Together, they pulled the older vampire’s corpse through the cave. Once outside, they dropped it on top of the pile of bodies the others had brought out. Meredith counted quickly and found all four there. That was it, the whole group they’d been chasing. She felt a bitter satisfaction: She might be wrong, might be different now, but she could still kill monsters, still make the world safer.

“Go us,” Adam said, pumping his fist, and Meredith found herself smiling at him.

For a minute, it felt like they were what Meredith had always wanted: a real team. There were five of them, not including Jack, all young, fast, and strong. Meredith could have liked them, would have liked them, if they were true hunters.

But that wasn’t quite what this was.

She was a spy, she reminded herself. She wasn’t really one of them. She would never be one of them, she promised herself, not even if she never found the cure.

“Good work, everybody,” Jack said, as he looked over the heap of bodies.

Adam and the others gazed at him in adoration, their eyes wide and shining, and Meredith felt ill. Even if she found a cure for what Jack had done to them all, the others were already lost. They loved Jack. They loved what they’d become. Sadie picked up a blood bag and sipped from it, faked a kick at Conrad, her leg moving so fast it blurred, and they both laughed.

The hunt over, Adam picked up a can of gasoline and began to pour it over the bodies. They’d burn them to make sure they were dead and to keep curious humans from stumbling across a pile of corpses. Sadie and Conrad, hand in hand, wandered a little farther into the woods. Meredith was heading over to offer Adam her help when she saw Jack lead Nick farther downhill, holding tightly to his arm as if Nick might try to get away.

There was something furtive about them, and Meredith changed course to follow. She walked quietly, keeping her shield up as Jack had taught her. Breathe. Count. Hide your aura. They didn’t glance back at her, but she was careful to keep in the shelter of the trees anyway. Her mouth dry and her heart pounding, she squeezed her hands anxiously into fists. Surely, now that she’d been changed, her palms shouldn’t sweat.

When they were far enough away from the caves that even a vampire shouldn’t have been able to eavesdrop, Jack and Nick stopped and began to talk, their voices low and their heads together. Edging to the other side of a nearby oak tree, her hands on its rough bark, Meredith stopped, too, and held her breath, listening hard.

She couldn’t hear what they were saying at first—their voices were too low. She gritted her teeth, frustrated. Did she dare risk getting closer?

But then Jack’s voice rose, furious. “What do you mean, you haven’t found her?” he said. His face reddened, and with a quick, violent movement, he shoved Nick against a tree. Lanky Nick ducked back, twisting his body away from his leader.

“I t-tried,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’m not giving up.”

“She’s got to be near here,” Jack said, his tone dark. He leaned into Nick’s face, spitting the words at him. “Try harder.”

Letting go of Nick, Jack turned away. Then, efficiently and viciously, he snatched a tree branch from the ground beside them and, in one smooth, quick movement, jammed it through Nick’s chest. Nick screamed, an agonized wail of pain, and lurched away, clawing at the branch.

Meredith couldn’t hold back her gasp of horror. It’ll heal, she reminded herself, clapping her hand over her mouth.

Too late. Jack swung around, looking up the hill. “Meredith?” he called.

No. Her body tensed to run, but he knew she was there.

Meredith took a deep breath, smoothed her hair, and stepped out from behind the tree. “Hi,” she said, careful to keep her face cheerful and her voice light and unconcerned. “Um, we need your lighter. To burn the bodies.”

Behind Jack, Nick strained to pull the branch from his chest, giving a painful-sounding groan as it slowly slid out. “Nick?” Meredith asked, trying to sound confused. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Nick breathed, his eyes glassy. He wiped the sweat and tears from his face. The wound in his chest was already closing, but his shirt was stained with blood, and his voice hitched as if he was barely holding back a sob.

“Nick and I had a disagreement. I overreacted,” Jack said slowly. He was looking at Meredith with a speculative expression, and her stomach turned over nervously.

Digging in his pocket, he walked toward her. His eyes were fixed on her, curiously blank, and Meredith steeled herself, trying not to flinch backward.

When he was a few steps away, he stopped and held out a small silver object. His lighter. “Here you go.” When Meredith looked up at him, he smiled.

She forced her body to relax, and smiled back at him. Maybe he had bought her excuse. She would have to be more careful now, though, in case he was suspicious. That had been too close.

And who was the “she” Jack had been searching for? Meredith’s heart sped up, and she took a steadying breath, willing her pulse back to normal.

Jack had a secret. No matter what it took, she would find out what it was.

Chapter 12

Matt cleared his throat and looked up at the clock on the wall of the ER waiting room, shuffling his feet with impatience.

The air seemed suffused with a combination of boredom and despair. People sat huddled together, pressing ice or bandages to themselves, or filling out paperwork with exhausted expressions on their faces. In the chair closest to Matt, a tired-looking older man held a cup of coffee with both hands as he leaned forward tensely, his gaze fixed on the door of one of the examination rooms. Matt looked away, shifting from one foot to the other, embarrassed by the naked fear in the man’s eyes.

Still, that man would be helped here. They all would. That’s what Jasmine did—she helped people. In that way, she’d always been one of them. They fought monsters to protect the innocent, and Jasmine fixed the innocent.

