by L. J. Smith
And now he was torturing Elena’s best friend.
The thought came to him quite simply and, if not quite in words of one syllable, it was very simple to understand.
Meredith was too smart and too disciplined and too logical to struggle, and so he wasn’t causing her agony, but it certainly was nothing like the kiss. Meredith was experiencing, in all its raw ugliness, the truth behind the mindillusions that vampires usually used to seduce their victims.
He broke his promise about not reading her mind. He allowed himself to sense just a little of what she was experiencing.
She didn’t like it.
Panting, stunned, Stefan pulled his head up.
Oh, God. I’m so sorry. Meredith—oh, my friend, my dear, dear friend . . .
The tie of blood was strong enough to allow him to speak without words. But, of course, that was because he was a monster.
He stared down at her, and then, in one motion, he rolled away and was on his feet, frantically licking the evidence of what he’d been doing from his lips and teeth. His canines would not retract immediately, but he put all his energy into blunting those razorsharp tips and drawing some of their length back into his jaws.
He couldn’t remember feeling so ashamed, so caught, since Elena had innocently stumbled upon him feeding.
He was pacing without thinking, the way that a distraught panther paces its cage. He could feel the sting of tears inside his nose and behind his eyes, but what good would it do to cry? He paced, shuddering, until Meredith had finished buttoning up her blouse. And as he did, involuntarily, from the sweetdry aftertaste of Meredith’s blood dissolving into his body, he unwillingly saw more of her thoughts.
He really couldn’t help it. As the molecules from her donation fitted into place in his own oxygen receptors, random phrases bubbled up in his mind. Homo sapiens raptor. Top of the feeding chain. Why hadn’t they taken over the world already?
She could never entirely trust; could never entirely relax with; and she could certainly
never fall in love with a being like Stefan Salvatore.
He stopped his pacing; Meredith had finished with her blouse. He was conveniently near the door. He looked at her. His thoughts were tangled in such loops and knots that the only words he could force out were, “God,” and “So sorry.”
Meredith’s cool, incisive intelligence had stripped him bare. She had put him in his place, along with the fox, the cobra, the tiger, and the shark. He knew now that she would never look at him without seeing a deadly snake in the grass and feeling, along with Emily Dickinson, “zero at the bone.”
He fumbled with the lock as he heard Meredith’s footsteps on the wooden floor. He had lost Elena, and now he had lost his only links to Elena; because of course he couldn’t face Bonnie or Matt ever again. He opened the door for Meredith with a feeling that as he saw her back retreating from him he would see all three . . .
“Wait.” It was just one word, spoken hoarsely, but it froze Stefan like a troll caught by sunlight. It took him a moment before he could compose himself enough to look back into the room.
Meredith was standing up, but she was farther from the door than before. She was standing by the window, looking out as if she were seeking answers in Mrs. Flowers’ kitchen garden.
“Wait,” she said again, as if to herself. “Stefan, do you think—that he can get into our thoughts as well as our dreams?”
Stefan felt a bound of hope in his chest, followed by the inevitable fall. “I don’t know. He would have to be very powerful. And we would have to be very vulnerable—“
“—such as when I’m concentrating all my energies on relaxing and letting myself be controlled by something from the outside?”
Stefan studied Meredith for longer this time. He noticed that her eyes did not skitter away from his gaze. She wasn’t afraid to look at him.
“Is it all right if I come back in?” he asked, as if it wasn’t his own room and she nodded without hesitation. She wasn’t afraid to be alone with him.
But despite the warmth that kindled inside him at such signs he had to be rational.
“Meredith, what you were thinking—I caught some of it. I couldn’t help it. And you were right. I’m not human. I’m not the same species as you are. I’m a carnivore that would live only off humans if . . . if I could live with myself that way.”
