~Chapter One~
"We're all going to crash Ray's party this weekend. Hey, that'll get your mind off Yvan for a while!"
The sound of Kirs's voice playing in her head sounded a whole less encouraging and exciting as it had Wednesday over the phone. El was standing still as a statue, staring down at the pair of jeans and Rolling Stones t-shirt resting against the forest green comforter of her bedding in a particular manner, wondering if it was really worthwhile to crash a party she wasn't invited to in the first place. Ray Jones was the most popular girl in her grade, and El wrinkled her nose up in disgust as she tried to picture herself standing in a gorgeous mansion sticking out like a sore thumb.
Maybe mom will get me out of there, El thought to herself. Marianna Peterson, El's mother had been a famous Italian model back in the days that nobody but her Italian
relatives living in the country shaped as a boot knew about. America really had been a new switch for her, a brand new experience, and so far, she hated it. But overall, El had great friends and a wonderful boyfriend to say the least. If only,
El turned towards the mirror right behind her and almost screamed out loud. Someone was standing in the farthest and darkest corner of her bedroom, watching from the shadows. His skin was pale white, his hair black and completely straight. His eyes were also a charcoal black, twinkling with mystification as he stood there in all black. El whirled around, and stared beyond the foot of her bed, and found that she was just staring at a poster of the Rolling Stones, where it always had been. The man wasn't there anymore.
Scared shitless, El immediately turned towards her bedside table, where three books were stacked up, one on top of the other. Inching slowly towards the white table with the green beaded lamp atop, she slowly looked down into the cover of the novel on top.
The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith sat still, the pages wrinkled and the bookmark sticking out from the top of the book. El couldn't help but keep staring, staring at the curly letters that made up the title of the name as if something was going to pop out at her from below. What even terrified the poor girl even more was that lately, once she snapped the book closed and fell asleep, her dreams would take her back towards that mysterious and small town of Virginia. There, El would come face to face with the dangerous Damon and the heart-felt Stefan, who hated what he was. She'd see Bonnie behind closed eyelids, and the red haired druid would smile and wave at her and call her by her full name, Elena. Was it really that ironic that her name was the same as the main character's? But just currently, her imaginings had taken her on a different path, where Damon and Stefan would fight over her, teeth tearing away skin and blood pouring out from torn limbs. El had been so terrified that she couldn't watch or even jump in to stop the fight, and she always woke up with a sweaty forehead at three in the morning.
But who had she just saw in the corner of her very own bedroom just one second ago? Had it been Damon, and if it was, why was he here?
I just need to get my head in order, El thought to herself, shaking her head slowly and starting for her bedroom door. I need to just calm down. I might be home alone by myself, but there is no way…
Once she was finally alone in the bathroom across the hall from her room, she closed the door and turned the lock, making sure nobody could come in. El walked over to the sink and turned the hot water handle, and soon enough, steamy fog was hitting her face and she was throwing water in her eyes from her hands, bending over the counter.
That wasn't Damon Salvatore. He's a fictional vampire and they don't just come out of the books like that! El scrubbed furiously at her face with the palms of her hands, trying to get extra crud out of her long eyelashes. I was just seeing things, a vision. Maybe my eyes are playing a trick on me.
But when it came to Damon, nothing could have been what it really seemed. Damon Salvatore was the one she tended to dream up a lot, the one with the long, black hair and the Italian air to him that it turned El on. They truly had a lot in common, with their dark hair and their European background. His black eyes burned charcoal whenever he looked at her, that twinkling of amusement and hunger speaking in tongues that El could really never read. His eyes were probably the most beautiful feature on his face, those mysterious pits that you could just fall into and never come out.
What am I doing? El turned the water off, coughed, and shook her head again. What am I doing?! She picked her head up and stared into the reflection in the mirror, finding herself glaring behind long, dark bangs back at herself. I love Yvan, and Damon is not real. He's not real! She didn't want to go back into that obsessing stage, where all she could think of all day long was the older Salvatore brother and how someday, he'd come to her dreary town and save her from it. She'd be flying with him in the air as his beautiful crow's feathers shined bright rainbow colors in the dimness of the morning sky. If only they could just be together.
Something fell to the floor just down the hall, stopping El in her tracks immediately. She was still hunched over the marble counter of the bathroom, but now, as she looked at herself in the mirror, she found that her eyes were wide with fear. It can't be the dog, she's outside. El rotated her head slowly towards the bathroom door, still closed and still locked as it had been before. Maybe I was just hearing things. Nothing happened. El tried to reassure herself, although she had a strong feeling that someone had broken into her house when she was alone.
