The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Nightfall (23 page)

N
o peck on the lips was going to satisfy Damon, Elena thought. On the other hand, Matt was going to need outright seduction before he would give in. Fortunately Elena had broken the Matt Honeycutt code long ago. And she planned to be remorseless in using what she had learned on his weakened, susceptible body.

But Matt could be far too stubborn for his own good. He allowed Elena to put her soft lips against his, he allowed her to put her arms around him. But when Elena tried to do some of the things he liked most—like running her nails down his spine, or touching her tongue tip lightly to his closed lips—he clamped his teeth shut. He wouldn’t put an arm around her.

Elena let go of him and sighed. Then she felt a crawling
sensation between her shoulder blades, as if she were being watched but a hundred times stronger. She glanced back to see Damon standing at a distance with his Virginia pine rod, but she couldn’t find anything unusual. She glanced back once more—and had to cram a fist into her mouth.

Damon was
there
; right behind her; so close that you couldn’t have gotten two fingers between the front of her body and the front of his. She didn’t know why her arm hadn’t hit him. Her whirl actually trapped her in between two male bodies.

But how had he done it? There had been no time to travel the distance of the clearing from where Damon had been standing to one inch behind her in the second that she had glanced away. Nor had there been any sound as he’d walked across the pine needles toward them; like the Ferrari, he was just—there.

Elena swallowed the scream that was desperately trying to get out of her lungs, and tried to breathe. Her own body was rigid with fear. Matt was trembling slightly behind her. Damon was leaning in, and all she could smell was the sweetness of pine resin.

Something’s wrong with him. Something’s wrong.

“You know what,” Damon said, leaning forward even farther so that she had to lean backward against Matt, so that, even spooned against Matt’s shaking body, she was
looking straight into the Ray-Bans from a distance of three inches. “That gets you a grade of a D minus.”

Now Elena was shaking as well as Matt. But she had to get a grip on herself, had to meet this aggression head-on. The more passive she and Matt were, the more time Damon had to think.

Elena’s mind was in feverish scheming mode. He may not be reading our minds, she thought, but he can certainly tell if we’re telling the truth or lying. That’s normal for a vampire who drinks human blood. What can we make of that? What can we do with it?

“That was a greeting kiss,” she said boldly. “It’s to identify the person that you’re meeting, so you’ll always know them afterwards. Even—even prairie hamsters do it. Now—please—could we move just a little, Damon? I’m getting crushed.”

And this is just much too provocative a position, she thought. For everybody involved.

“One more chance,” Damon said, and this time he didn’t smile. “I want to see a kiss—a real kiss—between you. Or else.”

Elena twisted in the tight space. Her eyes searched Matt’s. They had, after all, been boyfriend and girlfriend for quite a while last year. Elena saw the look in Matt’s blue eyes: he
wanted
to kiss her, as much as he could want anything after that pain. And he realized that she’d had
to go through all that fancy footwork to save him from Damon.

Somehow, we’ll get out, Elena thought to him. Now, will you cooperate? Some boys didn’t have buttons in the selfish sensations area of their brain. Some, like Matt, had buttons labeled
HONOR
or
GUILT
.

Now Matt held still as she took his face between her hands, tilting it down and going up on her toes to kiss him, because he’d grown so much. She thought of their first real kiss, in his car on the way home from a minor school dance. He’d been terrified, his hands damp, his whole interior quaking. She’d been cool, experienced, gentle.

And so she was now, drawing a warm tongue tip to melt his frozen lips apart. And just in case Damon was eavesdropping on her thoughts, she kept them strictly on Matt, on his sunshiny looks and his warm friendship and on the gallantry and courtesy that he had always shown to her, even when she broke up with him. She wasn’t aware when his arms went around her shoulders or when he took control of the kiss, like a person dying of thirst who’s finally found water. She could see it clearly in his mind: he’d never thought he’d kiss Elena Gilbert like this again.

Elena didn’t know how long it lasted. Finally she unwound her arms from around Matt’s neck and stepped back.

And then she realized something. It was no accident
that Damon had sounded like a film director. He was holding up a palm-sized video camera, staring into the viewfinder. He’d captured the whole thing.

With Elena clearly visible. She had no idea what had happened to the disguising baseball cap and dark glasses. Her hair was disordered and her breathing came quickly, involuntarily. The blood had risen to the surface of her skin. Matt didn’t look much more together than she felt.

