Be still my heart

"Stefan!" Caroline yelled as she continued to back away from not-as-inanimate-as-he-should-be Dead-Guy who watched her with filmy fish-eyes.

"Caroline," Stefan blurred back to her having noticed that she wasn't right behind him as she should have been. He came to an abrupt halt when he saw the zombie. Caroline glanced at him, able to note yet another new expression upon his face. She instantly dubbed the look of stunned surprise his wtf face. "What the fuck?" Stefan hissed (proving she had categorised correctly) staring at the corpse dragging itself forward pretty fast considering Dead-Guy was kind of mangled already.

"Yeah," Caroline nodded vigorously as they both began backing away. It wasn't fear motivating them so much as a profound sense of unreality; vampires, witches, and werewolves were all fine but zombies were a whole other category of weirdness even for Stefan. "We have zombies now." She told him with a brittle smile. "How come you didn't tell me there were zombies Stefan? Because, just saying, this so comes under the whole baby vamp instruction manual thing."

"A zombie?" Stefan was still hung up on that fact. "Caroline – I've never seen a zombie outside a Romero film."

"Oh," Caroline's heart sank because if the hundred and sixty-two year old didn't know about zombies that made the situation so much worse. "Well, hey! Now you have." She beamed tightly trying not to flinch as Mr. Dead-Guy started poking at the hole in his chest with scrabbling fingers. "So what do we do now Stefan?"

The resounding lack of an answer to her question from her mentor in all things undead was really, really not what Caroline had wanted to hear.


"Stefan, when you get this message – call me."

Huffing in frustration Elena threw her cell onto the dash as she started her car, glancing swiftly over to the passenger seat. Damon was slumped, head against the door's window glass, more asleep than awake. It had been an interesting experience trying to sneak him out around the back of her house and into her car without Jeremy or Aunt Jenna coming out to investigate. Waiting until Jenna had gone to bed had been a risky strategy and Elena was pretty sure she'd catch hell for it later, but right now she was just glad it had worked. She peeled out of the driveway and hit the road, all her senses keyed into the slightest shift or stirring from the passenger side.

The journey to the Salvatore boarding house was uneventful except for the wild pounding of Elena's heart and the furious whirl of her thoughts. Pulling up in front of the Salvatore house Elena wasn't sure what to feel when she saw the darkened exterior and not a single light on inside. It worried her that she couldn't get through to Stefan, especially as the two hour deadline was about up, but on the other hand, Elena knew how volatile the relationship between Stefan and Damon still was, and she wasn't sure what would happen if the two came face to face right now. Damon seemed calm – passive even - with her and she wanted to keep it that way.

"Damon, come on," dashing around the side of her car she opened the passenger door and coaxed the half-conscious vampire out. "Can you walk – here put your arm around my shoulders – that's it."

It was...strange, feeling Damon's arm around her shoulders, the sudden weight of his body leaning into hers, not too much, but still noticeable in that he was trusting her to help him. It was strange to put her arm around his waist and guide him up to his own front door. Damon's silence made the whole thing even more unnerving; glancing at his face from a few inches away she saw that he was concentrating completely on just holding himself up and putting one foot in front of the other. Elena knew Damon wasn't invincible, she knew he was as susceptible to hurt as Stefan was, but she still found it very odd to actually see Damon like this – needing her to help him walk.

Shoving through the (unlocked) door to the boarding house Elena slapped on the lights and readjusted her hold on the ailing vampire. "We're going upstairs, okay? Damon, answer me." She twisted into his body a little so she could grasp his chin and lift his head to meet her eyes. "I'll take you up to your room, okay Damon?"

Grey faced and soaked in sweat Damon forced his heavy-lidded eyes to focus on her. She saw him jerk his head in a slight nod, "...'kay."

"Okay," Elena repeated before pursing her lips and dragging him over to the stairs. "Grab the rail; you're too heavy for me to take all your weight. Good...okay, first step..."

To Elena the main stairs to the second floor of the house had never seemed so long. Damon did his best to lean on the rail and not her but with each step his wheezing grew worse and his shaking increased. When they finally reached the landing Damon slumped to his hands and knees, hacking black blood and coughing. Elena bit down on her lip and ran down the hallway to Damon's bedroom, flew over to his wash basin, grabbed a hand towel and soaked it in warm water. She dashed back into the corridor to see that Damon had scooted over to lean against the wall, clutching at his chest. His face was twisted in pain.