“And I am a . . . a xenophobe.” She glanced at him as if to see if he knew the English word. “Someone afraid of aliens, that’s the dictionary definition. But it really means someone afraid of humans from other countries, or people who are just too different.” Very suddenly, she put her hands to her face, which wasn’t like Meredith at all.
Meredith was always in control. Her voice, muffled, went on, “I’m ashamed of myself. I know you, and yet I could think all that . . . crap.”
And she didn’t swear, not even mildly. Stefan began to speak to her to explain that she was the one who was right, and that he was just as alien and dangerous as she had thought, when she took her hands away from her face.
“I know you, Stefan Salvatore. And if you say that everything I was thinking is true then I have some thinking to do. I can’t help but be prejudiced on the side of ordinary humans. But I also owe an apology to the one of your . . . species . . . who is willing to die to save mine.”
She walked toward him, her hand held out. Stefan stood mute. Then he took her hand, but instead of shaking it, bent and kissed it.
But he was thinking about Elena, and about just how rare she had been. Without him controlling her mind, she had accepted him. Without him controlling her mind, she had seduced him—for that had been, in truth, what had happened. Without the slightest fetter around her mind or body, she had given him her blood, and had delighted in it.
Elena had been like a force of nature: take her or leave her for the passionate, cynical, idealistic, selfcentered, generoustoafault, girl that had been her mortal self. A wild tropical storm in rising in a millpond. An orchid in a field of daisies; a gryphon in a herd of sheep. Elena had never been like anyone but herself. And she had absolutely gloried in the moment when she could drop all her defenses and submit entirely to the fate of the quarry caught by the hunter—because the hunter had been her heart’s desire, and because in all other things he was her slave, to cherish or spurn or destroy as she pleased. And Stefan had gloried in that.
They had been a pair of mad little things, in love in a way that was senseless and probably hopeless from the start. First love—for he now realized that before Elena he had only experienced infatuation—on a planetary scale. But it had changed him, he would swear, from a creature who gloomily enjoyed his doom; a zombie that could only remember and remember the time of his humanity, into an approximation of a human being—for the little time that he had had her.
Maybe I’m insane, he thought, shame always ready to leap for his throat. I helped her—after the first time when she had it all her own way—to do those things. If what they had done equated to madness, as it would seem to, then he had aided and abetted her . . .
Stop it, Stefan!
The voice was so sharp it was almost like having Damon mock him, urging him to renounce the role of martyr. Stefan flushed, full of new blood, full of anger—
And then in shock, glanced upward.
There was no mistaking that voice—or that indignation. Bonnie had been right, his inamorata was here, watching over him. He looked at Meredith to see if she had heard anything and saw that she hadn’t.
Who was he to flout one of Elena’s edicts?
Meredith’s dark eyes were on him. He said, apropos of nothing, “You rigged the drawing of the twigs. You made sure you’d be first.”
She didn’t admit it aloud, but he could still pick up thoughts from her mind.
Rigorously, he tried to shut his own mind to it.
“You wanted to see if it was bearable.”
This time she answered him. “If it would be bearable for anybody except
Elena. I think Bonnie will be fine, if you control her mind, and keep it light and romantic.”
“Like the kiss?”
She flinched, making him flinch. Then she straightened herself and met his eyes again directly, sparing him nothing. “A little lighter than the kiss,” she suggested.
He wasn’t hurt by her reaction; his mind was elsewhere. “And Matt?”
“If I can stand it—but, no, Matt isn’t sensible. You’re absolutely right. I’ve got to stop Matt even if it means hitting him over the head. He’ll try to give—and he’ll be humiliated and mortified when he can’t.”
Stefan looked away. “You were humiliated and mortified?”
“We’re being completely honest with each other, aren’t we?” He nodded.
“Stefan—it isn’t flattering.”
“Tell me.”
“I felt—well—disposable. As if, when you were done with me, you would crush me like an aluminum can and toss me in the waste basket. I kept wondering if I’d be evaluated by the FDA. I didn’t feel like a person anymore.”
