Every clock had twelve faces, twelve different power thresholds. At six o'clock, morning or night, a strong enough witch could extinguish the sun. Since the dark ages, no witch had been born with that much power. None until Bonnie Bennett.
The first night of Christmas break, Bonnie drove through Mystic Falls, tapping her fingers to a song on the radio. She loved music like she loved air. It was necessary. She spent too much time home alone, and a good playlist made life in an empty house bearable. Not that it mattered anymore. After almost being killed by a psycho vampire and losing her grams all in a matter of months, Bonnie was giving up. She had relatives in Faircreek, Georgia, a place far enough away from the miserable life she led in West Virginia.
A tear slid down her cheek. Her watery eyes shined in the light from the street lamps as she passed. She did not want to leave, but a dull aching in her chest made it impossible to stay. She was only seventeen. She didn't want to deal with death and all the things that went bump in the night. High school was hard enough.
Her phone buzzed in the passenger seat. Her best friends, Elena and Caroline, had been calling her. She situated her jacket over the phone so she wouldn't have to see it. They would find out about her leaving soon enough.
Leaving Mystic Falls wasn't a decision she took lightly. She'd been thinking about it ever since her Grams died. She'd mentioned it to her father in one of their weekly phone sessions, and he'd jumped on board without a moment's delay. His sister had two kids, ran her own businesses, and was pretty well off. He thought a life with them in Georgia was better than a life spent waiting for him to return from his endless business trips.
No one knew she was leaving in the middle of the night, and she did at least think about telling her friends, but it was too late for conversations, almost one in the morning. She wouldn't have survived saying goodbye to them anyway.
Something smacked against her windshield as she drove. She jammed on the breaks. Her body jerked forward, straining the seatbelt, and her breaths came in shallow and quick.
She'd hit another bird. It was the only explanation. She glanced out the back windshield at the empty road. The trees were still, and the moon was bright and full.
"No harm." She tried to laugh, but nothing came out. When she turned around in her seat, Damon Salvatore stood in the glare from her headlights.
She took in his dark hair, leather jacket, and scowling eyes. Then she floored the gas. Her car shot forward faster than she would have expected. The hybrid usually fought her when she tried to go faster than sixty. Despite the car's speed, Damon flashed out of her path twice as fast.
She could hear her heartbeat over the sound of the whispering engine, and she did not stop driving even as her tires left behind a trail of fire. The sight of the blaze in her side mirror didn't surprise her. Fire-starting was in her blood and fear turned her into a pyro.
No one could blame her. Damon had tried to kill her before, and she would not allow him the opportunity to try again. Her speedometer crept higher. She glanced in her rearview mirror as often as possible, looking for any sign of his pursuit.
For all intents and purposes, she was alone.
Four months ago, Bonnie woke up to the first day of her junior year. She was a cheerleader, on the yearbook staff, and she had the best friends anyone could hope for. Although eccentric, her grams had filled the spaces in her life her parents left behind, and Bonnie was happy. Then two gorgeous members of the undead strolled into the only place she had ever called home and destroyed everything.
Bonnie looked through a rack of postcards at a gas station outside of Charlotte. They were yellowed and collecting dust, but she selected one of a beach, white sands and perfect blue water. It looked like nothing she would find within a million miles of Hansom, North Carolina.
"How much for this?" Bonnie asked the salt-and-peppered man behind the Plexiglas window. The nametag on his plaid shirt said Hank. She grabbed a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses from beside a condom display. "These too?"
"Dollar for the card. Two for the glasses." His words were slower than the town's stoplights. She'd been stuck at one for almost five minutes before she decided to take the risk and run it. She wouldn't get to Faircreek by the following morning if it took ten hours to get through one backwater town in the middle of nowhere.
"Aren't you a little too young to be traveling on your own?" Hank asked.
Bonnie just shrugged and paid for the glasses, the postcard, and a full tank of gas.
"Where's the post office?" she asked, scribbling a quick message on the card.
I love you guys, but don't look for me.
Hank held up an unenthusiastic finger, pointing to the white-washed wooden sign above the window that said post office.
Bonnie smiled. "How convenient."
She mailed the postcard and grabbed the glasses, content that she had made her effort to say goodbye. Caroline and Elena would be fine without her. They had their lives. Would always have their lives. They were homecoming queens with faces men went to war over, literally for Elena. Bonnie couldn't have that in Mystic Falls. There she was, and would always be, a Bennett witch. Second best, but first to go to bat.
Things never end well for people like us.
As long as there was magic, there would be witches. They were nature's attempt at maintaining balance. But witches led to vampires, and vampires led to evil. Bonnie wanted a normal life with none of the above.
She slid on the sunglasses. The bell above the door rang when she pushed it open and walked out into the blinding sun. Endless green fields spread on either side of the road, and a baby blue Camaro idled behind Bonnie's Prius.
Swallowing, she stopped short, her swede moccasins paused on the sticky blacktop. She didn't see the owner of the Camaro, just the unoccupied car, but even that was enough to make her blood rocket like race cars.
She sprinted across the lot, searching her satchel for her keys. It didn't have to be Damon. She was miles away from West Virginia. Why would he have followed her? He'd gotten what he wanted from her at the expense of several innocent lives, and he'd made it more than obvious that she didn't matter to him.
