Jeremy waited until he heard the front door shut close and creeping to the window he peeked down at the driveway, to make sure that Stefan wouldn't show up at any second. He immediately took out his cellphone and still looking worryingly outside, he texted both Kol and Kylie the same short message.
Inviting Kol at the Salvatore mansion and giving him access to the house was probably not the brightest idea he could come up with, but as long as Kol wasn't interested in murdering him and everybody else he knew, he could certainly use his help.
It didn't take longer than five minutes, when Jeremy heard a knock on the front door. He quickly sprinted down the stairs, still rather surprised how Kol made it so fast. Before opening the door, he first pressed his eye against the peephole, mostly out of habit as Damon never let him open the door without a certain safety drill.
After he made sure that Kol was indeed the one standing at his doorstep and not another murderous vampire, he opened the door.
"Who could foresee the day when young Jeremy Gilbert would invite me into his humble vampire safe house" Kol smiled brilliantly.
Jeremy rolled his eyes and after a small pause he said tonelessly, "don't make me regret it" he motioned the vampire to step inside.
Kylie showed up about half hour later, adding one more person to the awkward silence.
Jeremy was sitting on the living room carpet by the fireplace and right across from Kylie, while Kol was laying head down at the sofa next to them.
For several minutes no one spoke a single word. The silence was predictably broken by Kol who seemed rather bored, "I'm bored" he confirmed, "Just tell me who I shall kill" he added staring affectionately at his hands.
"Nobody!" Kylie shrieked. Unlike Jeremy, who at that point couldn't care less about killing somebody and especially if that somebody was Mr. Bell, Kylie did not look eager to accept Kol's methods and expertise.
Kol rolled down from the sofa and onto the floor with a groan, "then why am I here?"
Kylie, who was clearly wondering the exact same thing, glanced over at Jeremy, who averted his eyes and pretended to be looking at something worthwhile, since he himself had no idea why he invited Kol. Probably because he thought that as an Original, Kol had to have a lot of information about everything, plus he got so used at being around him again, that he texted him without thinking.
"Okay, explain this to me" Kylie turned to Kol, "let's say that we get the stone" she started hypothetically, "we still need somebody to cast the spell like Mr. Bell did. So, not only we need to find the stone but we also need to find a witch"
Kol was about to argue at something, but Jeremy spoke first.
"That's not a problem" he said with a shrug, "Bonnie can do it"
"Bonnie? Your ex-girlfriend, Bonnie?" Kylie sounded out in a very high-pitched voice, struggling to understand, "Your ex-girlfriend is a witch?"
"Did I forget to mention that?" Jeremy looked awkwardly over to Kol, pleading him to say something. Kol, however, seemed to enjoy that moment of panic more that he was willing to admit and simply stuffed his mouth with a handful of pretzels and watched the two kids as though they were a TV program that he couldn't change the channel of.
"Bonnie is a kind witch and a good person" Jeremy hurried to explain, as Kylie seemed to have one of her discreet panic attacks.
"Yes, she probably won't turn you into a frog" Kol added mockingly, "though to be fair, she could"
Jeremy threw him a dirty look, "You're not helping" he grunted.
"I wasn't trying to" Kol put on a foul smile, before catching a pretzel with his mouth.
"And you think she will agree to help us?" Kylie finally appeared to be pulling herself together after the first shock of finding out that her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend was a witch that was also apparently strong enough to turn her into a frog. "I remember you once mentioned that she is not a big fan of Damon"
Kol let out an audible snort, almost choking on the food he still had in his mouth. "Nobody is a big fan of Damon" he said with a laugh.
"You're the one to talk" Jeremy gazed up at him with a self-satisfied grin.
"While everybody just loves to be around you" said Kol evenly.
Kylie rolled her eyes. "Yes, you're all delightful, can we focus on Bonnie now?" she tried to ease up the tense of the room, though Jeremy still had to duck down as Kol aimed the whole packet of pretzels at his head. "How are we going to convince Bonnie to cast the spell?"
