Eyes widening in horror, Meredith grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling him close to her. “You can’t tell them,” she said fiercely. “No one else can know. I’m going to find some way to reverse it.”

Damon unwrapped Meredith’s fingers from his shirt. With a little thrill, he realized that Meredith’s predicament could be good. He could use this. “Fine,” he told her. “I won’t breathe a word. But there’s something I want you to do.”

Meredith’s eyes narrowed. It was admirable, Damon thought, how she could go from a quivering wreck to sharply suspicious, pulling herself together in an instant. “What do you want, Damon?”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her with a bitter laugh. “It won’t hurt. Probably.” She flinched, and he sighed, feeling guilty. “I want you to connect with Jack,” he went on, in a softer tone. “He made you for a reason. Surely he must want you to work with him.”

Meredith’s mouth opened in an automatic denial, and then she stopped. “You want me to spy on him for you,” she said thoughtfully.

“If we’re going to hunt him, hunter, we need eyes on the inside,” Damon told her. “So, yes, I want you to spy. Where he’s hiding, how many of… you there are, what he’s planning. How to kill him. You said once that I might be the best weapon we had, but I think you are.”

Meredith’s face was still streaked with blood and tears, but she wasn’t crying anymore. Her eyes, no longer full of shame, were speculative as she thought through the nuances of Damon’s idea. She’d always been practical, this hunter, Damon thought, and was surprised by a flare of affection. Meredith wasn’t his friend, but he did respect her, which was more than he could say for most humans—or vampires.

The corners of the hunter’s mouth went up in a smile—a small one, but a real one. “A secret weapon? That I can do.”

A weapon, Damon thought. He finally had a weapon against Jack. No, not a weapon, he corrected himself, as Meredith looked up at him and smiled in grim determination. An ally.

Chapter 8

Elena knew she was dreaming. She’d had this dream before.

The apartment stretched out before her, shadowed and deserted. “Stefan?” she called uneasily. Her voice sounded small in her own ears.

As she walked down the endless hall in search of Stefan, the lights snapped off behind her, one after the other, leaving pools of darkness. At the end of the hall, the bedroom door was closed. A tendril of worry curled inside her. There was something wrong, something about Stefan, but she couldn’t quite remember what it was.

“Stefan?” She already knew what would be behind the door—a dark, empty room, the bedroom curtains billowing in the breeze from the open windows. No Stefan. No one anywhere, just loneliness and silence. Full of dread, she slowly lifted one hand to twist the knob.

This time, though, everything changed.

Instead of her familiar bedroom, the door opened to reveal a room she had never seen before.

Inside, a fire burned in a large stone fireplace, throwing flickering shadows across the log walls. It was warm and cozy, but the woman sitting on the couch looked as cold as ice.

She was wearing a long white dress, and her dark hair hung past her shoulders. Her blue eyes were looking straight at Elena. Elena’s heart pounded in terror, and yet, there was something that wouldn’t let her leave. But the woman didn’t move. Blue eyes gazed straight through Elena and off into the distance.

Of course, Elena realized, she wasn’t really there. This was a dream, and the woman couldn’t see her.

No longer afraid to stare, she looked the woman over. She was young, maybe in her twenties, and beautiful in an unusual way. Skin so pale Elena could see the blue veins running underneath, and oddly tilted, large, light blue eyes. The woman’s hair spilled in an inky cloud over her shoulders. Her eyebrows arched dramatically dark against that pale skin. Her lips were red.

Snow White, Elena thought, remembering the fairy tale she had read to her little sister Margaret not too long ago. The Queen said, I wish I had a child with skin as white as this cold snow, and hair as black as this ebony needle, and lips as red as my hot blood.

As soon as she thought the word “blood,” there was an uncomfortable itch at the back of Elena’s mind.

Elena focused her Power, intent on seeing the woman’s aura. As her Guardian vision slotted into place, she had to grab at the doorframe, holding on so hard that the edges of the door cut into her hand.

The woman’s aura was the bright red of fresh blood, and it spread far, half-filling the room. Elena had never seen an aura so large and vivid, and it reeked of Power and violence. Vampire. A real one, not one of Jack’s creations.

Just then, those pale, tilted eyes shifted and met Elena’s. And the woman’s bloodred lips curled into a smile.

Elena sat up with a jolt, gasping in surprise. She was lying in her own big—too big, too empty—bed. Her mattress was soft, her pillows plumped up under her head. Words were completely clear in her mind, as if she had just spoken them. Get up now. Without stopping to think, she climbed out of bed and padded across the floor to the window.

The moon was full and sailing high over the apartment buildings on the other side of the street. Beyond them, Elena could see the bloodred path of an aura hanging in the air, leading farther into town.

Siobhan. It must be. Already, she could feel the insistent pull of her Guardian Powers. She had to find Siobhan and kill her, before anyone else died. No time to waste. If she lost the trail of Siobhan’s aura, it might take weeks before she found it again. Weeks when the vampire could be murdering innocent people. Hurrying, Elena slipped her feet into sandals and ran out the door of her apartment.

She had pounded down the stairs and out the front door of her building before she realized she was still dressed in her long lacy white nightgown. It didn’t matter, she decided. She would just scope out Siobhan’s situation, find the room from her dream—a cabin, it looked like—and drive away. She would come back later, with Damon.

At the thought of Damon, something inside Elena twisted. When he had held her in his arms and slipped his fangs into her throat, it had felt so right, like a homecoming. She couldn’t betray Stefan, not now. But she had always cared for Damon. Stefan had known that.

Driving her little Mini Cooper through the mostly empty roads of Dalcrest, Elena kept glancing up, following the smoky red tendrils of Siobhan’s aura. She expected them to lead straight through town and off into the hills nearby, places you might find a cozy cabin like the one Elena had dreamed of. But instead the trail led to the drive-in movie theater at the edge of town.

