Oaken rainbows danced over the ground as the raptor took flight, soaring high into the air and up into the clouds. It was night time and there were a few silver wisps of cotton, blotching out the sprinkle of stars that the silver-eye guarded. He was gliding over the forest of Mystic Falls, just behind the Salvatore manor, where a frantic Stefan Salvatore had just burst into the room, surprising his elder brother, Damon.

"Elena's gone!" He said in a panic. "Bonnie too! They're nowhere to be seen!"

The two brothers split up after that, but rather than follow Stefan out to check if she'd gone to the ball without him, Damon headed to the forest, looking around the alcove for the raptor. Suddenly the behemoth whistled and dropped down upon the crow in a steep dive, gazing at his horrified expression.

"Fledgeling?"

"There you are!" The sleek black crow cawed desperately. "You have to help me!"

The raptor had to circle around the crow once as he stopped in midair, flapping his large wings rapidly to keep him airborne. With a click of his beak, the raptor landed on a thick branch and folded in his wings. "Your mate has been taken by the no-wing?"

"Yes!" Cried the crow restlessly. "I need your help to find her! Please!"

The Wedge-Tailed Eagle remained calm, hoping that the crow would too settle. "Tell me what happened." He said. The crow quickly started reeling off what Stefan had told him – so quickly, in fact, that he had to tell him to speak slower.

"Have you checked at her nest?" He asked.

"Yes!"

"And she is not at her flock gathering?"

"No," squawked the bird. "My nest-mate is heading there now to check."

The raptor paused for a moment, then stared at him incredulously. "You're chirruping me that you've lost a member of your flock without even searching for her?"

"The arrangement between them was that he would fly with her to the gathering," explained the crow. "Have you seen anything strange at the no-wing nest we were guarding?"

The raptor left a meaningful pause. "Actually, I do believe I saw a female no-wing entering the nest. I didn't recognise her from the usual flock that I've seen there. She was being escorted by... A male no-wing with brown head feathers and dark body feathers. I recognise him from your flock. When I once saw him in your garden a few months ago, he had some kind of ring on his finger, but he's taken it off recently."

"Alaric!" Screeched the crow. "Alaric has Elena! I have to find them!"

Before he could do anything else, the crow had shot from the branch and headed into the sky towards the Mikaelson mansion. The raptor watched him leave, and then clicked his beak in satisfaction.

Perfect.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ x ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Elijah sat down on the sofa with a cup of mint herbal tea just as the doors burst open. Niklaus was enraged; he could see that by the mask stuck to his face. Rebekah looked nervous, her hands clasped in front of her belly.

"Where's Elena?" He demanded.

Elijah blinked a few times, glancing over towards Rebekah, and then towards his younger brother. "Excuse me?"

"Elena's gone, and so is the Bennett witch. I want answers. Where – are – they?"

There was a flicker of amusement in Rebekah's eyes, which meant that everything was still going as it should. Elijah stared incredulously at his half-brother and leaned forward slightly in his chair. "I took Kol to his concert and I've been back for, what..." He pointedly checked his watch. "An hour and a half now. Why would I know where they are?" Forcing an expression of concern, he added, "Is something wrong?"

"They've been kidnapped, Elijah," Rebekah informed him. "Niklaus went to check on them and found all of his hybrids unconscious. The house was on fire."

"And you'd think I would know where they are?" He repeated.

Niklaus glared at him with what seemed like an eternity. "We have to find them," he decided. "Without her I will not be able to make more hybrids."

Elijah could tell from the strained tone of his voice that he was seething. The oldest original quickly finished off his mint tea, which thankfully calmed him, and followed the two outside and into the driveway.

It was pitch black outside and the clouds were greying slightly, a warning of rain. Round stones clicked beneath his heels. It felt as though the wind was colder than usual, and while the weather couldn't really bother him, he still pulled his jacket off and draped it over his sister's bare shoulders. Niklaus paced around for a brief moment and then growled. "We should split up and look in places that she would go first."

Elijah glanced towards Rebekah once his back was turned. "I shall go to her house and search it more thoroughly. Find out if there are any signs of a struggle, and to see if anything is salvageable." He proposed. "If you ask the Salvatore brothers, then perhaps Rebekah can go back to the dance and check that you didn't just miss her?"

"No," Klaus sauntered up to him in an attempt to intimidate him. "We were there and she was not."

"I agree with Elijah," Rebekah thought out loud. "If he goes and checks the house, and we check the Salvatore brother's manor. I heard that they should also have been at the dance..."

"Which reminds me," Elijah added, mainly to Klaus, "When you checked her house, did you see Alaric? If he's there I'll need to be careful."

"He wasn't there," Rebekah said. "At least not when we checked. He is a teacher at the school though so maybe he went and we just didn't notice him."

"And Kol's at the concert," the eldest original's lip quirked slightly downwards. "He won't be back until morning."

There was a brief pause. Then Klaus ordered, "Elijah, check Elena's house. I'll go back to the dance. Look around the alley ways. Rebekah, have a little chat with Damon and Stefan Salvatore. Find out if they know."

Then, in a burst of speed, Klaus was gone.

Rebekah shot a pointed look towards Elijah and frowned. "Good luck, brother," she said, and raced off herself.

Elijah stood alone in the driveway for about a minute, staring out with a deadpan expression on his face. Everything was going so smoothly it was almost as if it were going too smoothly. It made him feel uneasy, but he knew that perhaps Klaus was just too distracted with the disappearance of Elena to notice anything else around him.

