The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight

by L. J. Smith

  “There’s m’main man,” he said, when Saber butted his way through traffic to pant directly in Matt’s face. “Buddy, I love your dog breath,” he declared. “You saved me. Can he have a treat, Mrs. Flowers?” he asked, turning slightly unfocused blue eyes on her.

  “I know just what he’d like. I have half a roast left in the refrigerator that just needs to be heated a bit.” She punched buttons and in a short while, said, “Matt, would you like to do the honors? Remember to take the bone out—he might choke on it.”

  Matt took the large pot roast, which, heated, smelled so good it made him aware that he was starving. He felt his morals collapse. “Mrs. Flowers, do you think I could make a sandwich before I give it to him?”

  “Oh, you poor dear boy!” she cried. “And I never even thought—of course they wouldn’t give you lunch or dinner.”

  Mrs. Flowers got bread and Matt was happy enough with that, bread and meat, the simplest sandwich imaginable—and so good it curled his toes.

  Elena wept just a little more. So easy to make two creatures happy with one simple thing. More than two—they were all happy to see Matt safe and to watch Saber get his proper reward.

  The enormous dog had followed every movement of that roast with his eyes, tail swishing back and forth on the floor. But when Matt, still chomping, offered him the large piece of meat that was left, Saber just cocked his head to one side, staring at it as if to say, “You have to be joking.”

  “Yes, it’s for you. Go on and take it now,” Mrs. Flowers said firmly. Finally, Saber opened his enormous mouth to take hold of the end of the roast, tail twirling like a helicopter blade. His body language was so clear that Matt laughed out loud.

  “This once on the floor with us,” Mrs. Flowers added magnificently, spreading a large rug over the kitchen floorboards.

  Saber’s joy was only surpassed by his good manners. He put the roast on the rug and then trotted up to each of the humans to push a wet nose into hand or waist or under a chin, and then he trotted back and attacked his prize.

  “I wonder if he misses Sage?” Elena murmured.

  “I miss Sage,” Matt said indistinctly. “We need all the magic help we can get.”

  Meanwhile Mrs. Flowers was hurrying around the kitchen making ham and cheese sandwiches and bagging them like school lunches. “Anybody who wakes up tonight hungry must have something to eat,” she said. “Ham and cheese, chicken salad, some nice crisp carrots, and a big hunk of apple pie.” Elena went to help her. She didn’t know why, but she wanted to cry some more. Mrs. Flowers patted her. “We are all feeling—er, strung out,” she announced gravely. “Anyone who doesn’t feel like going right to sleep is probably running on too much adrenaline. My sleeping aid will help with that. And I think we can trust our animal friends and the wards on the roof to keep us safe tonight.”

  Matt was practically asleep on his feet now. “Mrs. Flowers—someday I’ll repay you…but for now, I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  “In other words, bedtime, kiddies,” Stefan said. He closed Matt’s fingers firmly around a packed lunch, then steered him toward the stairs. Elena gathered several more lunches, kissed Mrs. Flowers twice, and went up to Stefan’s room.

  She had the attic bed straightened and was opening a plastic bag when Stefan came in from putting Matt to bed.

  “Is he okay?” she said anxiously. “I mean, will he be okay tomorrow?”

  “He’ll be okay in his body. I got most of the damage healed.”

  “And in his mind?”

  “It’s a tough thing. He just ran smack into Real Life. Arrested, knowing they might lynch him, not knowing if anybody would be able to figure out what had happened to him. He thought that even if we tracked him it would come down to a fight, which would have been hard to win—with so few of us, and not much magic left.”

  “But Saber fixed ’em,” Elena said.

  She looked thoughtfully at the sandwiches she’d laid out on the bed. “Stefan, do you want chicken salad or ham?” she asked.

  There was a silence. But it was moments before Elena looked up at him in astonishment. “Oh, Stefan—I—I actually forgot. I just—today has been so strange—I forgot—”

  “I’m flattered,” Stefan said. “And you’re sleepy. Whatever Mrs. Flowers puts in her tea—”

  “I think the government would be interested in it,” Elena offered. “For spies and things. But for now…” She held her arms out, head bent back, neck exposed.