Shaken but unwilling to leave the first service station she'd seen in miles without gas, she removed the cap from her tank and inserted the pump.
Biting her lip, she watched the ticker move slower than the cashier talked.
"Come on. Come on." She tapped her fingers at her side, wanting nothing more than to speed away from this place, leaving the familiar car behind, whether it belonged to Damon Salvatore or not. The ticker finally made it over five dollars and she swore.
"So the little witch has a patience problem," Damon spoke from behind her. She whipped around and almost ran into him. "Did no one ever tell you slow and steady wins the race?"
For a full breath, she forgot she had a tongue. Then she set her jaw and turned her attention back to the gas pump. Damon was blocking her door, and even if she did manage to get into the car, she couldn't just drive away without gas.
"I guess not," he said, "otherwise, you might have postponed this little road trip until you had someone to ride shotgun, protect you from all the sickos out there. The buddy system's not just for the kiddies, you know."
"Leave me alone." She watched the ticker like she was waiting for a slot machine to show her triple sevens.
Damon stepped closer, bumping her shoulder with his chest.
"I would love to do just that, but I can't. For the last few weeks, there has been this incessant rattling in my head that only goes away when I am within five feet of you. Then you decide to skip town, and my brain turns into an AM radio station. Nothing but static noise. You wouldn't happen to know why, would you?"
"Guilt," Bonnie growled, inching away from him. With the pump hose on her left, she couldn't move much. He reached out and brushed her hair behind her ear like she hadn't moved at all.
"That's almost funny enough to stop me from snapping your neck."
When his fingers brushed her cheek, heat flooded the pit of her stomach with hot lava. She felt the sparks behind her eyes, and then the gas pump and her car was on fire.
"Now, you've done it."
The eruption was nothing compared to the fear boiling in her throat. Gasoline plus fire equaled bad.
She didn't have time to scream. The ground disappeared from beneath her feet. She flew for all of a second before being dropped into the seat of the Camaro. The door slammed on her. She blinked and Damon was in the driver's seat. Then they were speeding away. Bonnie looked back in time to see her car explode, raining fiery shrapnel out of the perfect blue sky. The gas pumps went up next.
"What are you doing?" she asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. "Let me out, or I'll set this car on fire too."
"I don't doubt that, Match-striker. But it would be in your best interest to take a few deep breaths and calm down before you kill us both." He looked at her with pointed blue eyes. "We'll probably wind up on Mayberry's most-wanted list after your little exhibition back there. I know what you're thinking, that list is probably tragically small, and you'd be right. The hillbilly police should be preparing to organize as we speak."
She drowned in his words. The outside world sped by them at such drastic speeds that she couldn't keep up with it or him.
"Where are you taking me?"
"Back to Mystic Falls until we can figure out how to undo whatever you've done to me."
"I didn't do anything."
"You see, I do doubt that. Just ask the gas station you nuked back there. Bonnie Bennett, you have no control over your magic. That makes you a threat to small businesses, everyone you have ever loved, and most importantly me."
He pointed to his own face and flashed a dazzling, if not terrifying, smile. She could admit he was gorgeous, but so was the explosion they'd just left behind. Fire was beautiful until it burned.
She shifted to the edge of her seat and refused to move, not even to put on her seat belt, which was a bad idea with Damon going as fast as he was. She knew she was a threat. It was one of the reasons she'd decided to leave Mystic Falls behind. She didn't want her magic. It came with too much responsibility, too much loss. If her mother could run away, she figured she could too. Now, Damon was dragging her back for his own benefit, and she was not okay with that.
"I don't give a damn about you," she said through gritted teeth.
"What a coincidence." He glared at her long enough for her to become uncomfortable. He needed to watch the road, not her face. "I don't care about you either, but you know who does? Elena. She looked at me with the saddest brown eyes when I told her you skipped town. I have never seen her look so miserable."
Bonnie opened her mouth to speak, but he shushed her.
"Don't tell me you don't care because I know you do. You're practically an orphan. Abandoned by your mother, forced to put up with an absentee father, and we won't bring up what happened to your dearly departed grandmother."
"You happened to her," she said, hot anger spewing out in her words.
"No, no. Calm down. I can feel you burning a hole through that seat, and it's leather, vintage, and expensive to replace."
She could have reminded him that her car had just blown to pieces, which would be expensive to replace, but her thoughts were stupidly stuck on her friends. Damon was right. She cared that they were upset that she'd left. Other than her grams and sometimes her dad, they were the only family she had. Still, they weren't enough. She knew one day her magic would consume her. She would die as her grams did, a martyr trying to serve her purpose.
"This can't be about Elena," she said. "I'm trying to save myself."
A single tear rolled down her cheeks. She wiped it away quickly and pretended it never happened, but she saw Damon notice, and that fact made her want to blow something up all over again.
"Take it from someone who knows," he said, thankfully ignoring her tears, "Running solves nothing."
She admired the earnest with which he spoke, but she could not forget that she was talking to a devil.
"If I were you, I'd put on my seatbelt," he said, swerving into oncoming traffic to pass a big rig. "It might be entertaining to watch you go through the windshield, but I doubt it'd be much fun on your end."