It was such an unequivocally good thing to do—no shades of gray, no occasionally evil vampire allies, no icy Guardians—that Matt’s heart swelled with love for her. Jasmine, with her sweet, soft lips and her shining intelligent eyes, was good all the way through. And she loved him, too, despite everything he had seen and done.

Matt leaned back against the vending machine, looking at the elevators. Soon she’d be here. His heart fluttered in his chest at the thought that any minute now, those elevator doors would open and he’d see Jasmine.

His phone vibrated, and he took it out to see a text from Jasmine:

Come up to room 413. There’s something I want to show you.

Matt rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, found room 413, and tapped lightly on the closed door. It immediately jerked open, and Jasmine smiled up at him, almost bouncing with excitement.

“Come on in,” she urged, tugging him by the arm. She yanked him inside and closed the door behind them, then leaned against it, grinning.

“What’s going on?” Matt asked, looking around. This was obviously some sort of lab, full of shiny white-and-chrome equipment, none of which gave him the faintest clue to its purpose.

“Look at this,” Jasmine said. Leading the way across the room, she hopped up on a stool in front of one of the machines. She turned on a screen and began adjusting dials, her fingers moving competently over the controls. Two complicated-looking graphs showed up on the screen, one above the other.

“I have no idea what you’re showing me,” Matt said, staring at the screen.

“I ran an analysis of the two samples of blood I took,” Jasmine told him. “This is basically a genetic breakdown of Damon’s blood—” she pointed at the upper graph “—and this is the manmade vampire’s blood.” She indicated the lower graph. “They’re ridiculously similar. Much more similar than either is to normal human blood.”

“I still don’t know what that means,” Matt said apologetically.

“Long story short?” Jasmine arched an eyebrow, a pleased little smile on her lips. “Jack may have made his vampires in a lab, but he didn’t do it without help. There are all kinds of chemical and genetic modifications going on here,” she said, pointing to one edge of the lower graph. “But the basic structure of the blood shows that Jack didn’t start with just ordinary human blood. He used real vampire blood. That’s not in the lab notes Damon stole from him, but it’s definitely true. There was a first step he didn’t document in that notebook.”

“Wow.” Matt ran his eyes across the screen as Jasmine explained her conclusions in more detail. They still meant nothing to him, but he believed she knew what she was talking about. “It’s amazing that you figured this out.” He hesitated. “Is it going to help us kill them?”

Jasmine’s face fell. “I don’t know,” she said. “The mutated strands must be what keep them from being vulnerable to the things vampires usually die from. But I can’t—I’m not a geneticist.”

Seeing the disappointment in her eyes, Matt felt like a jerk. “This is great, though,” he said hastily. “The more we know about what Jack’s doing, the better.”

He was glad to see Jasmine’s lips tilt up again into a smile. And it was true. He had to believe that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his vampires would bring them closer to killing him.

Raccoon, Damon thought, scraping his tongue against his teeth, is even more disgusting than rabbit. That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing. He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up through branches at the stars, so clear and distant. The night forest was quiet around him.

He should just discreetly find a girl who would let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but somehow he couldn’t with Elena around. Even though he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seem right to find another companion. Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées.

How had Stefan managed it, decade after decade, resigning himself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Damon bit his lip and then consciously relaxed, lounging against the tree, pushing the thought away. He wasn’t going to think about Stefan.

Instead, he reached for his connection with Elena. It was better to think of her, of her soft skin and shining eyes, of her proud spirit and sharp, fierce mind, than to poke again and again at the painful scars left by Stefan’s loss.

Her grief was still there, haunting the bond between them. It would never leave her, he supposed, never leave either of them completely. But there was something else there, he thought, something gentler and warmer creeping into her emotions. He thought—hoped—that perhaps it was the way she felt about him.

Licking his lips, Damon let the blood flowing inside him—disgusting, but full of the energy of life—warm him and quicken his Power. Elena thought Siobhan might be in one of the hunting cabins up here in the hills. So Damon was looking.

It probably wasn’t what the Guardians wanted, as they’d assigned Elena the task of finding and killing the old vampire, but who cared what they wanted? Dead was dead, and he didn’t like the idea of Elena following auras by herself, finding corpses in the night. She was strong, he knew, but she was still so young.

And he was ready to take someone down. His experiments in killing the synthetic vampires were at a standstill. Nothing worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Damon with dull, resentful eyes instead of fighting back. Restlessly, Damon touched his tongue to his sharp canines. He needed to do something.

He pushed his Power outward, searching, categorizing what he found. There was life all around him. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth, an owl swooped overhead. He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a family of black bears searching for food. Humans down in the town below, sleeping or indoors. One walking a dog at the edge of the forest.

Nothing other. No vampire consciousness stirring. If Siobhan was in a cabin in the woods, it wasn’t one of the ones up here in the hills past the edge of town.

Damon looked up at the stars again and thought about whether he should call another animal to him before he went home. He hadn’t tried bear yet; maybe it would be less vile. All that fur seemed like it would be a pain to bite through, though, which might be even worse than the raccoon.

Or maybe he should head down into town, find a game of pool or a fight, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power.

He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when something stopped him short. Tensed, he held his breath and listened.

There was the lightest crackle, as if someone were carefully stepping across dry leaves. Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness, wrongness crept up on him, the faint chemical wrongness that was now all around.