The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight

by L. J. Smith

  Alaric tapped the side of his head and shook it sadly. “As many as possible. Neurons are beginning to go.” He looked around. “You’re not the only one here, are you?”

  “Except for the janitor and the guy who ferries me back to Hokkaido, yes. It started out as a normal expedition—there were fourteen of us. But one by one, the others have died or left. I can’t even re-bury the specimens—the girls—we’ve excavated.”

  “And the people who left or died from your expedition—”

  “Well, at first people died. Then that and the other spooky stuff made the rest leave. They were frightened for their lives.”

  Alaric frowned. “Who died first?”

  “Out of our expedition? Ronald Argyll. Pottery specialist. He was examining two jars that were found—well, I’ll skip that story until later. He fell off a ladder and broke his neck.”

  Alaric’s eyebrows went up. “That was spooky?”

  “From a guy like him, who’s been in the business for almost twenty years—yes.”

  “Twenty years? Maybe a heart attack? And then off the ladder—boom.” Alaric made a downward gesture.

  “Maybe that’s the way it was. You may be able to explain all our little mysteries for us.” The chic woman with the short hair dimpled like a tomboy. She was dressed like one too, Elena realized: Levi’s and a blue and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a white camisole.

  Alaric gave a little start, as if he’d realized he was guilty of staring. Bonnie and Elena looked at each other over his head.

  “But what happened to all the people who lived on the island in the first place? The ones who built the houses?”

  “Well, there never were that many of them in the first place. I’m guessing the place may even have been named the Island of Doom before this disaster my team was investigating. But as far as I could find out it was a sort of war—a civil war. Between the children and the adults.”

  This time when Bonnie and Elena looked at each other, their eyes were both wide. Just like home—Bonnie began, but Elena said, Sh. Listen.

  “A civil war between kids and their parents?” Alaric repeated slowly. “Now that is spooky.”

  “Well, it’s a process of elimination. You see, I like graves, constructed or just holes in the ground. And here, the inhabitants don’t appear to have been invaded. They didn’t die of famine or drought—there was still plenty of grain in the granary. There were no signs of illness. I’ve come to believe that they all killed one another—parents killing children; children killing parents.”

  “But how can you tell?”

  “You see this square-ish area on the periphery of the village?” Celia pointed to an area on a larger map than Alaric’s. “That’s what we call The Field of Punished Virgins. It’s the only place that has carefully constructed actual graves, so it was made early in what became a war. Later, there was no time for coffins—or no one who cared. So far we’ve excavated twenty-two female children—the eldest in her late teens.”

  “Twenty-two girls? All girls?”

  “All girls in this area. Boys came later, when coffins were no longer being made. They’re not as well preserved, because the houses all burned or fell in, and they were exposed to weathering. The girls were carefully, sometimes elaborately, buried; but the markings on their bodies indicate that they were subjected to harsh physical punishment at some time close to their deaths. And then—they had stakes driven through their hearts.”

  Bonnie’s fingers flew to her eyes, as if to ward off a terrible vision. Elena watched Alaric and Celia grimly.

  Alaric gulped. “They were staked?” he asked uneasily.

  “Yes. Now I know what you’ll be thinking. But Japan doesn’t have any tradition of vampires. Kitsune—foxes—are probably the closest analog.”

  Now Elena and Bonnie were hovering right over the map.

  “And do kitsunes drink blood?”

  “Just kitsune. The Japanese language has an interesting way of expressing plurals. But to answer your question: no. They are legendary tricksters, and one example of what they do is possess girls and women, and lead men to destruction—into bogs, and so on. But here—well, you can almost read it like a book.”

  “You make it sound like one. But not one I’d pick up for pleasure,” Alaric said, and they both smiled bleakly.

  “So, to go on with the book, it seems that this disease spread eventually to all the children in the town. There were deadly fights. The parents somehow couldn’t even get to the fishing boats in which they might have escaped the island.”