"Damon?" Dropping to her knees Elena mopped his face, wiping away the filthy blackish blood, the sweat, and the grime. "Damon it's okay. It's going to be okay."

Over and over Elena stroked his face with the wash cloth until it was too stained to use. Then she used her bare hands, sweeping his matted hair from his face, rubbing circles on his back as he choked and coughed some more. All the while she watched the pain flash across his face, watched him gasp for air, hands plucking at his ruined shirt, grasping his chest. "I'm here." She told him because there was nothing else she could give him. "I'm here."


Bonnie sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. She had a crick from poring over the old genealogy books and mementos of Bennetts' past. Glancing at the wall clock she was surprised by how late it was. Her dad was out of town, attending some convention for his job, and the house felt very empty. It was filled with that heavy emptiness that always used to creep her out back when the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of the foundations settling could still do that to Bonnie.

Dumping the old books and photo albums back into their boxes Bonnie left the boxes on the kitchen table and switched off the lights throughout the house as she made her way upstairs to bed. She hadn't found anything more on either Ambrose or Amelie in the boxes and that had left her annoyed. The cryptic message written on the back of the newspaper cutting combined with her strange dreams had definitely put her on edge. Unfortunately she was too tired to spend any more time poring over all the stuff in the rest of the boxes tonight. Tomorrow she'd try to find out if either Emily's son or daughter had left behind a grimoire – Grams kept the family spell books in a special chest still in the attic – and if that proved fruitless, well, then Bonnie figured she'd have to make a visit to the Salvatore boarding house. She wanted answers and she had the power of aneurism to help her get them after all.


"This is –wow – I didn't know the Council was into stuff like this." Alaric rubbed at the back of his neck, slouched in his easy chair and hoping that his general air of vacuous surprise came across as a little less brain dead than he currently felt. "Witches -that's – wow."

Sheriff Forbes gave him a humourless smile and sipped at the glass of scotch he'd poured for her, "But you knew about the vampires, because of your wife."

Alaric shrugged awkwardly. "It's one thing to believe in vampires after catching your wife being fed on, then to have her disappear, and make the leap that, yeah, vampires are real. It's another thing to just jump straight into the myths and legends closet with the rest of the evil fairy tales." He tried to smile but it didn't work out too well.

"I'm sorry. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to find out someone you love has become a sucker." Sheriff Forbes expression softened to something that might have been embarrassment or sympathy, perhaps a mixture of both. Alaric took a hasty swallow of his own drink, trying not to think about Caroline and the fact that not so long ago Sheriff Forbes had found out that her loved one was a 'sucker'. Sometimes his life was just too strange to dwell on. Alaric had already decided that the best option was just to go with it, and preferably, get drunk while doing so.

"So," Alaric roused himself trying to force his frazzled brain into action. "Damon called you tonight on an unknown number and told you he'd been –compromised – by a witch?"

Liz nodded hunched somewhat uncomfortably in the other armchair; the battered recliner Alaric had bought second hand at a yard sale a week after arriving in Mystic Falls. It was a disturbing shade of burnt pumpkin and the Sheriff, who always looked uneasy in her own skin, looked even more so sat in it. "If anyone else had called me with a story like that I'd never believe them but…"

"But it's Damon and somehow that's enough to fry out anyone's logic sensors." Alaric nodded. "Yeah I know how that goes." He sighed and raked a hand through his hair. "So witches in Mystic, huh? Who'd have guessed?"

Now Alaric wasn't a man who enjoyed lying, any more than he'd believed himself to be violent by design, but just like the violence he'd found he took to duplicity pretty well anyhow (he blamed Damon – hell, the guy deserved it).

"It seems a stretch at first," Liz agreed earnest and far too trusting under the circumstances, "but there's a pattern that tallies with what the Founders' knew about witches, especially when you consider that the Lasseter case isn't an isolated incident. There have been four other bodies turned up in a fifty mile radius of Mystic Falls – and all of them have been mutilated in some way. Add to that there are currently seven missing person cases open in Maudeville and you start to get a picture –and it's not pretty." Sheriff Forbes shook her head more intent and animated than Alaric had ever seen her. "When the Council watches for vampires these are the things we look out for too." Liz took another sip of her scotch becoming once again more contained in speech and action, "Different perpetrator this time, but a similar MO. These monsters don't tend to deviate much regardless of species."

