"I don't know what road we're on.

I don't know what we're heading towards,

But I know my heart is all yours."

"I don't know what Nik has hidden in that last coffin, but whatever it is, it has to be something that can kill him."

Kol wasn't just stating the obvious right now; we were sitting in my room, trying to discuss any way we might know to open up the coffin. If it was a spell that even Bonnie couldn't do, there wasn't a lot of hope for us.

Not without the knowledge of an Original vampire who just so happened to be fascinated with magic.

"But I may have an idea that won't require that coffin to be opened," he said, which pulled my gaze away from the grimoire Bonnie had brought over. She and I agreed to read through as many as we could, with the help of Damon, to see if there was something we could find that we hadn't already tried. "I found a way to make the daggers work on Nik, by using a different type of magic called kemiya. It combines the power of magic with science, and it would require teaching you and Bonnie how to use it, but we could make the dagger golden, making it possible to use it on Nik."

My eyebrows rose. "Seriously? Is that all it takes?"

"It won't be easy," he disagreed. "It's going to take quite a few things that are hard to come by. I had them back before he daggered me the most recent time, which is actually why he daggered me—he found out that I was going to make a dagger to use against him."

"That's pretty hypocritical."

He snorted. "You're telling me. To make it worse, Elijah helped him do it, and Rebekah was the one who told him that I was still trying to get the diamond I needed to do it with."

"Why would they do that?" I asked. "They suffered from Klaus' abuse just like you."

"Elijah and Rebekah were favorites of Nik," he said, the corners of his eyes tightening as he sat down next to me on the bed. "Finn was his least favorite, which is why he never removed the dagger from his body after getting them, but I was the one who stood against him the most. I wasn't going to just sit back and take his abuse, especially after being excluded from the family the way that I was."

I remembered back to something he had told me on the way to the movies the other night, when I asked if there was ever a time he and his siblings were close. He had mentioned that there was a time, before their mother died, but then they excluded him from their promise to stand together, always and forever. Ever since then, everything he had done had been to earn their favor and attention, to try and be a part of that, but he never was.

They were all horrible to him when all he wanted was to be a family.

"So what do you need?" I asked. "Maybe these grimoires will mention something about it. Some of them have mentioned encountering your brother, spells witches have made to protect themselves from him."

He nodded. "I read those. I have the daggers, and for fun, I could make them all golden and able to be used on Nik alone, but to make just one gold, we would need something like the perfect paragon diamond I was able to find in the 1900's. It's being protected now by a man who would kill himself before he gave it to me, as he's fiercely loyal to my brother and hates me just as much."

My eyebrows rose. "Seriously? How is anyone loyal to your brother?"

"Marcellus was always more family than I was," he admitted. "Nik found him when he was a young boy, and he sort of raised him. He cared more about this boy he found than his own brother, so I hated Marcellus. I did horrible things to him, things I never even realized were horrible."

"You know, you should be careful with the conscience," I informed him. "It might make you shut off your humanity if you think too much about it."

"For all the wrongs I've done, there's too much right going on for me to even think about flipping that switch," he disagreed. "I don't dwell on it. What's done is done. I can't change the past, only try to do better in the future."

This was a conversation I wanted to explore, so with my index finger tucked inside the pages, I closed the grimoire for a moment and focused on Kol completely. "You know, you never did tell me what it was about me that made you want to be better."

"You're pure, in a way that isn't smothering," he said. "You don't go around making everyone feel like monsters for the bad things they've done. Every day, you wake up and try to make the world better than it was when you went to sleep, even if it's just the world around you."

"One person can't change the world," I said. "Even with forever."

"Maybe not," he agreed. "But all I can think about any time I feed from someone is that I want to do right by you, which leaves me able to keep them alive."

A smile pulled onto my face, but my eyes drifted back down to the grimoire, which I opened back up. This conversation could've been explored more, but what more did I need to ask? Kol wanted to be better, if for no one else but me. One day, he might want to be better for himself, but the sheer fact that he wanted to be better was enough for me.

"You must be thirsty," he said, and he stood from the edge of my bed, flipping the grimoire closed and tossing it over to the bed next to me. "Do you need anything else?"

I shook my head. "No. A drink sounds amazing."

He was gone in a second, though I imagined he slowed down when he got to the steps. Jeremy wasn't here right now. After leaving Bonnie's, he mentioned something about hanging out with some friends, but Alaric and Elena were downstairs, getting things ready for the first "family meal" we had had in . . . honestly, I didn't think we had all sat down together as family since our parents died. There was probably once or twice, but we hadn't even celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving as a family the year they died.

This year would be different. Our lives would finally start to carry on as normal, even in the face of all the death and loss we had all experienced thus far.

