Stake Out

The spirits that Bonnie sensed in this town easily put all of her other experiences to shame. She had not thought about how tired she would be after finishing one mission, jumping right into another and hardly getting any sleep before meeting up with Tara... to sit in her car, doing surveillance. She could feel evil radiating from the house that Abby was sheltered inside of and she saw many hybrids on patrol outside of the building.

So, she supposed that during Klause's absence (as he had been bound and sealed away, much like his father, Micheal had), his followers were aligning themselves with another hybrid of sorts. How the hell did nature allow this to happen? There should have been no way to be a vampire and a witch at the same time, but with dark magic, things that never should have been sometimes were born. Hell, it was the story of the history of vampires. Her eyes fluttered a bit and she felt herself dozing off. But, within a few moments, she jumped awake and surprised that she could even sleep at a time like this.

"You've had a rough last few days. You can catch up on rest, if you need to. It certainly would do you no good if something happened and your ass is half conscious or dead tired," Tara complained, staring out of the window at the house.

"Girl, you know that I'll be fine. I'm shocked that I can even be at peace enough to sleep with all of the energy that I feel in Bon Temps," Bonnie admitted and bit her lip.

"Well, you know that you're safe, with me here. I'd never let anything happen to you, as long as I'm..." she almost said 'alive' but shivered at the fact that she knew that she was not and completed her thought, "with you."

"And as much as I appreciate that, you don't work for me, nor or you a pawn to me. You're a friend and I wouldn't ask you to sacrifice yourself for me. I've been that person before, and so have you." Bonnie yawned and reached for her glove compartment, knowing that she had some energy supplements in it; but, her car was hit by something, and it shook. "What the...?"

Tara said, "We've been spotted," as calmly as anything that she ever said.

"Damn it. Can you sense what it is? There's so much energy in this town that I won't be able to tell what's what unless I touch it." The car was hit again, hard.

"Tara said, "Right now, just bring it down and we'll figure out what the hell it is after you've exploded it's brain." Suddenly, a hairy fist punched through the top of the roof of the car and Bonnie gasped. "It's a hybrid in wolf form," Tara confirmed.

Bonnie reached her hand towards the creature and began to work her 'witchy juju' on it. They heard it howl in pain and its paw was retracted. Bonnie started the car up and said, "He'll call for reinforcements." Before she was able to finish the sentence, the car began being hit from several different sides and she lowered her head and raised both of her hands to mentally attack all of them.

Suddenly, Bonnie and Tara heard a loud POP and saw a hybrid crash into the windshield, dying – with its heart blown out of its chest. The sound was repeated several times until hybrids were running panicky from the vehicle. "There's a slayer involved," Tara observed as the monsters retreated. Bonnie's cell phone sounded and she looked at it, threw her head back against the seat and showed the phone to Tara. You can thank me later – some time after you explain to me why you didn't call on me for help. –Jeremy. "Where the hell is he?" Tara asked, glancing around the area, mostly at the tops of buildings. (None of them looked high enough for that human to have an advantage on the hybrids.) But, then again – Jeremy was probably the best slayer that Tara had ever met.

Bonnie was busy calling him, now. He let her call go to his voicemail and she left a message, "Look – I don't know how much info you have on this particular situation, but call me as soon as you can. If you've been called in to terminate the vampire witch, please hold off. It's Abby." Her voice cracked, just a bit as she confessed to the mailbox.

"We're going to have to get the hell out of here," Bonnie complained. "This is shit, Tara. The fact that those hybrids came after us means that Abby's not only powerful enough to detect my concealing spell, but she's also powerful enough to penetrate it."

"There's something that I'm more bothered by, here. That's whether or not she realizes it's you out here. If she does... All bets are off, Bonnie. She'll have to be put down." Bonnie began driving back to her motel when her phone rang and she answered the hands free.

"Jeremy..."

"Where are you headed, now?" He asked, annoyed.

"I'm going to regroup. I know you weren't blindly firing, so you must have seen what the hell just happened to my car. It's bad enough that I've been detected, but now we're exposed in this vehicle, full of monster holes."