"Right," Alaric tried to look attentive while secretly wondering how Bonnie would feel about being labelled as both a monster and simultaneously categorised in the same breath as the vampires. Not well, he imagined – and then a jolt of cold rippled his spine. Shit Bonnie. Was Damon trying to expose her? He'd tipped off the Sheriff to the possibility of witches in Mystic Falls –did that put Bonnie in danger? Why in hell would Damon do that?

"Look I'm willing to help, obviously," Alaric hedged when it became clear that simply nodding at the right intervals wasn't what the Sheriff was hoping for. "Damon," Alaric's lips pursed around the name slightly in annoyance, "was right about that – but I'm not sure what I can do. Witches aren't my area of expertise."

While he played along with the Sheriff Alaric tried to figure out what game Damon was playing. So far the only thing he could come up with was that the vampire was on the level. It made a crazy sort of sense if Damon's recent demented detour through memory lane had been due to a witch's spell. Of course that didn't explain why Damon would call the Sheriff, blow Alaric's cover, and potentially expose Bonnie as a witch. Still it was a piece of the puzzle and Alaric now knew that HIV blood was as ridiculous a cause as he had thought it was. So that was a plus.

"Mister Saltzman – Alaric," Sheriff Forbes began tapping the bottom of her glass with the palm of one hand, "I was sceptical as well. I didn't know if I could trust you, I still have my doubts, but Damon said the town was in danger from this witch. He believed you could help me protect this town…and no one has done more to protect Mystic Falls than Damon."

Alaric winced and immediately morphed the gesture into an earnest nod of agreement, all the while silently damning Damon Salvatore and his unholy ability to lie with complete conviction straight to the lowest circle of hell.


Bonnie was in the bathroom brushing her teeth when she heard something. Her head jerked up and she stared sightlessly at her reflection in the mirror as all the small hairs on the back of her neck and arms rose up on end. She froze, toothbrush still in her mouth, paste and foam covering her mouth. She strained her ears for any sounds. There it was. The scrape of a chair across the kitchen floor, the slithery ripple as the individual runners of the venetian blinds hanging in the breakfast room brushed together, as if disturbed by something – or someone.

Bonnie threw down her toothbrush and wiped off her face. She grabbed her cell phone from its charger by the bed and slipped through the doorway from her room to the upstairs hall. She didn't call out but peered over the stairwell down to the ground floor. There were no lights on and she hadn't heard a car pull in to the drive or the front door open, so it couldn't be her dad home early. Rubbing her arms Bonnie resisted a shiver; the temperature in the house had dropped a couple of degrees in moments and to Bonnie the air tasted coppery, like rust or…blood.

Taking a shallow breath she gripped the banister rail and descended the stairs, calling her power as she did so. She kept her cell clasped in her hand ready to dial 911 just in case the noise had been caused by something mundane like a regular, average-Joe home invader. Bonnie had no problem setting fire to a supernatural intruder but she'd have to change her strategy for a human.

"Ready or not," she breathed out under her breath, "here I come."


"Caroline – get the car," Stefan yelled as he played duck and weave with Mr. Dead-Guy. The zombie was nowhere near as fast as they were but after Stefan had vetoed Caroline's suggestion that they just run the hell away – saying that they couldn't leave because the zombie might attack the next car load of innocent people – they had started trying to figure out how to stop it. So far that wasn't going so well.

"The car? What good would...Oh!" Caroline blurred down the road to where she had parked her car some fifty feet or so away. Stefan football tackled Dead-Guy and slammed his already pretty mushy head into the asphalt a few times. Then he leapt up and started stamping on Dead-Guy's neck, trying to kick his head off, as they both agreed that worked well in the movies.