While Kol was gone, my eyes froze at the page I turned to, finding something unrelated in the words at the top.

It was hard to make a lot of it out, as the pages had been worn with age, but it mentioned something about a spell to stop a witch from taking magic from another. When Luka and his dad had come to town helping Elijah, he was able to take Bonnie's magic away from her, but this didn't seem like it was talking about that.

The word siphoning was in there, and that was the only word I had ever been able to find to describe what I did when I took the magic away from another source.

This spell looked to be some sort of elaborate lock, something that kept the magic and its source safe from this kind of magic, but when I flipped through more pages, allowing my eyes to briefly skim over each page, none of the others mentioned anything about it.

When Kol got back in there, holding a glass of cherry juice, it was hard to remember what I had found; he knew what I wanted, without ever actually telling him out-loud.

"You look surprised. Did you find something?"

I gave him a small smile as I took the cup from his hands, taking a large sip before using the finger I had bookmarking that page to pull it back open.

He saw what I was looking at and furrowed his eyebrows. "Is this talking about your kind of magic?"

I nodded. "At least all that I know about my magic. It's the first thing I've found that seems anything like what I do. I siphon the magic from my blood and use it for whatever spells I want within the limits of the magic in my blood. Maybe that's what kind of magic it is."

"That makes sense," he agreed. "Though I've never come across it before. I don't imagine that it's a type of magic that nature likes. Anything that throws off the balance in any way is considered an abomination or 'dark' magic."

"I don't get it," I said. "I'm probably the weakest witch in history because the only source of power I have comes from my blood, which is bound by human limitations."

"We need to get you an amulet, maybe have my blood put in it," he suggested. "That way, you always have something on you that allows you to use magic without taking it from yourself."

"That's not a bad idea."

"I can look through the grimoires that I have access to," he offered. "Most of them are farther away than I would like to travel, but I've stored a few throughout Mystic Falls over the centuries. I don't imagine any of them would mention what you are, but we can look at least."

I leaned back a bit, into his shoulder, and allowed my head to fall over onto his shoulder, in a simple kind of embrace that meant more than it should have. "Thank you. Look, I know you can't use magic anymore, but you know a lot about it, probably more than anyone here. Could you help me learn how to use it?"

"I don't know much about what you do," he said, and he took a deep breath. "If it really is as simple as siphoning magic before being able to do whatever spell you want to do, it shouldn't be hard to teach you. First, we have to find some sort of amulet for you to draw power from, a talisman maybe. I will look into that. I don't understand the ignorance is bliss mindset everyone has had. You absolutely should know how to protect yourself."

"But you will help me?" I asked, mostly for clarification.

"I will help you any way that I can," he agreed, his lips curling into a devious smile for a moment as I looked up at him. "It will be fun, being that close to magic again."

Being this close to him, with our faces so close to touching, it was all I could do to stay calm. All I could focus on was how soft his lips looked, how good they felt against mine, how amazing the smell of his cologne was after a full day of school.

All good things come to an end, however.

Something downstairs was going wrong, something that had Elena raising her voice at someone. Kol had been so focused on me, on our conversation, that he hadn't even realized someone was here, at least not enough that he felt obligated to say something.

"Who is it?" I asked.

His eyebrows furrowed. "Jeremy and Tyler."

"You should go," I said, and I began scrambling out of bed, my feet carrying me across the cold wood floors to my bedroom door as quickly as I could go without tripping over myself. "The less Tyler knows about you, the better."

We had been very careful to avoid him at school, and everyone agreed that Tyler didn't need to know that I had a boyfriend. There was no way to know how far being sired to Klaus went, so if Klaus asked him who he could use to get to me, if he knew I had a boyfriend . . . .

Klaus just didn't need to know about Kol at all.

With everyone downstairs, Kol had to step down quietly without using his vampire speed, but he was stepping like a vampire might. My human footsteps probably made up for the sound, since Tyler was the only one who would notice that Kol didn't make a sound.

The voices had gotten louder by the time we got downstairs, and sure enough, Tyler was sitting at the table looking irate while everyone else stood around him, their eyes widened.

Why was Tyler in the house? We had all agreed that no hybrids needed to be invited in, not while Klaus was trying to find Stefan and find ways to force us to tell him where the coffins were.

I think he knew that I knew, but he also knew that I couldn't be compelled to tell him, unlike Elena. If he could find a way to get to me specifically, I'm sure he was going to take it.

At the sight of Kol standing at the bottom of the stairs, everyone grew silent, with different expressions covering their faces. Elena looked dismayed, her attempt to remind me how dangerous this world was for him, while Alaric just looked indifferent. Jeremy's face was twisted in annoyance, but it didn't really seem to have anything to do with Kol. On the contrary, he actually seemed to like Kol.