"Couldn't you just put up a barrier around it?" He asked.

Ignoring his question, she said, "I need to see you. We have to come together and touch base. I want to know who sent you and all of the info that you have on Abby's current situation."

"You wouldn't like it if I told you who sent me," he said in a mock warning tone.

"I didn't say I want to like it. I said I want to know."

"I'll get back to you on that."

"Jeremy..."

"Tell Tara I said hi." He hung up and Bonnie groaned.

"Did you ever explain to me why the two of you never made up?"

"We bring out the worse in each other."

"By always risking your lives for one another and neither wanting to admit it's done for love. I understand."

"I've knocked him out to keep him safe, when all he wanted to do was lend a hand and fight for what was right. He's rushed into an impossibly dangerous situation to keep me from overexerting myself to death. I grow him special herbs to keep that ring from making him crazy. He sneaks into my missions, obviously well informed and kills whoever attacks me."

"He still loves you," Tara said.

"I don't ever remember hearing him ever say that he did love me."

"You just told me that you heard him loud and clear. Look – some of us have a hard time expressing our feelings. He lost his parents, lost his sister's heart to vampires, lost every girl that he loved..."

"Actually, he threw one away," Bonnie commented.

"Thought you said he didn't love you," Tara teased. Bonnie simply frowned, but Tara continued, "This is what we know for certain: you didn't want to call him in, because you knew that this mission would be dangerous, but he came into a dangerous mission (probably to handle it in the exact opposite way that you're going to try to handle it) and he still saved you when he saw you being attacked." Bonnie stopped the car at the motel and pursed her lips together.

When Tara looked up, she saw Jeremy, leaning against the door of Bonnie's motel room. The two women got out of the car and the slayer, dressed in all black and looking damned fine, Tara thought to herself, despite their age difference, said, "You are like the slowest driving witch I have ever seen. You should ride a broom. In speaking of which – I've come to realize something about Harry Potter. The reason that they ride brooms is because witches and wizards can use the elements to draw power. They can control the wind... So, you could ride a broom, if you really wanted to."

Bonnie jerked Jeremy by the collar of his jacket and pulled him into the room, while Tara folded her arms and leaned against the door. I think I'll wait until the customary pissing contest has run its course. "Who sent you after my mother?" Bonnie asked.

"What makes you think that I was sent. Maybe I heard that she was able to tap into some of the most evil available and I decided that I couldn't sleep with it on my conscience."

"You didn't. Abby has hybrids at her disposal. What do you know about that?"

"I know that they aren't any of Tyler's. I'm guessing they're from the old regime. That's why I didn't have any qualms about taking them down."

"What does Tyler have to say about all of this?"

"Of course, he wants to keep peace between hybrids, vampires and werewolves, but not at the cost of humanity's genocide."

"Abby is not after the destruction of humans. If she wants to destroy anyone, I would presume it would be the vampires."

"You presume correct. But, do you know what happens when vampires are targeted? They have to scourge. They have to try not to be noticed and basically get back into the coffin. That makes their level of dangerousness to humans peak. Abby's getting into something that she will not be able to control. She has to be stopped."

"I can stop her," Bonnie said.

"I wish that I could believe that, Bon. I waited for you to make it into town and I watched you – to see what route you would take. I followed you to your stake out and I saw you get attacked by Abby's goons. She's not going to be susceptible to your power and she's not going to allow any emotion that she may have had once upon a time for her daughter affect her course of action."

"Jeremy..."

"Bonnie – I wasn't willing to watch you get yourself killed when we were together, and I'm not about to do it now. I wanted to believe that your mother is still inside of that monster, somewhere. The attack on you today proved to me that it was wishful thinking on both of our parts and I can't let you interfere and mess up what needs to be done. Neither can I let you get yourself killed trying to prevent it. You think nature wants something like her here?"

"Nature doesn't want you here either, Jeremy," Bonnie reminded him, with damp eyes.