  “No, love. I remember this afternoon, if you don’t. And I swore I was going to start hunting, and I am,” Stefan said firmly.

  “You’re going to leave me?” Elena said, startled out of her warm satisfaction. They stared at each other.

  “Don’t leave,” Elena said, combing her hair away from her neck. “I had it all planned out, how you’ll drink, and how we’ll sleep holding each other. Please don’t leave, Stefan.”

  She knew how hard he found it to leave her. Even if she was grimy and worn out, even if she was wearing grungy jeans and had dirt under her fingernails. She was endlessly beautiful and endlessly powerful and mysterious to him. He longed for her. Elena could feel it through their bond, which was beginning to hum, beginning to warm up, beginning to draw him in close.

  “But, Elena,” he said. He was trying to be sensible! Didn’t he know she didn’t want sensible at this particular moment?

  “Right here.” Elena tapped the soft spot on her neck.

  Their bond was singing like an electric power line now. But Stefan was stubborn. “You need to eat, yourself. You have to keep your strength up.”

  Elena immediately picked up a chicken salad sandwich and bit into it. Mmm…yummy. Really good. She would have to pick Mrs. Flowers a wildflower bouquet. They were all so well taken care of here. She had to think of more ways to help.

  Stefan was watching her eat. It made him hungry, but that was because he was used to being fed round the clock, and not used to exercise. Elena could hear everything through their connection and she heard him thinking that he was glad to see Elena renewing herself. That he had learned discipline now; that it wouldn’t do him any harm to go to bed one night feeling hungry. He would hold his sleepy adorable Elena all night.

  No! Elena was horrified. Since he’d been imprisoned in the Dark Dimension, anything that hinted at Stefan going without filled her with appalling terror. Suddenly she had trouble swallowing the bite she’d taken.

  “Right here, right here…please?” she begged him. She didn’t want to have to seduce him into it, but she would if he forced her to. She would wash her hands into pristine cleanliness, and change into a long, clinging nightgown, and stroke his stubborn canines in between kisses, and touch them with her tongue tip gently, just at the base where they wouldn’t cut her as they responded and grew. And by then he would be dizzy, he would be out of control, he would be hers completely.

  All right, all right! Stefan thought to her. Mercy!

  “I don’t want to give you mercy. I don’t want you to let me go,” she said, holding her arms out to him, and heard her own voice soft and tender and yearning. “I want you to hold me and keep me forever, and I want to hold you and keep you forever.”

  Stefan’s face had changed. He looked at her with the look he’d worn in prison when she had come to visit him in an outfit—very unlike the grubby one she wore now—and he’d said, bewildered, “All this…it’s for me?”

  There had been razor wire between them then. Now there was nothing to separate them and Elena could see how much Stefan wanted to come to her. She reached a little farther and then Stefan came into the circle of her arms and held her tightly but with infinite care not to use enough strength to hurt her. When he relaxed and leaned his forehead against hers, Elena realized that she would never be tired or sad or frightened without being able to think of this feeling and that it would uphold her for the rest of her life.

  At last they sank down together on the sheets, comforting each other in equal measure; exc
hanging sweet, warm kisses. With each kiss, Elena felt the outside world and all its horrors drift farther and farther away. How could anything be wrong when she herself felt that heaven was near? Matt and Meredith, Damon and Bonnie would surely all be safe and happy too. Meanwhile, every kiss brought her closer to paradise, and she knew Stefan felt the same way. They were so happy together that Elena knew that soon the entire universe would echo with their own joy, which overflowed like pure light and transformed everything it touched.

  Bonnie woke and realized she had only been unconscious for a few minutes. She began to shiver, and once she started she couldn’t seem to stop. She felt a wave of heat envelop her, and she knew that Damon was trying to warm her, but still the trembling wouldn’t go away.

  “What’s wrong?” Damon asked, and his voice was different from usual.