"It doesn't matter, she is useless. Creepy, history teacher is not a witch" said Kol waving his hands around pompously.
Jeremy glanced at him with a disapproving cringe on his face. "I saw him cast the spell twice, he is a witch" he said as Kol stared right back at him with one of his favorite 'You-are-so-stupid-why-even-bother-explaining' kind of look.
"If he is not a witch, then what the hell is he?"
Kol rubbed his hands and sat up on the carpet between Jeremy and Kylie, a diabolical smirk playing on his lips. "He is an 'Ιερέας'" he said knowledgably, expecting some kind of a reaction worthy of the earth shattering secret he just revealed.
The two kids, however, exchanged a puzzled look before turning back to Kol.
"What's that?" asked Kylie first.
"What's that?" Kol repeated with a hiss, "What's that? What do they even teach you in school?" he raised a hand to hush Jeremy who seemed ready to retaliate. "'Ιερέας' means Priest. Your history teacher is a High Priest in the temple of Hades" he explained in the same tone one would use to speak to a couple very slow toddlers.
"Hades?" now was Jeremy's turn to ask.
Kol closed his eyes in an exasperated manner and let himself fall on the floor. "The Greek God of the Underworld" he breathed.
"I know who Hades is!" Jeremy retorted indignantly and Kylie hurried to back him up.
"What does Hades has to do with any of this?"
Kol suddenly raised himself up again and gazed from one kid to the other as though he was trying to decide whether they were really as dumb as they appeared to be, or whether he simply forgot to mention a few rather important details when he was filling them in about Alexandros and the resurrection stone that he created.
"Hades is his father…"
Both Jeremy's and Kylie's jaws dropped. They did guess that this man Alexandros was powerful, as he was one of the creators of a magical stone that could bring people back to life, but they never thought that there was even the tiniest possibility of him being the son of a Greek God. Especially as for all they knew those Gods were made up by the human imagination.
Jeremy recovered first.
"He is the son of Hades?" he asked unable to hide a snort, as even by putting together this sentence made him feel stupid.
"Probably not" Kol admitted with a frown, "but we didn't exactly have DNA tests back in the day, so we took his word for it"
Kylie cringed as if there was something unpleasant under her nose that really bothered her. "Why would anybody say he is a son of Hades, if he really is not?"
Enjoying the attention as all eyes were turned on him, Kol hitched his shoulders "It's what he used to say to make an impression on people, needless to say, it worked" there was a dramatic pause. "Me and my family were introduced to him several months after we became vampires. He was already two thousand years old. Mother always knew how to pick her friends"
Jeremy waved aside all the useless information about Kol's family and focused on the one thing that took him completely by surprise.
"He was two thousand years old when you met him? He is immortal?" he gaped.
"No, he is pretty mortal, hence the lovely coffin. But he did used to have some mad sorcery skills. He had spells and potions to make him younger, faster and stronger. Back then it took four of us to bring him down. Only Elijah didn't help, he thought that killing the man was rude"
"So," Jeremy slowly, shook his head, "Mr. Bell is the High Priest of a cult worshiping Hades and his alleged son, Alexandros" he said, his voice growing steadily weaker as if he was going out of breath, a sharp pain at the pit of his stomach.
"Sounds about right" Kol smiled pleasantly and for once again stuffed his mouth with pretzels.
"If he is the High Priest of that cult in Atlanta, why would he kill his own vampires to get the bones?" asked Kylie suspiciously. It was something about their history teacher being a High Priest and Alexandros being a son of Hades that made her feel a little bit nervous and uncertain about this whole story.
Kol struggled for a few seconds to swallow all that food in his mouth and with a maddening air of superiority; he said "Who told you that this was his cult or his vampires? Alex was a sneaky, old git, I bet his fan base is little wider than a couple dozen vampires. The folks in Atlanta simply were unlucky enough to have his bones"
There was a long pause in which everybody seemed battled to accept all those new facts. Everybody except from Kol, who looked rather pleased with himself, chewing audibly the last of his mini pretzels.