Caroline started the car, revving the engine. Up ahead in the glare of her headlights Stefan jumped back as the zombie tried to bite a chunk out of his leg. When Dead-Guy dragged his body upright his head hung down his back flopping against his shoulder-blades in complete contradiction to what a head should do. Dead-Guy's neck had split open to the bone and sinew; to Caroline it reminded her of what her favourite Ken doll had looked like after Bonnie had bitten the head off in a jealous rage when they were seven. She shuddered and then watched Stefan dart forward, grab for the corpse's neck and...rip off his head.

"Eww...Ewww - Gross."

Since being smothered by Elena's evil, five hundred year old lookalike, dying, and coming back vamped-out, Caroline had been shot in the head, tortured, and pretty much experienced the life of a character in an action movie. Still despite her new-found determination to no longer be 'girlie-girl Caroline' decapitation was still not nice to watch; at all - ever.

Decapitation was even worse when it didn't freaking work!

Dead-Guy, now without a head, wavered on the spot, a nub of spine protruding from the stump of his neck, but did not fall down. In the movies the zombies stopped when their heads came off. Not Dead-Guy apparently. Watching the headless corpse continue to advance on Stefan, who threw the head back at the corpse before turning to blur towards the car, was one of those sights that Caroline figured would stay with her for the rest of eternity.

"Drive Caroline," Stefan threw himself into the passenger side and Caroline squeezed her eyes closed and stepped down on the gas pedal. The car lurched forward. Caroline opened her eyes, tried not to think about what she was doing as she drove straight at the corpse and hoped to God her insurance covered zombie-related damages. Dead-Guy bounced over her hood, the roof of the car and flopped onto the road behind the still moving car.

"The barrier Caroline; reverse!"

"Shut up I know!" Caroline yelled back, slamming the car into reverse inches before the front bumper hit the invisible barrier. The bump, bump as the car ran over Dead-Guy made her stomach cramp. Stefan twisted around to stare out of the back window of the car.

"Again – Caroline; it's getting up again."


Elena wrung out a fresh wash cloth of excess water and left the bathroom annex. Damon's coughing fit had finished about fifteen minutes ago and he'd been able to walk himself into his room, where he'd then proceeded to strip down to his jockey's and crawl into bed, not even seeming to notice Elena trailing behind him. That had startled her, not that Damon would want out of his filthy clothes, or that he'd strip mostly naked in front of her (she'd seen him half dressed more than once already) but that'd he'd do all that without a single smirking comment or even the eye-thing.

If she hadn't known already that there was something seriously wrong with Damon Salvatore that right there would have been all the evidence she needed. The narcissistic dick she had become inexplicably fond of was nowhere in evidence. Elena had never imagined she could miss him so much.

"Damon," hitching herself up onto his ridiculously huge bed she tugged down the coverlet so she could see him. Damon had buried his face in his pillows and his knuckles were bloodless where he clutched at the white cotton of the pillowcase. He didn't respond to his name but she knew from the tension in the muscles of his shoulders that he was still awake. "Here," she said, "I brought you something to help with the fever. Turn around." She slapped the damp cloth against his head.

Slowly Damon lifted his head a half inch from the pillow so he could roll bloodshot eyes up to look at her while fumbling one handed for the wash cloth. "...You shouldn't be here..." he croaked through dry and cracked lips. "...Haven't you learned what happens to little girls...who try to play nursemaid to sick vampires?"

"You're being a dick," Elena sighed trying not to smile. "Good. I think that's a positive sign…kinda."

Damon flopped laboriously over onto his back, coughing a little as he did so. "I'm having...a really bad day."

"Yeah, I guessed." Elena shifted so she could sit cross-legged on his coverlet. She let her eyes explore his room as Damon swiped at the sweat beading his brow with the wash cloth. The only other time she'd been in his room for any extended length of time had not been under the best of circumstances, as Damon had so helpfully alluded to, but all the same Elena couldn't help being curious. His room was very different from Stefan's. It sort of reminded her of a showroom; there was something not very lived in about all the minimalist grandeur that made Elena vaguely sad.

"How do you feel?" She asked resisting the desire to reach out and touch his cheek. She couldn't explain why, but now Damon seemed more like himself she felt her barriers coming back up against him. Maybe because she could see that Damon's walls were back up behind his eyes as well.