  “I don’t know,” Bonnie said. She didn’t. “Maybe it’s because they kept starting to throw me out the window. I wasn’t going to scream about that,” she added hastily, in case he assumed she would. “But then when they talked about torturing me—”

  She felt a sort of spasm go through Damon. He was holding her too hard. “Torturing you! They threatened you with that?”

  “Yes, because, you know, Misao’s star ball was gone. They knew that it had been poured out; I didn’t tell them that. But I had to tell them that it was my fault that the last half got poured out, and then they got mad at me. Oh! Damon, you’re hurting me!”

  “So it was your fault it got poured out, was it?”

  “Well, I figure it was. You couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t gotten drunk, and—wh-what’s wrong, Damon? Are you mad too?” He really was holding her so that she really couldn’t breathe.

  Slowly, she felt his arms loosen a little. “A word of advice, little redbird. When people are threatening to torture and kill you, it might be more—expedient—to tell them that it’s someone else’s fault. Especially if that happens to be the truth.”

  “I know that!” Bonnie said indignantly. “But they were going to kill me anyway. If I’d told about you, they’d’ve hurt you, too.”

  Damon pulled her roughly back now, so that she had to look him in the face. Bonnie could also feel the delicate touch of a telepathic mind probe. She didn’t resist; she was too busy wondering why he had plum-colored shadows under his eyes. Then he shook her a little, and she stopped wondering.

  “Don’t you understand even the basics of self-preservation?” he said, and she thought he looked angry again. He was certainly different from any other time that she’d seen him—except once, she thought, and that was when Elena had been “Disciplined” for saving Lady Ulma’s life, back when Ulma had been a slave. He’d had the same expression then, so menacing that even Meredith had been frightened of him, and yet so filled with guilt that Bonnie had longed to comfort him.

  But there had to be some other reason, Bonnie’s mind told her. Because you’re not Elena, and he’s never going to treat you the way he treats Elena. A vision of the brown room rose before her, and she felt certain that he would never have put Elena there. Elena wouldn’t have let him, for one thing.

  “Do I have to go back?” she asked, realizing that she was being petty and silly and that the brown room had seemed like a haven just a little while ago.

  “Go back?” Damon said, a little too quickly. She had the feeling that he’d seen the brown room too, now, through her eyes. “Why? The landlady gave me everything in the room. So I have your real clothes and a bunch of star balls down there, in case you weren’t through with one. But why would you think you might have to go back?”

  “Well, I know you were looking for a lady of quality, and I’m not one,” Bonnie said simply.

  “That was just so I could change back into a vampire,” Damon said. “And what do you think is holding you up in the air right now?” But this time Bonnie knew somehow that the sensations from the “Never Ever” star balls were still in her mind and that Damon was seeing them too. He was a vampire again. And the contents of these star balls were so abominable that Damon’s stony exterior finally cracked. Bonnie could almost guess what he thought of them, and of her, left to shiver under her one blanket every night.

  And then, to her total astonishment, Damon, the ever-composed, brand-new vampire blurted, “I’m sorry. I didn’t think about how that place would be for you. Is there anything that will make you feel better?”

  Bonnie blinked. She wondered, seriously, if she were dreaming. Damon didn’t apologize. Damon famously didn’t apologize, or explain, or speak so nicely to people, unless he wanted something from them. But one thing seemed real. She didn’t have to sleep in the brown room anymore.

  This was so exciting that she flushed a little, and dared say, “Could we go down to the ground? Slowly? Because the truth is that I’m just terrified of heights.”

  Damon blinked, but said, “Yes, I think I can manage that. Is there anything else you’d like?”

  “Well—there are a couple of girls who’d be donors—happily—if—well—if there’s any money left—if you could save them…”

  Damon said a little sharply, “Of course there’s some money left. I even wrung your share back out of that hag of a landlady.”

  “Well, then, there’s that secret that I told you, but I don’t know if you remember.”

  “How soon do you think you’ll feel well enough to start?” asked Damon.

