Chapter 20: Beautiful Destruction
DAMON
I'm most of the way down our quarter mile of driveway before my mind catches up to my legs and I realize I don't have my car keys and also I don't know where I'm going. I take a blurring step, hauling off with a punch to a tree thick enough to be older than I am. The wood cracks, the whole thing quivering, but doesn't come down.
The front door slams and Elena comes storming up the driveway toward me. "Oh no," she vows. "You don't just get to stomp out on me."
"Of course not. Why would any being on this earth ever think I deserved one second of a fucking break?"
"Oh, you want a break?" she asks, her eyes sparking dangerously like they do when she's about to do something DEFCON Three Dumb.
"What are you going to do, dump me like your high school boyfriend?" I taunt, rage vibrating through my ears until I almost can't hear my own words. "Go ahead, Elena. Go right ahead and break up with me twice a week when you're in a snit just like you did to my brother."
She blinks in shock, her mouth falling open. We never talk about her and Stefan. It's a silent agreement even though it's practically chiseled in stone, but today, I couldn't give the slightest hint of a damn.
I prowl toward her, my shoulders bunched and rippling with deadly muscle that's screaming to be put to use.
"You do whatever crazy shit you're going to do, and I'll be a nice guy and even let you pretend it's justified." I throw my hands up, waving them mockingly even as my eyes flare and burn into hers. "Ooh, Damon cheated on me. He's running around playing Spin the Bottle with other girls!" I drop the falsetto, letting rage vibrate into my voice, and she takes a step back. "When you know damned good and well I'm more committed to you than any husband has ever been to a wife."
Her brows furrow, confused by the harshness of my tone, and I take another step but this time she holds her ground as I seethe my next words right into her face.
"It doesn't matter who I kiss, and you know it and you thrive on it, because that's the one thing you never have to question. But you only acknowledge it when it suits you." The last word is cutting sharp and I whirl away from her before I have to see her face fall and then torque into a fury to match my own because I don't care anymore.
All caring has gotten me is a girl who makes me crazy, a to-do list about seven years long and a drinking habit that's starting to run up a bill that raises even my eyebrows. Not to mention a houseful of packed guest rooms whose sheets nobody thinks to wash but me.
Well, fuck sheets.
I'm out of here and I'll sleep on the goddamn ground in whatever country I end up in tonight.
Something clamps onto my upper arm and spins me back around and the next thing I feel is the bark of a tree slamming all the breath out of my lungs and Elena's teeth against my lips.
Her tongue scorches mine even as she pulls my hair, her fingernails scoring my scalp and her breasts challenging my chest. I grab her by the waist and lift her clear off the ground, not sure if I mean to bring her closer or toss her away and she moans deep in her throat at the friction of my body against hers, my hands hard on the curve just below her ribcage. My heart kicks viciously as her taut thighs clench around my hips, trusting me with all her weight, and then I can't let her go.
I turn and press her to the tree, giving her space to wrap her legs all the way around me even as I'm careful not to scrape her soft skin on the bark. She whimpers and I soothe her lips with a patience she doesn't have yet, nuzzling the skin we bruised with our enthusiasm even as it heals, teasing the very tip of her tongue back to mine as I cup her cheeks, hiding her face in my hands, letting my fingertips soak in the silk of her hair.
My thumbs adore the line of her cheekbones and my frustration bleeds into the matching lines of her flat stomach against mine, her breasts crushed against my ribs, her beautiful arms squeezing me closer as she tilts her head to taste me, breathless and half-panting as she goes after more. I groan and my hips surge helplessly forward, pinning her even more securely to the tree.
She laughs, the sound bright and soft, and her fingernails rake playfully through my hair, cradling the back of my neck as she abandons my mouth to plant teasing, close-mouthed kisses all over my face. My hands fall to her shoulders and I stroke down her sides, cupping her bottom even as she gives me one last squeeze with her thighs and unwinds her legs, forcing me to lower her back onto her feet.
She pulls back, smiling up at me, and I blink hazily and adjust my belt that's suddenly pinching in all the wrong places.
"Um..." I manage, and I feel almost too light to bother trying to sort out what just happened.
Her eyes darken slightly and she leans forward to leave a kiss on my chest, centered right over the first closed button on my shirt. It's what she normally does before she undresses me, and my heart jumps in recognition. I'm all for having her right here in the driveway, though there's a small part of me that recognizes there's an objection to this of some kind. Somewhere. From someone who is definitely not me.
"I'm the only one who gets to do that to you," she whispers fiercely. "Got it?"