"How do I feel?" He asked her incredulously still fussing with the wash cloth. "I feel like a witch has put a curse on me so she can drive me insane and use my awesome undead body to enact her fucked up revenge on anyone she feels like." Damon closed his eyes and pressed the crown of his head back into his pillows before forcing his chapped lips into an insincere smile. "What about you Elena? How are you doing?"


Bonnie had never been a fan of horror movies, not the ones that involved hot girls being incredibly stupid while axe-wielding nut-jobs chased said hot girls through their darkened houses in the middle of the night at any rate. Those had always rankled her feminist nerves. She'd always wondered why the girl didn't just get the hell out of her house or call the cops or do something, anything at all, instead of slowly creeping through the house looking for death.

Now she knew – it was a freaking instinct of idiocy, like a dormant lemming chromosome left over in the human genome. That was the only explanation for why Bonnie was presently living up to every bad horror movie cliché she'd ever known. Yet despite knowing she was being stupid she couldn't stop. This was her house damn it - and she was a kickass witch who could light fires with her mind. She was not so dumb bimbo victim and she would not hide in fear.

The shadows were all shades of grey to Bonnie, familiar furnishings taking on sinister dimensions as her eyeballs threatened to pop out of her sockets. She switched on every light in the house as she made her way through the rooms of the downstairs, but still the light didn't seem to illuminate. If anything it seemed like the electric lighting was just a flimsy veil hiding the true darkness that always lurked beneath. The house was so cold. The air seemed to tingle with an icy chill that reminded her of the static-y bite of a winter's day before a snow storm.

She could still smell blood.

Bonnie hesitated just before she reached the breakfast room. She didn't consciously stop but suddenly her feet had rooted themselves to the hallway carpet and her knees locked in place. If the house had been cold before, then the breeze coming from the breakfast room was positively arctic in comparison. Bonnie could feel the bone gnawing cold seeping through the open doorway into the hall. It almost seemed like she should be able to see frost forming, or her own breath puffing white and billowy. The innocuous buzz of the refrigerator was the only sound; Bonnie's hand clenched around her cell phone.

She really didn't want to enter that room. Yet she knew she had to.

She called up a specific number on her cell, breathing in lightly and quickly as she stood transfixed in her hallway. She listened to the sound of the phone ringing on the other end of the connection, imagined that connection like a lifeline, giving her the courage to walk forward and breach the threshold of the breakfast room doorway.

"…oh god…" Tears pricked her eyes, Bonnie's legs shook and she wavered, one hand reaching out to grab the doorframe. On the other end of the line the call connected, joltingly and a voice from a far happier place came through. Jeremy Gilbert's voice, prosaically sleepy and normal hummed through the line, an illusion of safety Bonnie was barely aware of even as it kept her upright.

"…Ugh…Bonnie…what…?"

Bonnie let the phone drop from her hand, clattering to the floor as her feet propelled her across the room to where the boxes of Bennett memorabilia she had previously packed away so carefully were now spread across the table in tattered strips, the contents flung across the room like the remnants of a tornado. There was a single clear space made on the table and someone (something?) had gouged a jagged message into the varnished wood a half inch deep.

He died to stop me – and he failed.

Punctuating that one taunting sentence was a squishy, purplish lump of meat. The scent of rust and blood that Bonnie had smelt throughout the unnaturally cold air was coming from that fleshy lump. Bonnie shook her head, wordlessly refuting what her eyes wanted her to see. It wasn't possible, wasn't possible; was not possible. Wasn't, wasn't, wasn't.

"…Bonnie…Bonnie are you there? What's wrong…Bonnie!" Jeremy's voice was tiny and distant, a voice from another place, another world, far away from this pocket of terror Bonnie was trapped in. She heard it but nothing could snap her attention from the...the thing on her table.

A heart - a human heart, ventricles severed, oozing, slimy. It was just sat there on the table where she ate her Froot Loops every morning. Bonnie's fingers twitched at her sides as she began to shake, power surging inside her as she fought not to scream. The cupboards and drawers began to shake, the blinds scraping together sandpaper rough and wild. The pepper shaker flew across the room and one of the old Bennett photo albums burst into flames. Bonnie didn't notice, not even when the sprinklers activated and the smoke detector started wailing.

Bonnie only had eyes for the human heart sitting on her breakfast table; the still beating human heart sitting on her breakfast table.