Tyler's tightened eyes and pressed lips was the expression that had me moving Kol towards the door, away from everyone and closer to safety from Klaus.

He didn't say anything, only gave my hand a small squeeze before moving to open the door.

Jeremy stood from the table suddenly, while Kol was in the process of heading outside, but for whatever reason, he stopped. I was too focused on him to pay much attention to Jeremy, and Kol suddenly looked horrified, the lids of his eyes widening as he turned back to face me.

I folded my arms over my chest and stepped closer to Kol, who pulled his phone out and began typing on it. Whatever he had to say, it must've been something Tyler didn't need to hear, so I waited beside him, glancing over my shoulder at the people in the kitchen.

Jeremy was further into the kitchen than I could see, and Tyler seemed to be focused on something, maybe trying to listen to either Jeremy's phone conversation or any conversation between Kol and me. Since there was none, I didn't know what he was trying to hear.

Elena, however, was looking at the two of us with a furrowed brow and tightened eyes, her attempt to portray confusion at something going on. If I had to guess, it was probably the fact that Kol stopped halfway out the door.

Nik is the one on the phone with Jeremy! I couldn't make out everything, but I would recognize his voice anywhere.

My feet were moving away from Kol without thinking twice about it, as I needed to get into the kitchen. Kol had come back inside as well, and right now, I don't think either of us were concerned about the consequences of this.

Right now, all we needed to do was figure out why Klaus called Jeremy. How did he get Jeremy's number?

When I got in the kitchen, there was a strange, empty look clouding Jeremy's face, the face of someone who had just been told to do something without any reason why. All he knew was that his mind was telling him to do something that he couldn't say no to.

My eyes moved down towards his wrist, where the vervain bracelet Elena had gotten him usually rested, but it wasn't there.

"Who is this?" Tyler asked. "I know you're the new guy and all, but what are you doing here?"

"He's my partner in chemistry," I said, once again using partial truths to convincingly lie to a vampire. "He came over to get some notes he missed in class."

Tyler seemed convinced, enough that he didn't press it further and actually stood himself up from the table. "Well, this has been . . . not so fun, but I appreciate the food offer."

Alaric took a sip of his water and let out a scoff. "Some other time."

Things were a bit awkward as Tyler nodded, the uncomfortable aura in the room screaming about an unwanted guest. Of course I knew Tyler being in here wasn't something any of us wanted, but how had he gotten in here?

The empty look never left Jeremy's face, but I waited to bring it up until I heard the sound of the door closing to say anything about it.

"Something's wrong," I said. "Jeremy, where's your bracelet?"

He looked down at his wrist for a moment and then back up to me, his eyebrows furrowed. "I-I don't know."

Elena groaned. "That's why Tyler wanted to hang out with you. He was trying to get your bracelet. Who was that on the phone, Jeremy?"

Jeremy's jaw tightened, his eyes like daggers as he looked over at Elena. "Screw you. I'm out of here."

Kol surprised everyone when he took a step towards Jeremy, holding his hand out towards him to stop him from taking another step. "You need to hold on there, mate."

"Dude, get out of the way," Jeremy snapped. "I like you, and I'm glad you make my sister happy, but you have no idea what goes on in this town. If I were you, I'd get back where you came from as fast as you can."

My eyes widened. "Jeremy! What has gotten into you?"

"I have to get to work," he said, but the very words felt empty, like there was no real meaning behind him.

What had Klaus compelled him to do?

Kol had to let Jeremy go, as there was nothing he could do to erase whatever compulsion Klaus had him under. All he could do was watch and listen carefully, focusing on whatever Jeremy was doing as he slammed the door behind himself.

Elena's breaths became unsteady, her arms folding over her chest as she tried to get a grip on things. "Kol, you should probably go."

"Shit!"

None of us had any idea what he was talking about, but whatever it was had him turning on his heels and running towards the door, which I was quick to follow behind. Whatever it was definitely had something to do with Jeremy's compulsion, and I wasn't going to stand back and let him get himself killed.

Kol ripped the door open in time just for everyone else to get a full view of what he was hearing—the SUV roaring down the street towards Jeremy, who was just frozen in the middle of it.

"Jeremy, no!" I heard Elena screech behind me, but she had no way of making it to the door in time. I tried to get out the doorway, but at the sight of Kol disappearing from my side, my entire body froze in place.

The only thing I saw happening then was Jeremy's body go flying into the grass on the side of the road, just as the black SUV racing down the street crashed into Kol.

A/N: The lyrics are from the song Mixed Signals by Ruth B.

This is all I'm gonna have time for today, but I hope you guys enjoy it! Happy Thanksgiving! For those out there who don't celebrate Thanksgiving, happy Thursday!