  Elena—

  I know. At least Fell’s Church isn’t on an island.

  “And then there’s what we found at the town shrine. I can show you that—it’s what Ronald Argyll died for.”

  They both got up and went farther into the building until Celia stopped beside two large urns on pedestals with a hideous thing in between them. It looked like a dress, weathered until it was almost pure white, but sticking through holes in the clothing were bones. Most horribly, one bleached and fleshless bone hung down from the top of one of the urns.

  “This is what Ronald was working on in the field before all this rain came,” Celia explained. “It was probably the last death of the original inhabitants and it was suicide.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Let’s see if I can get this right from Ronald’s notes. The priestess here doesn’t have any other damage than that which caused her death. The shrine was a stone building—once. When we got here we found only a floor, with all the stone steps tumbled apart every which way. Hence Ronald’s use of the ladder. It gets quite technical, but Ronald Argyll was a great forensic pathologist and I trust his reading of the story.”

  “Which is?” Alaric was taking in the jars and the bones with his camcorder.

  “Someone—we don’t know who—smashed a hole in each of the jars. This is before the chaos started. The town records make note of it as an act of vandalism, a prank done by a child. But long after that the hole was sealed and the jars made almost airtight again, except where the priestess had her hands plunged in the top up to the wrist.”

  With infinite care, Celia lifted the top off the jar that did not have a bone hanging from it—to reveal another pair of longish bones, slightly less bleached, and with strips of what must have been clothing on it. Tiny finger bones lay inside the jar.

  “What Ronald thought was that this poor woman died as she performed a last desperate act. Clever, too, if you see it from their perspective. She cut her wrists—you can see how the tendon is shriveled in the better-preserved arm—and then she let the entire contents of her bloodstream flow into the urns. We do know that the urns show a heavy precipitation of blood on the bottom. She was trying to lure something in—or perhaps something back in. And she died trying, and the clay that she had probably hoped to use in her last conscious moments held her bones to the jars.”

  “Whew!” Alaric ran a hand over his forehead, but shivered at the same time.

  Take pictures! Elena was mentally commanding him, using all her willpower to transmit the order. She could see that Bonnie was doing the same, eyes shut, fists clenched.

  As if in obedience to their commands, Alaric was taking pictures as fast as he could.

  Finally, he was done. But Elena knew that without some outside impetus there was no way that he was going to get those pictures to Fell’s Church until he himself came to town—and even Meredith didn’t know when that would be.

  So what do we do? Bonnie asked Elena, looking anguished.

  Well…my tears were real when Stefan was in prison.

  You want us to cry on him?

  No, Elena said, not quite patiently. But we look like ghosts—let’s act like them. Try blowing on the back of his neck.

  Bonnie did, and they both watched Alaric shiver, look around him, draw his windbreaker closer.

  “And what about the other deaths in your own expedition?” he asked, huddlin
g, looking around apparently aimlessly.

  Celia began speaking but neither Elena nor Bonnie was listening. Bonnie kept blowing on Alaric from different directions, herding him to the single window in the building that wasn’t shattered. There Elena had written with her finger on the darkened cold glass. Once she knew that Alaric was looking that way she blew her breath across the sentence: send all pix of jars 2 meredith now! Every time Alaric approached the window she breathed on it to refresh the words.

  And at last he saw it.

  He jumped backward nearly two feet. Then he slowly crept back to the window. Elena refreshed the writing for him. This time, instead of jumping, he simply ran a hand over his eyes and then slowly peeked out again.

  “Hey, Mr. Spook-chaser,” said Celia. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Alaric admitted. He passed his hand over his eyes again, but Celia was coming and Elena didn’t breathe on the window.

  “I thought I saw a—a message to send copies of the pictures of these jars to Meredith.”

  Celia raised an eyebrow. “Who is Meredith?”

  “Oh. She—she’s one of my former students. I suppose this would interest her.” He looked down at the camcorder.