Elena had never been there, but she had heard about it—it had just opened earlier that summer, playing old movies to lure in families and the student crowd. The marquee outside read:

DOUBLE MIDNIGHT FEATURE

DRACULA

SON OF DRACULA

Ironic, Elena thought. It seemed like Siobhan had a sense of humor.

An old black-and-white film flickered on a huge screen, just visible over the top of the fence. Elena pulled up to the gate, and a white-haired man came out of his little booth to take her money. “First movie’s almost over,” he said genially. “Half price, sweetheart.”

Elena thanked him and pulled the car into the lot below the big screen. There were only about twenty cars there. As she parked, she saw Siobhan’s aura trace across the lot to a big old boat of a black car parked near the back.

Siobhan was leaning against the car.

In a moment, everything in Elena went on alert. She slammed open the door of her car, fumbling off her seat-belt, her gaze fixed on Siobhan. The vampire was tall and elegant lounging there, her long black hair cascading down her shoulders just as in Elena’s dream. As Elena watched, she wiped her mouth daintily with the back of one pale hand and raised her other hand in greeting, fanning her fingers at Elena in a ta-ta gesture.

Elena’s feet hit the asphalt, and the doors of her Power flew open. She felt something burst from her, a huge silent wave of Power crashing toward Siobhan, ready to drag the vampire under.

But it was too late. By the time Elena reached the car, the vampire was gone, moving so fast that Elena saw only a blur. Power from Elena hit the side of the black car, and its back panel crumpled, denting in with the sharp sound of bending metal.

Elena dashed toward the blur, her long white nightgown blowing against her legs. Maybe there was still time. The lot was full, but no one else had seen, their eyes fixed on the movie.

Above her on the screen, Mina Harker was saying, “I felt its breath on my face and then my lips.…” and then gasped. There was no sign of Siobhan anywhere. The trail of her aura had vanished.

Elena turned back to the car. Two figures were silhouetted in the front seat, leaning together. As Elena got closer, she could see long dark hair, the girl’s face pressed close against the neck of the guy. It almost looked like another feeding vampire, but they were too still. Maybe they were just unconscious, but dread pooled in Elena’s stomach.

She reached for the passenger door of the car and yanked it open.

When the door opened, the couple slumped sideways like rag dolls, any illusion of life disappearing. The girl’s arm flopped limply over the seat onto the floor of the car. Her neck was destroyed. The guy’s cheek rested upon hers and he gazed vacantly past Elena, his eyes empty. Tentatively, Elena reached out and touched the guy’s neck, then felt the girl’s wrist for a pulse. They were both dead, but their skin was still warm, their blood still wet.

Elena’s heart pounded, blood rushing dizzyingly in her ears. She had been just a few moments too late.

On the flickering black-and-white screen above Elena’s head, Mina, her voice full of horror, was telling the vampire hunter Van Helsing, “She looked like a hungry animal… a wolf. And then she turned and ran back into the dark.”

Elena turned the steering wheel and noticed, with a shiver of disgust, that there was a smudge of blood on the back of her hand. Pulling a tissue out of her glove compartment, she wiped it away.

In the end, she’d left Siobhan’s victims where she found them. Everyone in the audience had their eyes fixed on the screen above them; no one had seen her. It hurt to abandon them like that—their broken bodies gazing glassily at her, as if silently asking for some kind of acknowledgment—but getting tied into a police case would cause complications.

Once, finding two dead bodies would have horrified and traumatized Elena. The girl she used to be would have called the police, would have wept. She’d seen so much since then. Now all she could muster up was pity and a hard determination to catch Siobhan, to stop her. Elena didn’t know when she had become this colder, tougher person.

Before she could really think about it, about how she had changed, she caught a flicker of a peacock blue and rust-red aura in the woods to the side of the highway. Damon. Their bond tugged insistently in her chest, and she pulled over.

She could feel him coming toward her, and a moment later, the passenger side door opened and Damon climbed into the car. He was smiling, and Elena felt a sharp pull of excitement, not her own. Damon was up to something. She found herself smiling back at him, her heart lifting.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same question. You’re a little underdressed.” Damon said, his gaze skating curiously across her lacy nightgown. Then he stiffened. “Are you bleeding?”

“What?” Elena said, and realized. “No, not me. I got a Guardian task and I wasn’t… I didn’t find the vampire, but I found some victims.”

“Jack’s your task?” Through the bond, she could feel his pleasure that the Guardians might finally be on their side.

Elena sighed. “No,” she said. “A different vampire, a real one.”

“Don’t let this distract you,” Damon said quickly. His voice was flat, but there was urgency underneath it, and pain. “Jack’s the most important thing. For Stefan.”

“Damon…” she said, reaching for his hand.

There was a cracking noise like a gunshot, and the roof of the car suddenly dented in. Elena screamed as a figure leaped from the roof of the car, kicking in the window. Damon was outside in a flash, blue pieces of safety glass scattering everywhere.

Elena barely had time to draw a shocked breath when Damon ripped the back door of the car open and shoved in a struggling figure dressed in black. A vampire, she realized. One thin-fingered hand flailed out and caught Elena’s hair, dragging her head back against the seat. She shrieked as sharp pain shot through her scalp, and then again as Damon jerked the vampire’s arm back, long strands of Elena’s hair still dangling from its fingers.

“Don’t touch her!” Damon hissed, throwing himself on top of the other vampire and clamping one heavy hand on the back of its neck. Elena could feel Damon’s vicious satisfaction in the violence, his pleasure in being able to act, to win against an enemy again.