The Return: Nightfall tvd-5 Page 5

  “…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.Whip whip whip whip whip… 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.

  Only inhumanly fast reflexes could have caught her, especially from across the room. But Stefan had tossed the lamp to Meredith and was across the distance faster than Bonnie’s eyes could follow. Then he was holding Elena, encircling her protectively.

  “Oh,hell,” said Caroline. Black trails of mascara ran down her face, making her look like something not quite human. She looked at Stefan with unconcealed hatred. He looked back soberly — no,sternly.

  “Don’t call on Hell,” he said in a very low voice. “Not here. Not now. Because Hell might hear and call back.”

  “As if it already hadn’t,” Caroline said, and in that moment, she was pitiful — broken and pathetic. As if she had started something she didn’t know how to stop.

  “Caroline, what are you saying?” Stefan knelt. “Are you saying that you’ve already — made some bargain—?”

  “Ouch,” Bonnie said, suddenly and involuntarily, shattering the ominous mood in Stefan’s room. One of Caroline’s broken nails had left a trail of blood on the floor. Caroline had knelt in it, too, making things pretty messy. Bonnie felt a sympathetic throb of pain in her own fingers until Caroline waved her bloody hand at Stefan. Then Bonnie’s sympathy turned to nausea.

  “Want a lick?” she said. Her voice and face had changed entirely, and she wasn’t even trying to hide it. “Oh, come on, Stefan,” she went on mockingly, “you do drink human blood these days, don’t you? Human or — whatever she is, whatever she’s become. You two fly like bats together now, do you?”

  “Caroline,” Bonnie whispered, “didn’t you see them? Her wings—”

  “Just like a bat — or another vampire already. Stefan’s made her—”

  “I saw them too,” Matt said flatly, behind Bonnie. “They weren’t bat wings.”

  “Doesn’t anybody have eyes?” Meredith said from where she stood by the lamp. “Look here.” She bent. When she stood again she was holding a long white feather. It shone in the light.

  “Maybe she’s a white crow, then,” Caroline said. “That would be appropriate. And I can’t believe how you’re all — all — fawning on her as if she were some sort of princess. Always everybody’s little darling, aren’t you, Elena?”

  “Stop it,” Stefan said.

  “Everybody’s, that’s the key word,” Caroline spat.

  “Stop it.”

  “The way you were kissing people one after another.” She gave a theatrical shudder. “Everyone seems to have forgotten, but that was more like—”

  “Stop, Caroline.”

  “The real Elena.” Caroline’s voice had become pretend-prissy, but she couldn’t keep the venom out, Bonnie thought. “Because anyone who knows you knows what youreally were before Stefan blessed us with his irresistible presence. You were—”

  “Caroline, stop right there—”

  “A slut! That’s all! Just a cheap, anybody’s slut!”

  7

  There was a sort of universal gasp. Stefan went white, his compressed lips showing in a tight line. Bonnie felt as if she were choking on words, on explanations, on recriminations about Caroline’s own behavior. Elena may have had as many boyfriends as the stars in the sky, but in the end she had given all that up — because she fell in love — not that Caroline would know anything about that.

  “Don’t have anything to say now?” Caroline was taunting. “Can’t find any cute answer? Bat got your tongue?” She began to laugh, but it was forced, glassy laughter, and then words were spilling out of her almost as if uncontrollably, all words that weren’t supposed to be spoken in public. Bonnie had said most of them at one time or another, but here, and now, they formed a stream of venomous power. Caroline’s words were building up to some kind of crescendo — something was going to happen — this kind of force couldn’t be contained. Reverberations, Bonnie thought as the sound waves began building up….

  Glass,her intuition told her.Get away from glass.

  Stefan just had time to whirl to Meredith and shout,“Get rid of the lamp.”

  And Meredith, who was not only quick on the uptake but also a baseball pitcher with a 1.75 ERA, snatched it up and threw it at — no, through— an explosion as the porcelain lamp shattered— the open window.