I nod, because I think that's what she expects, though I can't imagine how it is relevant. There's not a girl in a thousand who kisses like that, and not one in ten thousand who could make me go from homicidal to brain-scramblingly aroused in less time than it takes to flip a coin.
She skims her thumbs over my cheeks, looking at me like it's the first time she's seen me in a long, long time. And then she lets go and takes a step back. Her nipples are still pebbled hard against the thin fabric of her Henley, but her face is serious now.
"I know you might want to feed from girls," she says. "Maybe not just blood bags all the time. But I don't want you to touch them like you do me," she says, hurt pooling in her eyes that makes me want to rip my own fucking heart out for putting it there. She shakes her head slowly, her hair still mussed from my hands. "I don't want you to kiss them, Damon."
"I didn't kiss her like that," I say, gesturing at the tree we were just working up into a triple X rating.
She shrugs, and then just lets her shoulders fall. "It doesn't matter. Look, if you found out somebody else kissed me, they'd be dead. And not metaphorically dead but internal-organs-in-another-zip-code dead."
The skin under my eyes prickles and I don't argue, busy keeping my fangs from voting their agreement.
"You're–" she starts, taking a step closer and laying her hand on my chest. "We're–" She swallows, ducking her chin, and then the words spill out all at once. "We're going to live a long time and I know you might get tired of me or we might get bored at some point but I don't–" her voice falters and comes back stronger, a threat vibrating underneath that makes the predator in me wake with eager approval. "I don't want to share you," she asserts, her hand pressing harder against me. "And I won't."
The corner of my mouth kicks up even though I know it will probably piss her off, and I pull her into my chest so she won't see it, resting my chin on top of her head.
"Well, shit," I say. "There goes my Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders fantasy."
She tries to punch me in the stomach, but with her hands trapped between us it doesn't have much force. I tighten my arms around her and she gives up, letting her hands creep around my waist and hanging onto the back of my belt as if that will give her a better grip on me.
"I'm all the cheerleader you need," she informs me, and I don't even consider disagreeing.
I close my eyes, and for a moment I don't hear the rustle of the leaves, or the faint voices coming from the house, or the cars on the road at the end of the winding driveway. I just listen to Elena's heartbeat, slowing down at exactly the same rate as mine, and I think if she were just a little taller, the pump of blood would swell against our skin at exactly the same place, pressing together like a whole new kind of embrace.
The fact that all our blood is borrowed just makes the moment more bittersweet. I like to think one hundred and forty-seven years of diluting my own means my father is no longer part of me. But I still want to believe Elena is new enough that a little of me still warms her veins.
"Damon?" she asks, in a small voice muffled by my shirt and her ferocious grip on me.
"Mmm?" I answer her, freeing a hand to begin to smooth the tangles I fumbled into her hair.
"Why did you?" she says, the words so plain that the anger stirring in my belly folds before it gets any momentum.
She pulls back and looks up at me, her eyes clear.
"I mean, I never really thought...but it just doesn't make any sense." She shoves a strand of hair impatiently out of her face and something in my chest hurts roughly because she's young and everyone always loves her best and she doesn't know what it's like to absolutely adore someone and have them reach for another man right in front of you. Or after they've compelled you back to your own room like a servant whose services they no longer required.
I smooth the bit of hair back to the right side of her part and allow myself a second to take a firm hold on my temper because I don't ever want her to know what that's like.
"I didn't want her to die," I finally murmur. "And the test wouldn't have worked on Stefan with someone who did, but..." I swallow and rest the point of my chin against her head again and she obliges me, tightening her arms around my waist.
"I know," she says quietly, and relief makes me hold her a little harder than I should, because I have no idea how to put into words what I actually meant, and now I don't have to.
A noise catches my attention and I focus back in the direction of the house. Something like coughing, or maybe choking, and then a tiny squeak of distress.
Elena stiffens, because she heard it, too.
"Damon, what was–?"
But I'm already running.
STEFAN
The door slams as Damon storms out and I pick myself up off the floor, shrugging off Elena's worried questions as I turn the Taser over in my hands, checking for damage. But once I'm standing, I can't quite decide what to do next, the thoughts tangling inside my head, words lost behind my lips.
It's so hard to focus. When I got out, blood was the only thing that made me feel better, but now I almost feel too much better. After the liquid silence of the quarry, the world is a sensory cacophony, human blood its amplifier. The touch of my clothes against my skin goes from sensual to irritating to distracting and back to sensual again before I can even begin to react. I can hear everything: Jeremy constantly chewing or digesting or banging dishes in the kitchen, Elena and Damon kissing half a house away from me, Ric sighing in his room, though over what I don't know.