Slowly and ever so bravely, El reached towards the doorknob and turned it, hearing the loose click of the lock unlatching. Leisurely, El poked her head out into the empty hallway before her, and peered down the corridor towards her bedroom at the end. The noise had definitely come from there, because now, she could hear faint and low voices coming from just beyond that door.
***
The bedroom door opened with a creak, and once El walked into her bedroom, she found the scene to be extremely different from when she had left it just a few minutes ago. It startled her in her tracks.
First of all, the window was wide open, green curtains fluttering in the wind pouring in from the other side. It made even the room's temperature drop a little, and El narrowed her eyes at the window. She hadn't opened it at all today, for her parents were sure to turn the air conditioning on before they left her to be alone in her huge, mysterious house. Second of all, her clothing that she had left on the bed was in a different awry, the faded jeans lying neatly over the t-shirt she had laid out. Lastly, as El scoped the room a third time, she realized that her plush green carpet below her feet was covered in black crow's feathers by the open window.
"What the hell?" El seemed to ask herself as she walked into her abandoned bedroom. It looked like a bomb had been turned off in here, although her bedroom was always so messy along with the rest of her house. But having feathers flying into her open bedroom and landing all over the floor got her a little suspicious. While sauntering through her room, El turned to see what had fallen from its great height and smashed to the ground. It was the green lamp, the light bulb shards strewn all over the place. And right beside the green lamp shade was the fallen book, The Vampire Diaries by LJ Smith.
El couldn't help herself. "Hello?" She called in the room, walking over to her bedside table and picking up the remains of her elegant lamp. After placing the broken piece of lighting fixture upon her bedside table, she fell back towards the floor to pick up her book that was lying downward. She plucked it from her feathered floor and placed it back on top the rest. "Hello?" El called again.
As if it was some sort of greeting and not a horrified question, two large birds swooped through her bedroom window and circled close to the ceiling above El's head. She closed her eyes, yelping in fear, the sound of thousands of birds flapping above her head. "What is going on?!" She screamed to no one in particular as she bent down on her knees, visualizing where she had found the light bulb remains in her mind so she wouldn't land on one. She was trembling, her hands behind her head, her nose reaching towards her stomach. Idiot birds, she thought to herself. And then, all stopped.
She heard a scream from one of the birds and slowly picked her head up, rotating it towards her desk sitting against the farthest wall of her bedroom. Her eyes widened, feeling as if they were just going to pop right out of her skull at what she saw.
A crow, black as night, was watching her with those beady, black eyes. Its claws looked bloody from where El was still crouched on the floor, its beak dangerous. It landed just upon her American history textbook, its talons digging into the cover. El hadn't seen anything so beautiful and so wonderful and so…large. The crow was the biggest crow she had ever seen, and its feathers shone a bright rainbow underneath the dim lighting of her bedroom.
The other bird she saw through the clutter of her desk was a white hawk, also watching her, but not looking at her like some boys did at school. He wasn't watching her as if he was undressing her with its eyes or anything, not like the alluring crow was doing. But the hawk was almost as beautiful as the crow itself, although before El could stand up, the crow screeched again and flew towards her bed.
It landed on top of the jeans and its claws were piercing the fabric of the holes. El narrowed her eyes, and jumped up immediately from the floor, but not before tripping in front of her and scraping her knees on the light bulb glass.
The hawk stayed quiet, although the crow was still watching curiously, calling to her in a loud scream.
"Stupid bird!" El tried to hide the tears of pain from her eyes, for she could feel the blood tricking down her leg from the wound in her knee. She whipped her hand in the bird's direction, and it backed up towards the pillow at the end, jumping backward and dodging her angry strikes. "Stupid, stupid crow!"
El was fuming, extremely angry at what was happening. She couldn't get to the bird by just standing at the foot of her bed helplessly, so she crawled up onto the mattress, her bloody knee staining the comforter below and her eyes closed as she tried to reach again towards the bird, swiping at it.
"GET OUT!"
"Is that anyway you treat your guests, Elena?" A deep, alluring voice asked from in front of her, and El snapped her eyes open to see that a cold and pale hand had wrapped around her wrist, preventing her from punching at him.
The bird was gone; the bloody claws now black boots underneath her. Black pants, black sweater, black jacket, El realized as she widened her eyes and started from the bottom and made her way up towards the top. Black eyes, black hair.
The smile upon his face was full of amusement, his teeth both large and ever so white. His skin was pale as well, although set in his face was the most beautiful young man El had ever laid her eyes on.
But that didn't stop her, she was still livid.
"How do you know my name?" She asked, still with narrowed eyes as she stared into those mysterious ones below her.
"Who doesn't know your name? Now Elena, what kind of stupid question is that?" The boy asked, still smirking up at her with that greedy look to his eyes.