Damon looked up from the viewfinder.

“What do you want that for?” Matt growled in tones completely unlike his normal voice. The kiss had affected him, too, Elena thought. More so than her.

Damon picked up his branch again and again waved the end of it like a Japanese fan. Pine aroma wafted by Elena. He looked considering, as though he might ask for a retake, then changed his mind, smiled brilliantly at them, and tucked the video camera into a pocket.

“All you need to know is that it was a perfect take.”

“Then we’re leaving.” The kiss seemed to have given Matt new strength, even if it was for saying the wrong type of things. “Right now.”

“Oh, no, but keep that dominant, aggressive attitude. As you remove her shirt.”

“What?”

Damon repeated the words in the tones of a director giving an actor complicated instructions.

“Undo the buttons of her shirt, please, and take it off.”

“You’re
crazy
.” Matt turned and looked at Elena, stopped aghast to see the expression on her face, the single tear running down the eye not hidden.

“Elena…”

He moved around, but she moved too. He couldn’t get her to look him in the face. At last, she stopped, stood with her eyes down and leaking tears. He could
feel
the heat radiating from her cheeks.

“Elena, let’s fight him. Don’t you remember how you fought the bad things in Stefan’s room?”

“But this is worse, Matt. I’ve never felt anything this bad before. This strong. It’s—pressing on me.”

“You don’t mean we should give in to him…?”
That was what Matt
said
and he sounded as if he were on the verge of being ill. What his clear blue eyes said was simpler. They said:
No. Not if he kills me for refusing.

“I mean…” Elena turned suddenly back to Damon. “Let him go,” she said. “This is between you and me. Let’s settle it ourselves.” She was damned well going to save Matt, even if he didn’t want to be saved.

I’ll do what you want,
she thought as hard as she could to Damon, hoping he would pick some of it up. After all, he’d bled her against her will—at least initially—before. She could live through him doing it again.

“Yes, you’ll do
everything
I want,” Damon said, proving that he could read her thoughts even more clearly than she’d imagined. “But the question is, after how much?” He didn’t say how much what. He didn’t have to. “Now, I know I just gave you an order,” he added, half turning toward Matt but with his eyes still on Elena, “because I can still see you picturing it in your mind. But—”

Elena saw the look in Matt’s eyes then, and the flaming of his cheeks, and she knew—and immediately tried to hide the knowledge from Damon—what he was going to do.

He was going to commit suicide.

“If we can’t talk you out of it, we can’t talk you out of it,” Meredith said to Mrs. Flowers. “But—there are things out there—”

“Yes, dear, I know. And the sun is going down. It’s a bad time to be outside. But as my mother always said, two witches are better than one.” She gave Bonnie an absent smile. “And as you very kindly did not say before, I am very old. Why, I can remember the days before the first motorcars and airplanes. I might have knowledge that would help you in your quest for your friends—and on the other hand, I am dispensable.”

“You certainly are not,” Bonnie said fervently. They were using up Elena’s wardrobe now, piling on the clothes.
Meredith had picked up the duffel bag with Stefan’s clothes in it and dumped it on his bed, but the first time she picked up a shirt, she dropped it again.

“Bonnie, you might take something of Stefan’s with you as we go,” she said. “See if you get any impressions from it. Um, maybe you too, Mrs. Flowers?” she added. Bonnie understood. It was one thing to let somebody call themselves a witch; it was another thing to call someone very much your senior one.

The last layer of Bonnie’s wardrobe was one of Stefan’s shirts, and Mrs. Flowers tucked one of his socks in her pocket.

“But I won’t go out the front door,” Bonnie said adamantly. She couldn’t even bear to imagine the mess.

“All right, so we go out the back,” Meredith said, flipping Stefan’s lamp off. “Come on.”

They were actually walking out the back door when the front doorbell rang.

They all three exchanged glances. Then Meredith wheeled, “It could be them!” And she hastened back to the dim front of the house. Bonnie and Mrs. Flowers followed more slowly.

Bonnie shut her eyes as she heard the door open. When there were no immediate exclamations about the mess, she opened them a slit.

There was no sign that anything unusual had happened
outside the door. No smashed insect bodies—no dead or dying bugs on the front porch.

Hairs on the back of Bonnie’s neck rose. Not that she wanted to see the malach. But she did want to know what had happened to them. Automatically, one hand went to her hair, to feel if a tendril had been left behind. Nothing.

