stefan.

“I know.” Stefan ran his fingers unconsciously across the wrist he had fed Trinity from. “But giving her any more blood isn’t safe. She’d rather die than be a vampire; any hunter would.”

Elena’s breath caught in her throat. Stefan thought that Trinity—funny, sweet-tempered Trinity, who had sparred with her and sympathized over Sammy’s death—was dying. Elena didn’t want to believe it, but Trinity looked so small and helpless lying there, trapped in her unconscious fight.

Jack nodded, his eyes fixed on his young teammate. His hair and clothes were spattered with blood and his face was exhausted, but he hadn’t left Trinity’s side. “All we can do now is watch over her,” he said softly. “At least we killed Solomon.”

Stefan nodded. “It was all thanks to Andrés,” he said. “Without him, we never could have gotten free.”

Andrés was slumped in a chair in the corner of the bedroom, completely asleep. Elena could sympathize. It sounded like he had channeled so much Power that he had burned himself out temporarily.

“Everyone fought hard,” Meredith said with a brief smile, dried blood cracking on her face. “And we won.”

Solomon was dead, Elena reminded herself. With all the worry over Trinity, she hadn’t really let it sink in. It didn’t feel like they’d won.

Glimpsing her own reflection in the window, she saw a pale, large-eyed girl, one who looked like the
victim
in a dark fairy tale, not the happy princess. She was edgy and anxious, as if there was some kind of doom hanging over her head. As if there was something terrible still out there in the dark.

Stefan had told Elena that Solomon was the same man who brushed past her outside the bar a while ago, with the yellow-green eyes. She shivered at the thought that he had touched her, and realized how close she could have been to death at that moment.
I’m being ridiculous
, she told herself.
Everything will be all right, as long as Trinity survives
.

Trinity shifted in the bed and gave a soft whimper, and Elena forced her attention back to the wounded girl.

The apartment was full, but it was very quiet, just the shuffle of feet in the hall as everyone—hunters, werewolves, Elena’s friends—stopped by, one after another, to gaze in at Trinity as she struggled for life. They were all injured in varying degrees, with limps, bruises, and cuts, but no one was hurt as badly as Trinity. Her hair spread out over the pillow, and her lashes were dark against the pallor of her face. She was breathing slowly and shallowly. Elena realized that she was breathing in time with Trinity, trying to make her friend’s breath get stronger by sheer force of will.

But there was one person she hadn’t seen. “Where’s Matt?” she asked Meredith.

“He said he had something to do,” Meredith reassured her. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

Elena nodded. Tension still hung over her, over all of them. Trinity was balanced between life and death now, they all knew it, and the only thing they could do was to wait.

Matt scrubbed fiercely at the blood on his face with a wet wipe he’d found in the glove compartment of his car. He met his own gaze in the rearview mirror, confused and desperate, and looked away in frustration.

If he went into the hospital with blood on his shirt and in his hair, they’d either arrest him or try to operate on him.

Maybe there was something in his trunk. Hunching his shoulders so that no one in the hospital parking lot would realize he was covered in blood, he unearthed a dirty gray hoodie and pulled it over his head.

The emergency room was lit so brightly lit that it hurt his eyes for a moment. He staggered, blinking his eyes rapidly to adjust, and looked around. Before he could make it to the nurse behind the desk, Jasmine’s voice spoke behind him. “Matt? What’s going on?”

He turned to see her standing there, crisp and competent in her white coat, the complete opposite of everything he felt right now. When she saw his face, her eyes widened and she pulled him to the side of the room. “What is it?” she asked urgently. “What’s happened?”

Matt licked his lips nervously. On the ride over, all he’d been able to think was:
Get Jasmine. She can help Trinity. You need Jasmine
. And she could help; he knew she could. But he didn’t know what to say now.

“Please,” he managed, his voice cracking. “Please, we have to hurry.”

Jasmine frowned and glanced toward the admitting desk, and Matt angled himself to block her view. “No,” he said. “We can’t do this here. There’ll be too many questions. You have to come with me now.”