The rush of the blood and the unmanageable tumble of sensations have been taking up every bit of my mind and sometimes I can barely manage to focus enough to speak when people talk to me. Right now, it's all I can do to sort out what just happened.
Elena huffs out an incredulous breath and shakes her head, following Damon out the door with her hands balled into fists.
Cali looks after them, her bourbon forgotten in her hand and her eyebrows raised in a slightly baffled look of surprise.
I don't mind her distraction, because I can't stop looking at her. Her name is nearly a phonetic match for the Hindu goddess Kali, and I can't imagine anything more appropriate. Beauty and destruction, and in her, they're one and the same.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about her since I fed from her. When she appeared today, I felt like I was finally going crazy, but she's real and fragile and here, and no matter how supernaturally perfect my vision is, I can't discern what makes her so intoxicating.
Her blood that night was like poetry, sounds and satisfaction and significance singing down my throat and I knew, I knew I couldn't drink for more than a second or I'd never stop.
Damon chose her for me, and then he left me alone with her. Because he knew. He always knows exactly what will hurt me most, goddamn him, and there must still be a part of him that's thirsty to dole out that eternity of misery because sometimes he can be so exquisitely cruel. And absolutely relentless.
Every night he shows up in my room again with a patronizing smirk and his jacket already on, pushing me to go out whether I want to or not, saying that I wanted to have fun, not sit around writing in my diary and doing my hair like a little girl. There's not a single night when I don't feel like punching him at least once. Even so, it's been nice to have him to myself again. To go out drinking without Elena there drawing his attention away, smiling at him with joy in her eyes that wilts to apology when she looks at me, her slow vampire heartbeat taunting me with the fact that I failed her in every way.
And God, to really feed again. It's been almost relaxing with Damon there. For the first time ever I could drink from humans without fighting myself every second or drowning in the desperate rush of my failure. I could just let go and love it because I knew he was strong enough to stop me. For a few short days I didn't have to struggle. And it was glorious.
Cali makes a dismissive sound and turns back to her drink, but then she catches me staring, and still I can't stop. I offer her the Taser and she swipes it from me without looking away.
She tilts her head, those almond-shaped eyes shrewd and thoughtful on my face. The ring in her lip tilts a little, like she's poking at it with her tongue. I don't like the idea that her soft flesh is pierced, scarred forever with a hole that's stopped trying to heal. I want to take the ring out and give her my blood, let part of me fix this part of her that's not quite whole.
She's the first person I've both wounded and healed.
Damon told me once, when he was so drunk that some of his words slipped into other languages, that murder was an act of ultimate power. To know you could decide for the universe whether a person would continue to exist or not. I never understood that, because to me, killing was just something that happened.
I only wanted the blood, every tiny last bit of it. When I couldn't suck it out of veins anymore, I would tear the bodies apart looking for the last smear I could steal onto my greedy tongue.
I never felt powerful. Even with scavenged blood strengthening every inch of my unnatural body I didn't feel like I had power over anything in my life.
But with Cali…she wouldn't be here if it weren't for me. I chose to bite her, chose to let her go, chose to give her a piece of me to keep her going and make her strong and healthy. I wonder if this is how Damon feels when he looks at Elena and Caroline, and all the other beautiful girls his blood has preserved for all time. Like a walking, talking dollhouse of his own creations.
"This would be so much less creepy if you weren't looking at me like you were going to pin me to a specimen board with a block-print label," Cali says, then tilts her head, her ponytail of brightly-colored hair just brushing her shoulder. "Actually, I take that back. This would still be creepy."
"I'm sorry–" I start, but she makes a shooing motion with her hand like she's flicking water off her fingertips.
"Less apologizing, more sneaking me out the back door before your bipolar brother slash kidnapping cohort comes back."
I smile sadly. "I'm sorry. I can't do that. It's going to take at least a day or two for the vervain to pass out of your system, and we can't risk you remembering any of this."
"Then why didn't you make me forget the first time?" she asks, her eyes drilling into me.
They remind me of Damon's: not as bright a blue, but just as sharp. The near-painful intensity of how they scrape your thoughts right out of your mind, leaving no room for privacy, for things that were never meant to be seen.
"You were supposed to, weren't you?" she demands. "But instead I woke up in my car. That means you were perfectly happy to play some pocket hockey with a passed-out girl to get the keys, but you didn't really want me to forget what happened."
She takes another sip of my brother's bourbon, her eyelashes fluttering slightly and her lips pursing in pleasure as she holds it on her tongue for a long moment before swallowing. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, watching her lips soften back into their customary luscious curve. She breathes in the scent of the bourbon and then sets the half-empty glass down on the side table with a decisive clunk, sending a glance toward the door.