“I’m looking for Matthew Honeycutt.” The voice cut into Bonnie’s reverie like a hot knife through butter, and Bonnie’s eyes snapped all the way open.

Yes, it was Sheriff Rich Mooseburger and he was all there, from shiny boots to crisp collar. Bonnie opened her mouth, but Meredith spoke first.

“This is not Matt’s house,” she said, her tone quiet, her voice even.

“In fact I have already been to the Honeycutt house. And to the Sulez house and the McCulloughs’. Every one of them, in fact, suggested that if Matt weren’t at one of those places, he might be out here with you.”

Bonnie wanted to kick him in the shins. “Matt hasn’t been stealing stop signs! He would never, ever,
ever
do something like that. And I wish to God I knew where he was, but I don’t. None of us do!” She stopped, with the feeling that she might have said too much.

“And your names are?”

Mrs. Flowers took over. “This is Bonnie McCullough,
and Meredith Sulez. I am Mrs. Flowers, the owner of this boardinghouse, and I believe I can second Bonnie’s remarks about the stop signs—”

“In fact this is more serious than missing road signs, ma’am. Matthew Honeycutt is under suspicion of assaulting a young woman. There is considerable physical evidence to support her story. And she claims that they have known each other since childhood, so there can be no mistake as to identity.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Bonnie almost shouted, “She? She
who
?”

“Miss Caroline Forbes is the complainant. And I would in fact suggest, if any of the three of you should
happen
to see Mr. Honeycutt, that you advise him to turn himself in. Before he is taken by force into custody.” He took a step toward them as if threatening to come through the door, but Mrs. Flowers silently barred the way.

“
In fact
,” Meredith said, regaining her composure, “I’m sure you realize that you need a warrant to enter these premises. Do you have one?”

Sheriff Mossberg didn’t answer. He made a sharp little right turn, walked down the pathway to his sheriff’s car, and disappeared.

M
att lunged at Damon in a rush that clearly demonstrated the skills that had gotten him a college football scholarship. He accelerated from utter stillness to a blur of motion, trying to tackle Damon, to bring him down.

“Run,” he shouted, at the same instant.
“Run!”

Elena stood still, trying to come up with Plan A after this disaster. She had been forced to watch Stefan’s humiliation at Damon’s hands at the boardinghouse, but she didn’t think she could stand to see this.

But when she looked again, Matt was standing about a dozen yards from Damon, white-faced and grim, but alive and on his feet. He was preparing to rush Damon again.

And Elena…couldn’t run. She knew that it would probably be the best thing—Damon might punish Matt
briefly but most of his attention would be turned to hunting her down.

But she couldn’t be sure. And she couldn’t be sure that the punishment wouldn’t kill Matt, or that he would be able to get away before Damon found her and had leisure time to think of him again.

No, not
this
Damon, pitiless and remorseless as he was.

There must be some way—she could almost feel wheels spinning in her own head.

And then she saw it.

No, not that…

But what else was there to do?

Matt was, indeed, rushing Damon again, and this time as he went for him, lithe and unstoppable and fast as a darting snake, she saw what Damon did. He simply sidestepped at the last moment, just when Matt was about to ram him with a shoulder. Matt’s momentum kept him going, but Damon simply turned in place and faced him again. Then he picked up his damned pine branch. It was broken at the end where Matt had trampled it.

Damon frowned at the stick, then shrugged, lifting it—and then both he and Matt stopped frozen. Something came sailing in from the sidelines to settle on the ground between them. It lay there, stirring in the breeze.

It was a maroon and navy Pendleton shirt.

Both of the boys turned slowly toward Elena, who was wearing a white lacy camisole. She shivered slightly and
wrapped her arms around herself. It seemed unusually cold for this time of evening.

Very slowly, Damon lowered the pine branch.

“Saved by your
inamorata
,” he said to Matt.

“I know what that means and it’s not true,” Matt said. “She’s my friend, not my girlfriend.”

Damon just smiled distantly. Elena could feel his eyes on her bare arms. “So…on to the next step,” he said.

Elena wasn’t surprised. Heartsick but not surprised. Neither was she surprised to see, when Damon turned to look from her to Matt and back, a flash of red. It seemed to be reflected on the inside of his sunglasses.