There was a rustle of leaves at the edge of the driveway. Elijah turned his head sharply, and came face to face with a crow, which stared at him in almost spite and distrust. He held the bird's stare for a moment, calmer than the ocean on a windless day, and headed for his car.

Crows were an omen of death.

Something bad was going to happen this night.

He could feel it.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ x ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Once at Elena's house, Elijah stepped through a mound of rubble carefully, listening to every creak and groan that the house made. If it decided to give up and collapse in on itself, obviously he didn't want to be in its way. He was searching for signs of a struggle, apparently, but something else even more important.

When he'd picked Elena up before, she'd not been wearing her necklace. Bonnie didn't hold the aroma of vervain and that concerned him, because that meant they could both have been compelled. From half-paying attention to them when they were in the car, he didn't recognise anything unusual about them. They acted as he'd suspected they would, but that was no way to prove they weren't being compelled.

He rushed up the stairs, balancing his weight out as much as he could, though he felt a slightly harder push against the torched staircase on his right leg. Elijah was right-handed and could kick harder with his right leg, and it felt natural to him. He was, despite his innate grace spanning over a thousand years, still a little bit clumsy with his left side.

When he finally reached Elena's room, it was, for the most part, burnt to the ground. However there was a lot of ash and cinder scattered across the room. His powerful nose wrinkled and he clenched his jaws, fighting his gagging reflexes.

Sometimes a heightened sense of smell was nice, but other times it was just a curse.

Now was one of those times.

"Are you looking for something, Chief Fire Officer?" Asked a man clad in heavy black fireproof clothing. The fire officer's boots crunched against the debris strewn about the floor and he approached.

Elijah had been forced to compel the leading officer at the scene to get inside the house peacefully. He'd given a false rank and name, making them believe that he was a trained veteran officer. He'd make them forget once he left but he needed to find Esther's necklace before he left. "Yes," he said distractedly, gazing at the remnants of a desk.

He compelled the fire fighter to help him find the vervain necklace, and he stuffed it in his pocket before it could burn his skin. He fled, managing to get to the forest again before he took the necklace out of his pocket, holding it loosely by the chain, and peered at it.

This had once belonged to the originator of the Bennett line. After that, Rebekah. Then it had been given to Elena by Stefan. Elijah had always thought it had been stolen and he had wanted to return it to his sister, but after everything that had happened...

Suddenly he paled, feeling disorientated and ill. The necklace glared up at him, reflecting in the light, and he stumbled slightly, shoving it into his pocket and then erupted into a coughing fit. The smoke must have entered my lungs, the original thought as he tried to settle his chest. It hadn't been blasting him in the face as if the fire were still raging but it had still been heavy and thick to inhale as he'd checked the underlying scents.

Once he'd calmed and wiped around his mouth he'd cleared the dust from his chest, he rushed back to his car and hid the precious necklace beneath his seat for later retrieval. He drove around until he reached a set of houses with bricks the hue of autumn, parking in from of one and flicking off his lights. He was near invisible now aside from the porcelain outline of the ebony SUV's chassis. Nobody would be able to see him.

So he picked up his phone from the passenger seat and brought it to his ear. "It's me. Pick up."

Click.

"Good evening, Elijah. I'm here." Said a masculine voice.

"Good evening to you also," replied Elijah casually. "I need to call on that favour you owe me..."

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ x ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Rebekah skidded to a halt at the edge of the ravine, gazing down at the back of the house. She'd been there for half an hour, waiting for one of the Salvatore brothers to get back, but so far she'd seen neither and taken to racing around the garden in her boredom. So far it just seemed like they'd holed themselves up for the night but she couldn't hear Stefan's obnoxious snoring or Damon whimpering the tendrils of a nightmare.

What she did hear was a near complete silence from within the house. There was a repeated clicking from the clocks, a gust of the aroma of whiskey from a bottle that had been left unscrewed and the faint odour of blood from their earlier feed.

But no Salvatore.

She had no intention of meeting up with them. She simply wanted to find out if all was normal at the household. Rebekah knew how frantic the two brothers got whenever their beloved "Elena" got in trouble. The fact that not even Damon, who she'd heard hadn't even planned going to the school dance, was not lingering around meant that they had no idea where she was either. Neither of the boys were home.

And that was all she cared about.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ x ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Caroline Forbes sat in the auditorium with Tyler Lockwood, her bright eyes positively beaming and stomach flipping about so much she felt like it was crashing against her lungs. So far they were just talking, completely oblivious to the chaos that was going on with Elena. The hall was empty and it the last day of the school term had ended with a spectacular bang!

Well, almost.

"It would definitely have been better if we'd brought fireworks," insisted Tyler, grinning wide. "What better way to end the night?"

"Uh, yeah," Caroline sneered joyfully, "If you wanted to blow out your eardrums. I might need them sometime soon, you know?"

"Hmm, I bet you do," Tyler raised an eyebrow at the heart-shaped face of the blonde. Her jaw was strong and curved for a woman of her age, and her eyes brimmed with a happiness that not many had nowadays. "But I still think it would have been a good idea."

Caroline rolled her eyes. "Boys love anything that explodes," she stated.

Tyler's grin grew. "We sure do," he teased.

Moments later there was a startling crash. Stefan Salvatore burst into the room. Caroline leapt to her feet. It was as if he was being chased by someone.

Scattered party poppers and ribbons sprayed across the floor and were crushed beneath the vampire's feet. "Have you seen Elena?" He demanded, wide-eyed.

Caroline felt her stomach do one final flip, and this time it crashed into her heart.