"So where do we find another High Priest to cast the spell?" asked Jeremy, his face screwed up in concentration. This whole time he thought that all he needed to bring Damon back to life was that stone and Bonnie, and now everything had changed for the worst.
Kol shook his head dismissively, "we don't" he said, "They are tricky to come by. We use the one we already have"
"Mr. Bell?" Jeremy scoffed, "Right, because he likes us so much"
Kol threw him a nasty glare as well as a pillow from the couch, "I never said he'll do it voluntarily" Kol smirked at them both, a manic gleam in his eyes. "The stone must be at his house—"
"—we could steal it as originally planned and blackmail him with it" Jeremy completed his thought for him.
"We could go to his house now" Kylie suggested indifferently, "Mr. Bell is on a class field trip with the freshmen, he won't be back until tomorrow"
"You," Kol pointed at Kylie with a side smile, "are surprisingly useful, I'm impressed" he said and leapt on his feet, when Jeremy spoke.
"We can't go, not tonight"
Kylie turned right around to look at her friend as she was just about to follow Kol to the exit. "Why not?" she raised both her eyebrows, mildly taken aback. If anything she thought that Jeremy would be the number one person to be pleased with all the action.
Jeremy hesitated. The real reason was that he promised. He promised to Stefan he wouldn't leave the house, and it was one he was planning on keeping. However, this was not something he was willing to share with neither Kol or Kylie for the simple reason that they wouldn't understand nor accept this as a reasonable excuse.
"Mr. Bell might be away, but we don't know if the house is empty. You can't enter," he indicated Kol, "and we can't be sure we can take the whatever it is that Mr. Bell is living with"
Both his friends stood in silence and with pleasure Jeremy noticed that they considering his words, so he hurried to add. "We are stronger during the day, when at least we can see what we are up against. We should go in the morning, before Mr. Bell is back from the field trip" he said decisively and sighed with relieved as both the vampire and the girl, nodded in agreement.
Stefan didn't come back until later the following morning. Jeremy saw him coming through the gate while he was in the garage.
"Where are you going?" Stefan walked up to him, looking curiously over at Jeremy who was just about to get into his car.
"Out" Jeremy answered as vaguely as possible, gazing down at his feet, avoiding to make a direct eye contact as though he was afraid that the vampire was able to read his mind.
"What does 'out' mean exactly?" Stefan leaned against Jeremy's car, his arms crossed over his chest, staring expectantly at the boy.
Jeremy shrugged his shoulders. "Out of the house" he said with a faint smile.
Stefan didn't lose his patience. He had a lot more frustrating conversations with the teenager in the past and he had sort of grown immune to his smug, smart-assery.
"And where exactly might that be?" he asked placidly.
Jeremy kicked anxiously the grass underneath his feet, racking his brains to come up with a reasonable location for him to be at, as he sensed Stefan's uncertainty about letting him out of the house.
"The Grill!" he screamed out at last, looking up at Stefan innocently.
Stefan's face broke into an ingratiating smile, that made the boy stagger back a pace and he clapped Jeremy twice on the shoulder, his smile growing wider by the second.
"Have fun" he said in a very suspiciously sweet tone, which was explained almost right away, "Anyway, you've been so good lately, I do think you deserve to know that I bugged your car again. So if you're not planning on going to the Grill and instead wander off to some place where you'll get instantly killed—"
Jeremy blinked.
"—I'll know all about it"
Jeremy's color had drained right off his face remarkably fast, as he stood motionless staring with wide-eyes at the vampire in front of him.
"You bugged my car?" he echoed in panic.
"Indeed" Stefan laid a hand on each of Jeremy's shoulders, "have fun buddy" he directed the boy to the car and waited until he was inside, so he could wave him goodbye with that annoyingly victorious smile always plastered on his face.