"I believe she prefers the name El," El heard another voice behind her, and she turned her head into the direction of the desk to see a similar looking boy sitting in her chair, twirling around and reading over her diary with piercing green eyes. My diary, El thought. No! No one reads my diary!
It was almost as if she had screamed it. El flew off her bed, and ran towards the boy in her desk chair.
"GET OUT OF THERE!" El screamed, trying to grab the green bound book from the stranger's hands. "THAT'S PERSONAL!"
The boy in the chair sighed, and looked up at El to hand her diary in it. As the frantic girl took the book in her trembling hands, the boy looked into her face.
"I didn't read it, don't worry."
"Your eyes were on the page; don't tell me you weren't reading it!" El screeched; feeling entirely violated. Now she felt as if all her most deepest, darkest secrets were just told to the whole world out of the mouth of some pale stranger who had turned from a hawk to a…a…El stopped in her tracks, and turned around towards the bed to see the young man with his eyebrows arched, his black eyes staring into El's blue green ones. What had happened?
She looked back at the boy in the chair before her, and he was still looking at her with such confusion in his leafy green eyes. Whipping her head back to the boy on the bed, she realized that he was now in possession of one of LJ Smith's novels, holding it up with one hand as one arm hid behind his head. He was reading it, the book leveled up high, and a smirk on his face. The young man felt El's gaze upon him, and he looked over at her, smiling.
"Interesting tale, must I say, Elena." The boy said, and El's throat closed up, feeling dry as a bone. She blinked her eyes once, twice, and a third time before realizing who was suddenly lounging in her bed.
Damon. Salvatore.
"NO!" She screamed in the utter silence of her bedroom, throwing her hands up to her eyes, squeezing them shut. "YOU DON'T EXIST, YOU DON'T EXIST!" Her hands were now trembling as she heard the sound of her creaky mattress rise up, but El still didn't raise her head.
"We don't exist?" Damon's smooth voice asked in front of her, and gently, he reached up to take her hands away from her face. She shuddered from his cold touch, but with the look upon his face, it reassured her in some way that made her want to lose her sanity.
"You don't exist!" El shouted into his face, and she turned her head to look over at the boy still sitting in the chair by the desk. "And neither do you, Stefan!" She turned her head back towards Damon in front of her again, glaring up into his face. "This is just some freaky dream that I've been having for a while now, and this is just the nightmare."
"A dream, you say?" Damon sounded unsure, and El watched him cautiously with both eyes widen as he released her wrists and bent down in front of her, balancing on one knee. El's eyes started to fill with mysteriousness when she watched him lean over to roll up part of her jean Capris, and it made her shudder on her feet as she felt a wave of exposure run through her when he found her bloody knee from behind the denim fabric.
He held her leg up lightly and gently before him before looking up at her with a serious look upon his face. "Did you fall earlier?" His tone was curious, but also sounding as if he already knew the answer to that. In his grip, he lightly brushed his cold thumb over the wound on El's knee, and she hissed slightly in pain.
"It was from the lamp you bastards destroyed when you broke into my room." El's voice was stern, but at a low volume, and she noticed Damon smirking up at her before he went back to examining her knee like a doctor examining a broken leg. El couldn't help but look down at him, many ideas running through her head on what he might do to her. Was he going to bite her? Was he just going to suck the life right out of her through that one little scratch? But with one small, 'hmm' from Damon, he leaned even farther in and finally rested his cold lips to the wound of El's knee.
El hissed again and closed her eyes as she trembled, awaiting the sting of his fangs. She even felt tears start in her shut eyes, but more of fear than ever of pain. How could this not be some dream? I'm sleeping in my own drool in my bed right now. This isn't happening. Even the reassuring voice in her head sounded stupid, because she could physically feel his lips pressed to her skin, and blood being sucked out. Suddenly realizing that the fangs hadn't been plunged into her skin just yet, she slowly opened her watery eyes, one after the other, and looked down at him, realizing, just after a few short moments, the stinging coming to an end. It was leaving a cold shiver to run through her leg and weaken her muscles, and when Damon pulled away about three minutes later, the pain was gone, and there were no traces of there ever being a cut or some kind of red bodily fluid there.
Damon wiped his mouth clean on the sleeve of his jacket, and El heard somewhat of a scoff behind her.
"Dear brother, I am most certainly surprised. You must have fed well earlier today, or else poor El would have been drained by you." Stefan was saying.
"That is most conclusively correct, brother, I have fed earlier today, but not as plentiful." Then he looked up at El from where he was still crouched on the floor, and slowly rose to his feet. "But this dear Elena's blood is very dissimilar to our Elena's blood back at home." He then looked back into El's eyes, taking her hands in his and he was speaking to her in a hushed tone. "Your blood is electrifying." It was almost as if it was their own private joke.