She leans forward, forearms resting on her bare knees that are pinched tightly together, slender and vulnerable above the clunky combat boots laced up her calves.
"Listen. I'm not going to go blabbing all over the fang-lover's chat boards on the 'net in the morning. I don't give a shit if you grow fur and duck feet on the new moon and eat zucchini bread made with babies, I'm the fuck out of here as soon as I get what I want, and five miles gone from ever being your problem again."
I glance down, my lips pressing together with regret. I can't just let her go. She must know that, but I admit I'm curious. If she came here for revenge, I would think she'd bring something stronger than a Taser.
"And what is it that you want?" I ask, allowing myself to look at her again. She's not wearing a touch of makeup and her skin is luminous, almost too healthy to belong to a human. I wonder if that's the lingering effect of my blood, or if it's just her.
Her too-vivid eyes flick away from mine and then her throat works as she forces them back. She starts to twist one of her many rings, the one on her right thumb that carries the relief-carved likeness of a rose.
"What's real?" she says, her throaty voice suddenly rough, and she coughs and half-glares at me before she continues. "Okay, so I figured out you guys did something to my head. Because he told me not to run and I couldn't. But he didn't tell me to like it when you bit me. He told me you would make me like it."
She sits back suddenly, crossing her arms so the folds of her man's coat hides the real shape of her body beneath.
"So what's the deal? Can you do the mind control thing with touch, or with your thoughts, or just eye contact like he did? How did you make me–" She swallows hard and blinks rapidly, looking away as she hisses out a curse. "That's completely screwed up, you know?" she bursts out, leaping off the couch and pacing across to the fireplace.
She reaches out and swipes her palm across the top of the mantel as if she is trying to clean it, but of course there's not a speck of dust because Damon picked up some kind of cleaning fetish in the years we spent apart and he sometimes stays awake all night dusting.
And he says I have problems.
She pauses, rubbing her fingers together in surprise, and then her hand rests more calmly against the ledge of the mantel.
Cali looks back at me and cold shivers over my skin, my hands clenching together.
"It's a hell of a mindfuck," she says. "And it's cruel. Since you're a creature who, by definition, lives like a parasite on humans, I'm going to take a wild guess you know nothing about traumatization or the kind of damage you can do by making somebody enjoy an act that takes place against their will."
I flinch, all of my muscles contracting against the impact of her words, and then I force myself to be still, my head hanging a little lower. She is wrong. It's been one hundred forty-seven years and I remember perfectly what it is like.
Her fingers tap once on the top of the mantel and then she lets go. "So, Stefan," she says, emphasizing the name she shouldn't know. "You're not going to make me forget anything, because trauma is stored in the body, not the mind." Her lips tighten, the ring glinting dangerously in the sunlight filtering through the windows. "And I'm not going to live the rest of my life all fucked up and not knowing why."
She crosses the room to me, her steps totally unselfconscious. But even uncalculated, there's a rhythm inside her, like the curves of all her movements are perfectly, mathematically symmetrical. I used to think watching Katherine dance was the most perfectly feminine thing I'd ever seen and suddenly the memory crumbles like a Styrofoam statue next to the marble original.
Cali stops right in front of me, planting her feet solidly as if she expects me to attack and crossing her arms.
"Talk," she snarls.
I can't deny her. Not after everything I've put this poor girl through, not an ounce of it fair. "You heard it," I say. "We didn't make you forget anything that happened. Damon compelled you not to run or scream or talk about what happened. He told you to like my blood, because–" my voice falters.
I should tell her, it's not as if I deserve to be able to keep any secrets of my own. But I don't want to say aloud how selfish I've been, how I never wanted to heal with blood so dirty and stolen as mine, tainted as it is by hundreds of violent deaths, by my own weakness. I always thought it would feel like trying to atone for a rape with flowers, an apology so inadequate as to be nearly a taunt.
There was something right about leaving the wounds gaping and weeping my regret for me.
But my blood, my own terrible, horror-laden blood is what returned her skin to the creamy perfection it is right now. That's why I can't stop looking at it. But I can't tell her that; it sounds arrogant, sick. Strange.
"He wanted to make it easier for both of us," I explain softly. "I know it may not look like it to you, but Damon means well, even when the way he goes about it is…" I gesture helplessly. There are too many years, too much revenge and cursing and violence and hatred and remorse to pin to a single word.
She doesn't look impressed. "Fine."