  “Bones and urns?”

  “Well, you were interested in them quite young, if your reputation is correct.”

  “Oh, yes. I loved to watch a dead bird decay, or find bones and try to figure out what animal they were from,” Celia said, dimpling again. “From the age of six. But I wasn’t like most girls.”

  “Well—neither is Meredith,” Alaric said.

  Elena and Bonnie were eyeing each other seriously now. Alaric had implied that Meredith was special, but he hadn’t said it, and he hadn’t mentioned their engagement to be engaged.

  Celia came closer. “Are you going to send her the pictures?”

  Alaric laughed. “Well, all this atmosphere and everything—I don’t know. It might just have been my imagination.”

  Celia turned away just as she reached him and Elena blew once more across the message. Alaric threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

  “I don’t suppose the Island of Doom has satellite coverage,” he said helplessly.

  “Nope,” Celia said. “But the ferry will be back in a day, and you can send pictures then—if you’re really going to do it.”

  “I think I’d better do it,” Alaric said. Elena and Bonnie were both glaring at him, one from each side.

  But that was when Elena’s eyelids started to droop. Oh, Bonnie, I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you after this, and make sure you’re okay. But I’m falling…I can’t…

  She managed to pry her lids open. Bonnie was in a fetal position, fast asleep.

  Be careful, Elena whispered, not even sure who she was whispering it to. And as she floated away, she was aware of Celia and the way Alaric was talking to this beautiful, accomplished woman only a year or so older than he was. She felt a distinct fear for Meredith, on top of everything else.

  14

  The next morning Elena noticed that Meredith still looked pale and languid, and that her eyes slid away if Stefan happened to glance at her. But this was a time of crisis, and as soon as the breakfast dishes were washed, Elena called a meeting in the parlor. There she and Stefan explained what Meredith had missed during the visit from the sheriffs. Meredith smiled wanly when Elena told how Stefan had banished them like stray dogs.

  Then Elena told the story of her out-of-body experience. It proved one thing, at least, that Bonnie was alive and relatively well. Meredith bit her lip when Mrs. Flowers said this, for it only made her want to go and get Bonnie out of the Dark Dimension personally.

  But on the other hand, Meredith wanted to stay and wait for Alaric’s photographs. If that would save Fell’s Church…

  No one at the boardinghouse could question what had happened on the Island of Doom. It was happening here, on the other side of the world. Already a couple of parents in Fell’s Church had had their children taken away by the Virginia Department of Child Protective Services. Punishments and retaliations had begun. How much longer would it be before Shinichi and Misao turned all the children into lethal weapons—or let loose those already turned? How long before some hysterical parent killed a kid?

  The group sitting in the parlor discussed plans and methods. In the end, they decided to make jars identical to those Elena and Bonnie had seen, and prayed that they could reproduce the writing. These jars, they were sure, were the means by which Shinichi and Misao were originally sealed off from the rest of the Earth.

  Therefore Shinichi and Misao had once fit into the rather cramped accommodations of the jars. But what did Elena’s group have now that could lure them back inside?

  Power, they decided. Only an amount of Power so great that it was irresistible to the kitsune twins. That was why the priestess had tried to lure them back with her own blood. Now…it meant either the liquid in a full star ball…or blood from an extraordinarily powerful vampire. Or two vampires. Or three.

  Everyone was sober, thinking of this. They didn’t know how much blood would be needed—but Elena feared that it would be more than they can afford to lose. It had certainly been more than the priestess could afford.

  And then there was a silence that only Meredith could fill. “I’m sure you’ve all been wondering about this,” she said, producing the staff thing from thin air, as far as Elena could see. How did she do that? Elena wondered. She didn’t have it with her and then she did.

  They all stared in the bright sunlight at the sleek beauty of the weapon.

  “Whoever made that,” Matt said, “had a twisted imagination.”

  “It was one of my ancestors,” Meredith said. “And I won’t contest that.”