El felt her face heat up. Being fed on by a vampire was something that she never knew would happen to her, for she knew that vampires didn't exist in this world. But if Damon and Stefan Salvatore were really here, in her bedroom, smelling her own, pungent and energizing odor of her blood, were there other vampires out there as well that she didn't know of?
"Um, I…I…" El couldn't even find the words to say to that as she stared up into Damon's dark eyes. She could almost feel her shoulders giving out, her knees buckling down under her from just staring into that beautiful, cold stone face.
Damon broke the connection between them for just a second as he looked over El's shoulder to his brother at the desk. "There you have it, little brother; my poor maiden is speechless." El turned her head around on her shoulders to see that Stefan was looking extremely livid about the whole thing as he sat there with his arms crossed over his broad chest as his eyes glared holes into Damon's face.
"Such a strange deed for someone who has killed many in the past," Stefan said wryly, his face unchanging. "I don't particularly like what has happened before my eyes, and I soon realize that El should not be in your care."
"No?" Damon raised an eyebrow.
"Never, brother." Stefan was shaking his head. "Elena back at home was never the same when you arrived in Fell's Church."
"But this Elena is not like our Elena back at home." Damon placed a cold hand on El's shoulder, and El looked up at him with an expressionless glance to her face. But her eyes were reading, 'save me from Stefan! I love you, Damon!'
"El is the same, Damon, for El and Elena are both mortals of the human world. We are just monsters."
"Oh please, brother, cry me a river. Katherine never really enjoyed your company anyway." Damon rolled his eyes. El looked back at Stefan to see him looking even more livid than before.
"Katherine loved me, and I know that someone like her could never love something like you."
"Guys," El finally spoke up, but not loud enough to get the two brothers to cease their conversation. They continued about whom Katherine loved best, and who really was to blame for Elena's death. El couldn't take this anymore.
"SHUT UP!"
The brothers closed their mouths and turned to look at her. Stefan was rising from his chair, and El watched him stride over to her in long strides.
"El, please, for me. Don't bother listening to Damon, he'll only steer you wrong."
El looked into his pleading eyes, and couldn't help but feel sorry for him. Stefan had been in many a pain from what she had read in her books, and she broke the connection of her eyes with Damon's, a signal to be released. Damon did so.
"Stefan, I'm so sorry about what happened." El was saying. "Come, must we speak in private?" She tried to sound more like she had been in the renaissance period, but failed. Stefan nodded quickly, and El guided him over to her wide open window.
"Please, Stefan," She started, but Stefan interrupted.
"You cannot go trusting my brother, El. He is dangerous and he will find a way to kill you."
"I understand, Stefan, but truth is," She started walking towards him, which made him walk backwards, so far that he walked into the ledge of the window.
"Truth is what, El?"
El reached her hands out in front of her and placed them on Stefan's cool shoulders. She gave him a smile. "That I never really liked you much." With one hard shove, she pushed him clean through the open window, and she waited to hear the crash of him making impact on the land right outside her bedroom window.
"I dare say, that was pleasantly entertaining." El could hear faint applause added to that comment behind her, and she shut the window, slamming down the glass and making the pane shudder from impact. She turned around to see Damon standing there, smiling lightly at her, eyes hooded.
"Pleasantly?" El asked, for that's the exact word she was hoping to get from Damon. He laughed, the ringing sound a beautiful tone coming from him.
"You are a very interesting creature, I must say." Damon pointed out, and El walked over to the bedside to look down at the clothing she had laid out for the party that night. She suddenly frowned when she noticed that her jeans and Rolling Stones t-shirt had long claw marks poked through them, and there was no way that she was going to explain the incident to her mother.
"Aw, I must apologize, but you are a very frightening girl." El could hear Damon's voice just behind her, and she realized that he must have been looking over her shoulder at the messy remains of her clothing. "May I ask where you were heading this evening?"
El shrugged her shoulders, not looking over at him. "A stupid party I was going to go with my friends."
"Ah, a formal event?"
"Nah, just casual." El looked over her shoulder to see Damon starting for her closet on the other side of the room. "Where are you going?"
"You must not go like that," Damon nodded towards the clothing that El was currently wearing, her jean Capri's and plain green t-shirt. "A proper woman must wear proper clothing."
El looked down at her clothes. "What's wrong with my clothes?" Looking back up to hopefully gain a response, she noticed Damon standing a few feet away with one of her favorite blue skirts and her white blouse that she hadn't worn in years. She almost blushed.
"Damon, I…I don't know." He handed her the clothing.
"Please, Elena, change. I will be waiting outside." El watched Damon start for the doorway of her bedroom as El cradled the clothing in her arms. Before starting out the door though, Damon turned around.
"It will be my pleasure to accompany you to this event tonight, Elena." He said, and closed the door behind him.