  There was a similar shattering in the bathroom. The mirror had exploded behind the closed door.

  Then Caroline slapped Elena across the face.

  It left a bloody smear, which Elena patted tentatively. It also left a white handprint, turning to red. Elena’s expression was one to wring tears from a stone.

  And then Stefan did what Bonnie considered the most astonishing thing of all. He very gently put Elena down on the floor, kissed her upturned face, and turned to Caroline.

  He put his hands on her shoulders, not shaking, only holding her still, forcing her to look at him.

  “Caroline,” he said, “stop it.Come back. For the sake of your old friends who care for you, come back. For the sake of the family that loves you, come back. For the sake of your own immortal soul,come back. Come back to us!”

  Caroline just eyed him belligerently.

  Stefan half turned aside, toward Meredith, grimacing. “I’m not really cut out to do this,” he said wryly. “It’s not any vampire’s forte.”

  Then he turned toward Elena, his voice tender. “Love, can you help? Can you help your old friend again?”

  Already Elena was trying to help, trying to get to Stefan. She had pulled herself up very shakily, first by the rocking chair and then by Bonnie, who tried to help her under the burden of gravity. Elena was as wobbly as a newborn giraffe in roller skates, and Bonnie — almost half a head shorter — was finding her hard to handle.

  Stefan made a motion as if to help, but Matt was already there, steadying Elena on the other side.

  Then Stefan had Caroline turned around, and he was holding her, not letting her dart away, forcing her to face Elena fully.

  Elena, while being held at the waist so that her hands were free, made some curious motions, seeming to draw designs more and more quickly in the air in front of Caroline’s face, at the same time clasping and unclasping her hands with the fingers in differe
nt positions. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing. Caroline’s eyes followed the movements of Elena’s hands as if compelled, but it was clear from her snarling that she hated it.

  Magic, Bonnie thought, fascinated. White Magic. She’s calling on angels, just as surely as Caroline was calling demons. But is she strong enough to pull Caroline out of the darkness?

  And at last, as if to complete the ceremony, Elena leaned forward and kissed Caroline chastely on the lips.

  All hell broke loose. Caroline somehow squirmed out of Stefan’s grip and tried to claw Elena’s face with her nails. Objects in the room went sailing through the air, propelled by no human force. Matt tried to grab Caroline’s arm and got a punch in the stomach that doubled him over, followed by a chop to the back of the neck.

  Stefan let go of Caroline to scoop up Elena and get her and Bonnie out of harm’s way. He seemed to assume that Meredith could take care of herself — and he was right. Caroline swung at Meredith, but Meredith was ready. She grabbed Caroline’s fist and helped her in the direction of the swing. Caroline landed on the bed, twisted, and then rushed Meredith again, this time getting a grip on her hair. Meredith pulled free, leaving a tuft of hair in Caroline’s fingers. Then Meredith got under Caroline’s guard and hit her squarely on the jaw. Caroline collapsed.

  Bonnie cheered and refused to feel guilty about it. Then, for the first time, as Caroline lay still, Bonnie noticed that Caroline’s fingernails were all there again — long, strong, curved, and perfect, not one of them chipped or broken.

  Elena’s Power? It must be. What else could have done it? With just a few motions and a kiss, Elena had healed Caroline’s hand.

  Meredith was massaging her own hand. “I never realized it hurt so much to knock people out,” she said. “They never show it in movies. Is it the same for guys?”

  Matt flushed. “I…uh, I’ve never actually…”

  “It’s the same for everyone, even vampires,” Stefan said briefly. “Are you all right, Meredith? I mean, Elena could…”

  “No, I’m fine. And Bonnie and I have a job to do.” She nodded at Bonnie, who nodded weakly back. “Caroline’s our responsibility, and we should have realized why she really had to come back this last time.She doesn’t have a car. I’ll bet she used that downstairs telephone and tried to get somebody to pick her up, but couldn’t, and then she came upstairs again. So now we have to take her home. Stefan, I’m sorry. It hasn’t been much of a visit.”