“Now,” he said to Elena. “I think we’ll put you over there on that rock, sort of half reclining. But first—another kiss.” He looked back at Matt. “Get with the program, Matt; you’re wasting time. First, maybe you kiss her hair, then she throws her head back and you kiss her neck, while she puts her arms around your shoulders….”

Matt,
thought Elena. Damon had said
Matt
. It had slipped out so easily, so innocently. Suddenly her entire brain, and her body, too, seemed to be vibrating as if to a single note of music, seemed to be flooded by an icy shower-bath. And what the note was saying was not shocking, because it was something that somehow, at a subliminal level, she already knew….

That’s not Damon.

This wasn’t the person she had known for—was it
really only nine or ten months? She had seen him when she was a human girl, and she had defied him and desired him in equal measure—and he had seemed to love her best when she was defying him.

She had seen him when she was a vampire and had been drawn to him with all her being, and he had cared for her as if she were a child.

She had seen him when she was a spirit, and from the afterlife she had learned a great deal.

He was a womanizer, he could be callous, he drifted through his victims’ lives like a chimera, like a catalyst, changing other people while he himself remained unchanging and unchanged. He mystified humans, confused them, used them—leaving them bewildered, because he had the charm of the devil.

And never once had she seen him break his word. She had a rock-bottom feeling that this wasn’t something that was a decision, it was so much a part of Damon, lodged so deep in his subconscious, that even he couldn’t do anything to change it. He couldn’t break his word. He’d starve first.

Damon was still talking to Matt, giving him orders. “…and then take off her…”

So what about his word to be her bodyguard, to keep her from harm?

He was talking to her now. “So you know when to throw your head back? After he—”

“Who are you?”

“What?”

“You heard me.
Who are you?
If you had really seen Stefan off and promised him to take care of me, none of this would have happened. Oh, you might be messing with Matt, but not in front of me. You’re not—Damon’s not stupid. He knows what a bodyguard is. He knows that watching Matt in pain hurts me as well. You’re not Damon. Who…are…you?”

Matt’s strength and fast-as-a-rattlesnake speed hadn’t done any good. Maybe a different approach would work. As Elena spoke, she had been very slowly reaching up to Damon’s face. Now, with one motion, she pulled his sunglasses off.

Eyes red as fresh new blood shone out at her.

“
What have you done?”
she whispered. “What have you done to Damon?”

Matt was out of the range of her voice but had been inching around, trying to get her attention. She wished fervently that Matt would just make a run for it himself. Here, he was just another way for this creature to blackmail her.

Without seeming to move quickly, the Damon-thing reached down and snatched the sunglasses from her hand. It was too fast for her to resist.

Then he seized her wrist in a painful grip.

“This would be a lot easier on both of you if you’d
cooperate,” he said casually. “You don’t seem to realize what might happen if you make me angry.”

His grip was forcing her down, forcing her to kneel. Elena decided not to let it. But unfortunately her body didn’t want to cooperate; it sent urgent messages of pain to her mind, of agony, of burning, searing agony. She had thought that she could ignore it, could stand to let him break her wrist. She was wrong. At some point something in her brain blacked out completely, and the next thing she knew she was on her knees with a wrist that felt three times the right size and burned fiercely.

“Human weakness,” Damon said scornfully. “It will get you every time…. You should know better than to disobey me, by now.”

Not Damon,
Elena thought, so vehemently that she was surprised the imposter didn’t hear her.

“All right,” Damon’s voice continued above her as cheerfully as if he’d simply given her a suggestion. “You go sit on that rock, leaning backward, and Matt, if you’ll just come over here, facing her.” The tone was of polite command, but Matt ignored it and was beside her already, looking at the finger marks on Elena’s wrist as if he didn’t believe them.

“Matt stands up, Elena sits, or the opposite one gets the full treatment. Have fun, kiddies.” Damon had the palm-camera out again.

Matt consulted Elena with his eyes. She looked at the
imposter and said, enunciating carefully, “Go to hell, whoever you are.”

“Been there, done that, bought the brimstone,” the not-Damon creature rattled off. He gave Matt a smile that was both luminescent and terrifying. Then he waggled the pine branch.

Matt ignored it. He waited, his face stoic, for the pain to hit.

Elena struggled up to stand by him. Side by side, they could defy Damon.

Who seemed for a moment to be out of his mind. “You’re trying to pretend you’re not afraid of me. But you will be. If you had any sense, you would be now.”