"No, it doesn't," he said, "But, at least I'm trying to prove myself. Abby is trying to get revenge and going against everything pure to do it." The gentle tears began to fall down Bonnie's cheeks and for a moment, she could have sworn that she saw Jeremy wince at the sight of them. But, he cleared his throat, straightened his demeanor and handed her a towel from the top of the sink. "It's understandable that you love her, no matter what she's done to hurt you." (He sounded a little bitter, and Bonnie couldn't shake that his bitterness was directed towards her, not Abby) "But, just because you love somebody and you know what's best for them doesn't mean that you can always give that to them."

Bonnie wiped her face as he continued to talk, a touch more gingerly, now, "When you brought me back from the dead, you lost contact with some of nature's best source of power, power that you could have possibly used today for the work that you're doing. Don't get yourself into trouble with nature and the spirits for love again."

"Because we all know how well it turned out for me last time," she joked.

"Precisely," he snapped and snatched the towel from her hands as he turned red in the face. "So, I guess that I can trust you to stay away from this."

"Abby may never care about me or be a mother to me, but she is my mother. I am who I am because of her and I will do everything to protect her. I love her and to me, that means unconditionally. I risked allowing the originals to continue to exist in order to keep you from dying again after you broke my heart as a form of payment for me bringing you back to life. And if something happens today that endangers you, I'm going to ignore the fact that you told me to let you kill my mother and I'm going to try to protect you. That's how love works. You don't do it for yourself."

Jeremy balled his fists up at the fact that she had thrown all of these things in his face and stirred up some issues that he wished to God he could forget and move past, and he said through his teeth, "I know how love works, Bonnie."

"Good, then I trust you to know that none of your argument on Alaric's behalf will be taken into consideration."

"I am not here for anybody but you, Bonnie," he said, almost desperately. He threw the towel onto the sink and leaned against it. "Tyler asked me to come, because he'd caught wind of the hybrid involvement. Alaric asked me to come and told me every single detail that he knew of. I told both of them 'no.' I told them that I couldn't do to you the very thing that Damon did, the thing that I think truly marked the beginning of your separation from the gang, from Elena. I know that if you even eventually turned on Elena because of your love of Abby that you would never even glance my way again if I hurt her. I mean, you've just made it abundantly clear that you have no reason whatsoever to want me in your life..."

"You are in my life," she snarled.

"Because I force my way in!" He finally yelled. Tara chuckled outside and shook her head. She had been guessing that he would be the first to begin the screaming match, although she had presumed that it would begin sooner. He tried to lower his voice, but it sounded like yelling, with a lower volume. "I was stupid, Bonnie. Alaric has reminded me on multiple occasions that I messed up. I've apologized to you, asked you to forgive me, begged you to judge me based upon what I do now, not a mistake that I made as a teenage boy. You just confessed that even though you promised to do that, you still handle me like the boy that cheated on you in high school. You still don't trust me."

"The only reason that you wanted me to forgive you was because you discovered that Anna had found her mother on the other side and didn't have any reason to try to reach out to you anymore. Why would I want to continuously be the backup plan? I got sick of doing it for Elena, Damon and Stefan, and I'm not about to do it for you. I never ask you to show up and bail me out, and I never would. So, don't expect me to feel obligated to owe you anything. You may look at me like I'm beautiful today, but we both know that it's because some part of you thinks you just can't do any better."

"I know that I can't do any better. There is no one better, Bonnie..."

She fumed through her nostrils and said, "So, Alaric didn't send you. That means that he's either going to come himself, or he'll send someone else." Jeremy wiped his entire face with his palm in annoyance that she'd cut off their conversation, but nodded his head with her in agreement.

Tara knocked gently on the door and stepped inside, looking truly sad for Jeremy. "I don't think he'll come himself. I think that he's gonna try to contact someone whose already attached to the place." She handed her phone to Bonnie and Bonnie read the text. Tara, I know that you love Bonnie and want to protect her. I do too. She doesn't understand the danger Abby poses. Please call me as soon as you can. Abby must be stopped, for all of our sakes.