  “I have a question,” Elena said. “If you’d had that from the beginning of your training; if you’d been raised in that kind of world, would you have tried to kill Stefan? Would you have tried to kill me when I became a vampire?”

  “I wish I had a good answer to that,” Meredith said, her dark gray eyes pained. “But I don’t. I have nightmares about it. But how can I ever say what I would have done if I’d been a different person?”

  “I’m not asking that. I’m asking you, the person you are, if you’d had the training—”

  “The training is brainwashing,” Meredith said harshly. Her composed façade seemed about to break.

  “Okay, forget that. Would you have tried to kill Stefan, if you’d just had that staff?”

  “It’s called a fighting stave. And we’re called—people like my family, except that my parents dropped out—hunter-slayers.”

  There was a sort of gasp around the table. Mrs. Flowers poured Meredith more herbal tea from the pot sitting on a trivet.

  “Hunter-slayers,” repeated Matt with a certain relish. It wasn’t hard to tell who he was thinking about.

  “You can just call us one or the other,” Meredith was saying. “I’ve heard that out west they’ve got hunter-killers. But we hang on to tradition here.”

  Elena suddenly felt like a lost little girl. This was Meredith, her big sister Meredith, saying all of this. Elena’s voice was almost pleading. “But you didn’t even tell on Stefan.”

  “No, I didn’t. And, no, I don’t think I’d have had the courage to kill anyone—unless I’d been brainwashed. But I knew Stefan loved you. I knew he would never make you into a vampire. The problem was—I didn’t know enough about Damon. I didn’t know that you were fooling around so much. I don’t think anybody knew that.” Meredith’s voice was anguished, too.

  “Except me,” Elena said, flushing, with a lopsided smile. “Don’t look so sad, Meredith. It worked out.”

  “You call having to leave your family and your town because everyone knows you’re dead, working out?”

  “I do,” Elena replied desperately, “if it means I get to be with Stefan.” She did her best not to think about Damon.

  Meredith looked at her blankly for a mom
ent, then put her face in her hands. “Do you want to tell them or should I?” she asked, coming up for air and facing Stefan.

  Stefan looked startled. “You remember?”

  “Probably as much as you got from my mind. Bits and pieces. Stuff I don’t want to remember.”

  “Okay.” Now Stefan looked relieved, and Elena felt frightened. Stefan and Meredith had a secret together?

  “We all know that Klaus made at least two visits to Fell’s Church. We know that he was—completely evil—and that on the second visit he planned to be a serial murderer. He killed Sue Carson and Vickie Bennett.”

  Elena interrupted quietly. “Or at least he helped Tyler Smallwood to kill Sue, so that Tyler could be initiated as a werewolf. And then Tyler got Caroline pregnant.”

  Matt cleared his throat as something occurred to him. “Uh—does Caroline have to kill somebody to be a full werewolf, too?”

  “I don’t think so,” Elena said. “Stefan says that having a werewolf litter is enough. Either way, blood is spilled. Caroline will be a full werewolf when she has her twins, but she’ll probably begin changing involuntarily before that. Right?”

  Stefan nodded. “Right. But getting back to Klaus: What was it he was supposed to have done on his first visit? He attacked—without killing—an old man who was a full hunter-slayer.”

  “My grandfather,” Meredith whispered.

  “And he supposedly messed with Meredith’s grandfather’s mind so much that this old man tried to kill his wife and his three-year-old granddaughter. So what is wrong with this picture?”

  Elena was truly frightened now. She didn’t want to hear whatever was coming. She could taste bile, and she was glad that she’d only had toast for breakfast. If only there had been someone to take care of, like Bonnie, she would have felt better.

  “I give up. So what is wrong?” Matt asked bluntly.

  Meredith was staring into the distance again.

  Finally Stefan said, “At the risk of sounding like a bad soap opera…Meredith had, or has, a twin brother.”