“Take a breath and tell me what’s going on,” Jasmine said calmly. Then she got a good look at him, and her eyes widened. “You have blood on your face.” She reached out to touch him, clearly worried. “Where are you hurt?”

“It’s not mine.” Matt took a deep breath, feeling as if he was flinging himself off a high cliff over dark water. If he did this, there was no going back. But he had to. Trinity’s life was at stake. “Please, trust me. I’ll explain on the way. Vampires are real. Magic is real. A friend is hurt, and we can’t bring her here.”

Jasmine’s eyes flew toward the admitting desk again, and the security guard beside it. “
Please
,” Matt said desperately. “I need your help.”

He gazed pleadingly at Jasmine and reached for her hand, trying to throw all the love he felt for her into one look, trying to remind her of how she trusted him. It was a lot to ask. But even if she thought he was having a psychotic break, he didn’t mind, as long as he could get her to come help Trinity. She needed a
doctor
.

Jasmine looked doubtfully between him and the security guard, then finally sighed, her eyes softening. “I’ll tell my supervisor I have to leave for personal reasons, and I’ll come,” she said. “But afterward, Matt, if I ask you to come back to the hospital with me, you’re coming.”

Matt pulled her into a hug, clinging to her, breathing in the scent of her, the normality and sanity she meant to him. “I’ll wait for you out front,” he said. “Bring a medical kit if you can. And please hurry.”

N
othing was killing these vampires.

Damon grabbed one by the neck and sank a stake into his heart. His opponent fell, but instead of dying like he should have, he simply pulled the stake out of his chest, scrambled back to his feet, and lunged toward Damon again.
What the—?
Before the strange vampire could get close enough, Katherine grabbed him from behind and snapped his neck.

The vampire fell like a stone, but by now Damon knew that was only temporary. Breaking their necks kept these vampires down for longer than anything else they’d tried, but it wasn’t permanent. Damon knew from experience that they had about half an hour before that vampire would be up and fighting again.

He glared down at the circle of temporarily incapacitated vampires around him. “What the
hell
?” he growled, kicking at one of them. “Stakes don’t kill them, breaking their necks doesn’t kill them, it’s impossible to pull their heads off or their hearts out, they can walk in the daylight, and apparently they’re not affected by holy ground.” He gestured around at the baroque-style Russian Orthodox church they were standing in. Some older vampires still refused to go on holy ground, and it had been worth trying. “
How
are we supposed to kill them?”

“We’ll find something,” Katherine said grimly. “Let’s search the bodies while they’re out.” She looked tired, Damon thought, her beautiful lapis lazuli eyes sunken and a slight grayish pallor to her skin. She wasn’t getting enough to eat, he knew, and she was still letting him feed from her.

Damon used the toe of his extremely expensive—but now, to his dismay, badly scuffed—boot to flip over the vampire closest to him, an East Asian man with short dark hair. “Nothing worthwhile here,” he said, going through the fallen vampire’s pockets. “A few coins.”

“This one’s pockets are empty,” Katherine reported, bending over another at the other end of the room.

“This one looks like a peasant.” Damon glared haughtily down at the next unconscious vampire, who was dressed in ripped jeans and a stained T-shirt. “Terrible taste in clothes.” Starving and running for his life made him more irritable than usual.

“We were more discerning when we turned people in the old days.” Katherine sniffed. “You and Stefan were the only ones I made for centuries.”

“You made up for it these last few years, though, didn’t you?” Damon asked absently. Was there something in the peasant’s pocket? His fingers closed on a narrow rectangle of cardboard, and he pulled it out. A business card. There was no phone number or address or any information at all, really. Just a company name—Lifetime Solutions—and a stylized black-and-white figure eight. “An infinity symbol?” he asked aloud. “Katherine, this—”

As he looked up, there was a sudden flurry of movement, and Katherine made a high, choking sound, her eyes startled wide open. There was a wooden stake buried in her chest.

One of the vampires who should have still been unconscious had risen up behind her, utterly silent, and attacked Katherine from behind. Katherine stared at Damon for one long moment, her lips parted in surprise. And then she fell.