  24

  Stefan woke early. He spent the time from dawn until breakfast just watching Elena, who even in sleep had an inner glow like a golden flame through a faintly rose-colored candle.

  At breakfast, everyone was more or less still wrapped up in thoughts of the day before. Meredith showed Matt the picture of her brother, Cristian, the vampire. Matt briefly told Meredith about the inner workings of the Ridgemont court system and painted her a picture of Caroline as werewolf. It was clear that both of them felt safer at the boardinghouse than anywhere else.

  And Elena, who had woken up with Stefan’s mind all around her, embracing her, and her own mind still full of light, was completely at a loss for a Plan A or any other letter. She had to be told gently by the others that only one thing made sense.

  “Stefan,” Matt said, draining a mug of Mrs. Flowers’s pitch-black coffee. “He’s the only one who might be able to use his mind instead of Post-it Notes on the kids.”

  And, “Stefan,” said Meredith. “He’s the only one Shinichi might be afraid of.”

  “I’m no use at all,” Elena said sadly. She had no appetite. She had gotten dressed with a feeling of love and compassion toward all humankind and a desire to help protect her hometown, but as everyone pointed out, she was probably going to have to spend the day in the root cellar. Reporters might come to call.

  They’re right, Stefan sent to Elena. I’m the only logical person to find out what’s really going on in Fell’s Church.

  He actually went while the rest of them were finishing breakfast. Only Elena knew why; only she could feel him at the limits of her telepathic range.

  Stefan was hunting. He drove into the New Wood, got out, and finally startled a rabbit out of the brush. He Influenced it to rest and not be frightened. Surreptitiously, in this thin woodland without cover, he took a little blood from it…and choked.

  It tasted like some kind of hideous liquid flavored with rodent. Was a rabbit a rodent? He had been lucky enough to find a rat one day in his prison cell and it had tasted vaguely like this.

  But now, for days, he had been drinking human blood. Not just that, but the rich, potent blood of strong, adventurous, and in several cases paranormally talented individuals—the crème de la crème. How could he have gotten used to it so quickly?

  It shamed him now, to think of what he’d taken. Elena’s blood, of course, was enough to drive any vampire wild. And Meredith, whose blood had the deep crimson taste of some primordial ocean, and Bonnie, who tasted like a telepath’s dessert. And finally Matt, the All-American red-blooded boy.


  They’d fed him and fed him by the hour, far past what he needed to survive. They’d fed him until he’d begun to heal, and seeing that he was healing, they’d fed him more. And it had gone on and on, ending with Elena last night—Elena, whose hair was taking on a silvery cast and whose blue eyes seemed almost radiant. Back in the Dark Dimension, Damon hadn’t exercised any restraint at all. Elena hadn’t exercised any on her own behalf.

  That silvery cast…Stefan’s stomach clenched when he thought about it, about the last time he’d seen her hair that way. She’d been dead then. On her feet, but dead just the same.

  Stefan let the rabbit scamper away. He was taking another oath. He must not make Elena into a vampire again. That meant no significant blood exchange between the two of them for at least a week—either giving or taking might tip her over the edge.

  He must once again adjust to the taste of animal blood.

  Stefan shut his eyes briefly, remembering the horror of the first time. The cramps. The shakes. The agony that seemed to tell his entire body that it wasn’t getting fed. The feeling that his veins might explode into flame at any moment, and the pain in his jaws.

  He stood up. He was lucky to be alive. Luckier than he ever could have dreamed he would be in having Elena beside him. He would work through the readjustment without bothering her by telling her, he decided.

  Just two hours later Stefan was back at the boardinghouse, limping slightly. Matt, who met him at the heavy front door, noticed the limp. “You okay? You’d better get in and ice it.”

  “Just a cramp,” Stefan said briefly. “I’m not used to exercise. Didn’t get any back there in—you know.” He looked away, flushing. So did Matt, hot and cold and furious at the people who had put Stefan in this condition. Vampires were pretty resilient, but he had the feeling—no, he knew—that Stefan had almost died in his prison cell. One day under lock and key had convinced Matt that he never wanted to be imprisoned again.