Her heartbeat is accelerating, racing toward some intention I can't read in her stony face. My own heart sinks because I think she might be about to run. I brace myself against the idea that I'll have to catch her and force her to stay when she'd rather go. My fangs press achingly against my gums at the thought of fleeing prey and my stomach twists with nausea at my own reaction.
She shrugs out of her coat and it hits the floor with the heavy thunk of the Taser and a jangle of her enormous key ring. Her shoulders are terrifyingly narrow, her arms hard with lean muscle.
"Bite me," she demands.
"What?" I rear back away from her.
She thrusts a threatening finger into my face. "Don't even try with the damn eye sex thing. I ate your fucking magic flower and you're not sinking a single fang into me this time without my full informed consent and unaltered mental state regarding what I'm about to experience."
"What?" I ask again, confused by her sudden switch to formal speech and by nearly every word that has come out of her mouth today.
She grabs me by the collar and tries to haul me to my feet, but I'm too heavy and she growls in frustration. I straighten my legs, standing obligingly.
"Look, mama's boy," she says. "Unlike some people, I don't sit around playing Grand Theft Auto all day on the flat screen while somebody else pays the utilities. I've cracked enough books and lived enough years to know your power-tripping brother is wrong. Erasing my memory isn't going to help, but I'm also not going to spend the better part of my twenties on a therapist's couch to sort all this shit out. We're going to do this the quick and easy route. We'll recreate the trauma on my terms, and this time, I get to decide what I like and don't like, how far it goes, and when it stops. Period."
I can feel the monster sizzling under my skin and I can hear Ric in the cell in the basement, Elena and Damon arguing outside. I can smell every bit of Cali: the chemical cocktail of hard fear and blazing anger that's punching out of her, the plain soap she scrubbed with this morning, the mineralized water in her shower, the astringent touch of antibacterial gel and the powdery scent of tablets of medication covering a growing thread of heady arousal that doesn't match the hatred in her eyes. The dark curl of perfume that clings to her coat from days past and the mango flavored lip gloss that is nearly worn off. The vervain won't have had time to make it into her bloodstream yet, and I already know all too well how she'll taste.
I take a hasty step away from her and nearly tear my own shirt when she won't let go.
"Look, Cali," I tell her nervously, her name sounding too exotic on my tongue. "There's a reason Damon was with me the other night. I'm, um, not that good with…blood."
"So you're a new vampire," she says contemptuously, letting go of my shirt with a little shove. "Fantastic. Was I your first?"
I flush and look away, biting back the hot anger that wants to push her to the ground and feed and feed and feed.
"No." I manage to shove the word out through gritted teeth, my eye twitching as I try to keep unnatural veins from staining my face.
"Hmph." She bends to dig in her coat. When she stands again, the mingled threads of her scent are so rich that my fangs start to force their way through my gums though every ounce of my will is braced against them.
She glares up at me, grabbing my collar and hauling me forward again, the Taser in her free hand. I see the weapon but I don't resist; my hands are busy, balled hard into fists so I can't break her. My fingers are hungry; eager to grind torn flesh against splintered bone, to paint the scent of blood into the air all around us so I can bathe in its delicious abundance.
"You're going to do exactly as I say and if you fuck this up, I'm going to run about two thousand volts straight through your personal business. You got that, cowboy?"
She jams the Taser against the fly of my pants and the prongs dig in painfully but it does nothing to quell my shameful reaction. The scent of anxiety and human blood and aggression is lighting my traitorous body on fire until I want to tear myself apart with the sickness of it all.
"I don't want to touch you," I whisper, and guilt jags across her delicate face, chased quickly away by fury.
"Well, how does it feel not to have a choice?" she growls and lets go of my shirt, grabbing me by the hair and stuffing my face down against her neck.
My fangs punch out so quickly that one scratches her by mistake and I nearly lose myself for a single drop of blood. My hands fly from my sides and latch onto her, throttling her throat and clutching at her shoulder with a creak of protesting tendons. She chokes and the Taser falls from her suddenly numbed hand.
The weapon hits my toe with a barely discernible twinge of pain and she's helpless, she's mine. I deserve her life, her blood, her submission because she is nothing and I will make her less than nothing compared to Me.
She tries to suck air in through her closed windpipe and the sound it makes is the tiniest whimper I've ever heard.
I nearly break my own fingers I let her go so fast, slamming my fangs down into my own lips so blood runs from my mouth like a flag of failure. Because it's me who is nothing, nothing but craving and regret.
The next breath I take tastes like copper and rug fibers and I'm on the floor, folded under the force of my own defeat. And then tears fill my eyes and I squeeze them shut before they can fall because she's still alive.
God help me, I didn't kill her.
"Run," I croak. "Please run."