Stefan could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He wanted to cry. But that was as unfair to Meredith as anything else that had happened. She would end up comforting him, the perpetrator.
“Don’t—Stefan, it’s not that bad. We did it for a reason, a reason we’d both agreed on beforehand. So just saying “food” is all wrong. I guess I was thinking of the other girls—and boys—out there who saw a sudden dark shadow in the night—”
“And then found themselves being served raw. We do what we do, Meredith. We prey on your species. To us—to most of us—you are meat. And for a lot of vampires, you’re disposable, a lot of them kill when they feed But you’ve known that all along, Meredith. You knew how different we were. You knew we were that bad. How could it have come as such a surprise?”
Meredith
Meredith thought, partly because knowing something is not the same as experiencing it. And then she thought, because I was hoping I was wrong.
“Stefan—please. Whatever your race is, you are not. And some of what I felt was sheer fear and unfamiliarity.”
“No, you were right the first time. It’s not something you should have to get used to. Under any circumstances. I’m a—”
Meredith’s cell phone chimed.
Like an automaton she picked up. “Yes? Matt? Yes, we’re just finishing up here. I know time is running out. We’ll hurry.”
She put the phone down and looked at Stefan.
“The rest of my dinner getting impatient?”
Meredith just couldn’t deal with the selfhatred behind that comment. She turned away. Then, without looking at Stefan, she said, “Matt was right, you know. Time is running out.”
Meredith brushed her hands together to show that she was done. Then she picked up her purse. “I have to think a little, Stefan. Then maybe we can talk again.”
“Right,” Stefan said dully. She knew he knew without either of them having to say it, that their relationship would never be the same. That they might not have any relationship even if somehow they both survived this night.
He reached to help her into her windbreaker, but she took it from his hands and put it on herself. Her eyes were ashamed and apologetic, but she did it anyway. Somehow she didn’t want to be catered to by homo sapiens superioris right now.
“Stefan, I’m—I’m sorry. But no matter what, I’ve got to turn Bonnie over to you now.”
Bonnie, the smallest, youngest, most fragile of any of them. Stefan opened his mouth, but Meredith was already turning to unlock and open the door by herself. She turned back to say only one thing.
“It’s the biggest cliché in the human world, Stefan, but please be gentle with her.
And it’s not such a big cliché, but if you aren’t, and we survive tonight—well, then it’s going to be me coming after you. The meat bites back!
Stefan didn’t smile. Silently, he nodded.
He could never have guessed what he was promising with that one small gesture.
Bonnie
Bonnie was excited. She was devoured by curiosity, prickling with fear, too impatient to stay in the car, and . . . well, just excited.
She and Elena had taken up boys before Meredith or even Caroline had. Bonnie had been a flirt since kindergarten. And by the time they had hit puberty—well, it was Elena—not Bonnie—that got nicknamed “Ice Princess” for throwing away her boyfriends just before they proposed marriage. (Or, if not marriage, eternal devotion.) Bonnie wasn’t an ice princess, she was a firebrand.
And she’d had been hearing Elena boast about Stefan for what seemed like years.
And now Bonnie was going to get to experience what Elena had said was the ultimate, and she was going to do it safely, for of course Stefan was safe. Stefan was safe as . . . as a deer. Sometimes he was like a deer caught in the headlights, sometimes he was like the rare wild fawns that would let you feed them because they didn’t know what you were.
She couldn’t wait.
She was tramping around the car for the sixtysixth time (oh, surely they’d be done soon! Elena said it was just a matter of teaspoonsfull, and Meredith wasn’t the romantic kind to stretch things out—!) when she ran into something.
She’d been staring at her feet, so she had to look up to see what it was. And then she had to look up some more. And then she had to decide whether to scream or not.
“Tracking a woozle?” Damon asked her. He seemed perfectly serious. “The next time we go around, there will be seventy of them.’”