Belligerently, he took a step toward Elena.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Whoever you are, you’re just an oversized bully. You’ve hurt Matt. You’ve hurt me. I’m sure you can kill us. But we’re not afraid of bullies.”

“You will be afraid.” Now Damon’s voice had dropped to a menacing whisper. “Just wait.”

Even as something was ringing in Elena’s ears, telling her to listen to those last words, to make a connection—who did that sound like?—the pain hit.

Her knees were knocked out by it. But she wasn’t just kneeling now. She was trying to roll into a ball, trying to curl around the agony. All rational thought was swept from her head. She sensed Matt beside her, trying to hold her,
but she could no more communicate with him than she could fly. She shuddered and fell to her side, as if having a seizure. Her entire universe was pain, and she only heard voices as if they came from far away.

“Stop it!” Matt sounded frantic.
“Stop it! Are you crazy?
That’s
Elena
, for God’s sake! Do you want to
kill her
?”

And then the not-Damon-thing advising him mildly, “I wouldn’t try that again,” but the only sound Matt made was a scream of primal rage.

“Caroline!” Bonnie was raging, pacing back and forth in Stefan’s room while Meredith did something else with the computer. “How
dare
she?”

“She doesn’t dare try to attack Stefan or Elena outright—there’s the oath,” Meredith said. “So she’s thought this up to get at all of us.”

“But Matt—”

“Oh, Matt’s handy,” Meredith said grimly. “And unfortunately there’s the matter of the physical evidence on both of them.”

“What do you mean? Matt doesn’t—”

“The scratches, my dear,” put in Mrs. Flowers, looking sad, “from your razor-toothed bug. The poultice I put on will have healed them so that they’ll look like a girl’s fingernail scratches—about now. And the mark it left on your neck…” Mrs. Flowers coughed delicately. “It looks like what in my day was called a ‘love bite.’ Perhaps a sign
of a tryst that ended in force? Not that your friend would ever do anything like that.”

“And remember how Caroline looked when we saw her, Bonnie?” Meredith said dryly. “Not the crawling around—I’ll bet anything she’s walking just fine now. But her face. She had a black eye coming in and a swollen cheek. Perfect for the time frame.”

Bonnie felt as if everyone was two steps ahead of her. “
What
time frame?”

“The night the bug attacked Matt. It was the morning after that that the sheriff called and talked to him. Matt admitted that his mother hadn’t seen him all night, and that Neighborhood Watch guy saw Matt drive up to his house and, basically, pass out.”

“That was from the bug poison. He’d just been fighting the malach!”

“We know that. But they’ll say he’d just come back from attacking Caroline. Caroline’s mother will hardly be fit to testify—you saw how she was. So who’s to say that Matt wasn’t over at Caroline’s? Especially if he was planning assault.”

“We are! We can vouch for him—” Bonnie suddenly stumbled to a halt. “No, I guess it was after he left that this was supposed to have happened. But, no, this is all wrong!” She took up pacing again. “I saw one of those bugs up close and it was exactly the way Matt described….”

“And what’s left of it now? Nothing. Besides, they’ll
say that you would say
anything
for him.”

Bonnie couldn’t stand just walking aimlessly around anymore. She had to get to Matt, had to warn him—if they could even find him or Elena. “I thought
you
were the one who couldn’t wait a minute to find them,” she said accusingly to Meredith.

“I know; I was. But I had to look something up—and besides I wanted one more try at that page only vampires are supposed to read. The
Shi no Shi
one. But I’ve tweaked the screen in all the ways I can think of, and if there’s something written here, I certainly can’t find it.”

“Best not to waste more time on it, then,” Mrs. Flowers said. “Come get into your jacket, my dear. Shall we take the Yellow Wheeler or not?”

For just a moment Bonnie had a wild vision of a horse-drawn vehicle, a sort of Cinderella carriage but not pumpkin-shaped. Then she remembered seeing Mrs. Flowers’ ancient Model T—painted yellow—parked inside what must be the old stables that belonged to the boardinghouse.

“We did better when we were on foot than we
or
Matt did in a car,” said Meredith, giving the computer monitor controls a final vicious click. “We’re more mobile than—oh, my God!
I did it!
”

“Did what?”

“The website. Come look at this.”

Both Bonnie and Mrs. Flowers came over to the
computer. The screen was bright green with thin, faint, dark green writing.

“
How
did you do it?” Bonnie demanded as Meredith bent to get a notebook and pen to copy down what they saw.