Bonnie was not about to be distracted—especially by WinniethePooh. “You—you—”
“Yes, it is I.”
“You left us.”
“I think it was more the other way round. Call it a mutual dissolution of our partnership, anyway.”
“Don’t try to confuse me with big words. You’re a traitor; that’s what you are. And because of you a girl is dead. And that makes me feel like—like—”
“Yes?” He looked curious and amused.
“Like doing this!” Bonnie stepped hard on his insole, wishing she was wearing her party shoes; then backed up and took a running kick at his shin and added an elbow to the ribs.
It was true that this was her method, or her opening method anyway, when she was on dates and boys misbehaved. From here on it went to broken noses, blackened eyes, and . . . well, serious dislocations of the groinal regions. When Bonnie didn’t want to play Bonnie didn’t play.
Unlike most of her combatants, however, Damon did not scream. He didn’t even blink. And he certainly wasn’t hopping around cursing, or doubled up moaning in pain. He simply stood exactly as he had been standing and looked at her as he had been looking, curious and hopeful of amusement.
Then he flashed one of his inimitable smiles, onethirtysecondth of a second on, and then instantly off again, and said, “And what are you planning to do now?” She looked up at him. Matt was in the car, his back to them, probably listening to music if he wasn’t under some spell of Damon’s. Stefan and Meredith were even farther away, and—preoccupied.
Vampires. You just couldn’t trust them to feel pain like real people. Even her patented kneetothefamilyjewels—patented because of its speed, force, and a secret second bounce she wasn’t demonstrating for anyone—probably would have no effect.
She started to look at Damon again, but suddenly her pointofview was whirling. He had picked her up as if she weighed no more than a kitten and put her down again, facing away from Matt and the house. She felt the whiplash of a bramble. When she looked back at Damon her bravado had undergone a serious change for the worse. She found herself thinking how fortunate but unlikely it would be for Stefan and Meredith to come out on the porch right this very minute. She blinked and found that she was blinking back tears.
“I’ll—I’ll put a spell on you,” she said in a small voice.
“A spell to do what?” He reached out and touched her jaw where a jutting tree branch
had caught her. “You’re bleeding.”
Bonnie felt her heart begin to gallop. “It’s nothing.”
“It ought to be taken care of.”
“Not your way,” Bonnie said, and she heard the oddest thing—a sort of faint echo to her voice, saying, Not your way.
In any case, Damon looked around. “So the hero has admitted he’s just like the rest of us raptors at last,” he said, eyeing the window to Stefan’s attic room from which surely, any minute now, Stefan and Meredith would be starting downstairs.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Neither do I really. Except that Stefan couldn’t keep his vow, could he? He knows he needs to have human blood.”
“We made him do it,” Bonnie said fiercely. “Matt and Meredith, and, yes, even Elena told him that he had to. And me.”
Something sparked in Damon’s eyes. “So the lovebirds are having conversations at will now?”
“Elena talked to him, to order him to do it,” Bonnie said, stretching a point.
Again, the feeling of rushing through the air, being lifted like a doll, and this time, ending up pinned against a tree. Her arms and legs were much too heavy to try any of the usual selfdefense in her repertoire. And of course there was no chance of screaming.
Damon’s face was close to her. There floated back to her a memory of a much more immature Bonnie saying that it would be so romantic to be killed by someone this handsome. She’d been a little idiot, that’s what she had been. God, if she could get her hands on that younger self of hers now . . .
“So you made Stefan take your blood,” he said, “but I’m still just a poor outsider, forced to stalk you for your own good.”
“I haven’t done it yet,” Bonnie said, knowing that she sounded like a kitten spitting rage with all its fur fluffed up. But then she thought of something else.
“Elena is watching you,” she said, combining what she was sure was the truth with the guess of the next question. “Elena wants to know what you’re going to do tonight. You said you were watching us for our own good. Are you going to help us? Help him? Or just watch?”