"So, he's a good guy?" Bonnie tried, very, very hard, to even begin to understand what Damon was saying. The problem was, in HER world the good guys didn't go around slaughtering families.
"No." Damon corrected, neatly unfolding the yellowed piece of parchment onto Bonnie's kitchen table. "It was a creation of good, of the Gods to preserve humanity, but it's either been corrupted or gone mad."
Bonnie toyed with a lock of red hair, her index finger spinning the brilliant tress around and around as she mulled through that argument. "Possession?" She hazarded, her chin shifting as her lower teeth nibbled on her upper lip. "There's been a great deal of debate that a possession will leave the possessed in a broken mental state."
Damon looked up from his page, the fathomless black eyes unblinking. It was amazing how light would strike those eyes and be absorbed, rather than reflecting. "I don't know." He argued. "The killings began four weeks ago, the first murder at your building, on your car, while you were moving in."
Wordlessly, Bonnie nodded confirmation to his statement. The image of poor vacant eyes and slaughtered body on the hood of her car permanently etched into her mind. Even now, weeks after the slaying, the scent of blood seemed to rise up around her and the chill of the night seeped into her bones. "It wants me." She remembered, not as if she could ever forget it, but that it needed said now. "Why me?"
Damon shrugged. "Klaus?" He hazarded the guess.
Arms folding in front of her, Bonnie suddenly propped her face into the safe little burrow there. Always and forever, Klaus would return to haunt her life, wouldn't he? She hadn't been the one to literally destroy him… or imprison him, if she was going to be honest here; she'd simple channeled the energy needed to give form to the powers that did the dastardly deed. If it were insane for being denied its prey, wouldn't it have targeted Elena?
"Elena had no scent to target, at the killsite." Damon argued, although Bonnie hadn't said a word. "The only power there that was marked, or traceable, was yours."
Tilting her head, brown eyes met black. "Great. So it's brassed off at me, and killing all of Fell's Church in a massive temper tantrum. Marvelous. If the Gods created it as an act of benevolence, why aren't they doing anything about it? Why aren't they protecting the innocent?"
Pure aristocracy shone from Damon's careless shrug, the elegant rise and fall of the shoulder's that allowed his concern for the masses to slide completely away from his mind and body. "How should I know, cara? I was raised Roman Catholic. There is only one God in my father's faith, and no such demon's or creations walk His world."
Bonnie just glared her expression hard and fast. "I never said it was my faith." Damon amended affected by her baleful gaze. "It is the only one I know of."
"Wonderful." Bonnie groaned, pushing herself away from the table and to the fridge. Reefing the door open, she scanned the contents quickly, not really wanting a glass of milk, but it seemed it was her own option. 'I really need to go shopping.' She mumbled to herself.
Damon either ignored her, or didn't hear her, Bonnie decided, as silence created her mumbling and the slam of the fridge door. Turning about, milk carton in hand, she leaned back against the appliance and stared at the neighborhood big bad vampire. As unlike Stefan as he was Damon definitely had moments where the kinship ties between Salvatores appeared. The line of his jaw and squint in his eyes as he tried to decipher a badly aged slip of paper. His dark hair fell forward in response to the tilt of his head, and occasionally his hand wound flatten and then flex in agitation.
Yup, there was no mistaking the Salvatore do-gooder pose in action.
Smiling, almost amused in spite of the world out to get her, Bonnie opened the carton and sipped directly from the container. The milk was tasteless, but cold and wet. Willfully ignoring the sheer blah flavour that had about as much stimulation as saw-dust, she swallowed several mouthfuls and lowered the container and her chin just in time to see Damon was staring at her. "What?"
"How did the -" He twisted his head to read the container. "-milk taste?" There was no rancor, or cruelty in the question, but if Bonnie had to assign an emotion or state of being to his tone, it was concern.
"Yuck." She answered, shoving the container back into the fridge and pulling out a bright red apple. "I've never really liked milk, though." Wandering back to the table, she slumped back down on her chair.
"So, it was the same flavour as before, then?" He persisted, those dark eyes unusually intense.
Bonnie tilted her head side to side, mulling over the answer to that question. "No. I guess not. It had no taste, kind of like lukewarm water. Just blah." She absently lifted the apple to her mouth, parting her lips for a big bite.
Whap
Bonnie blinked, a squawk of protest instinctively rising from her throat. "What did you do that for?" She demanded angrily, as Damon set the apple down on the table.
"It would make you sick." He answered dryly. "And I don't have time to both coddle a sick woman and try to find this thing."
"Make. Me. Sick." Bonnie repeated the words with a mild degree of fatalism. "Because of the blood. Your blood." She finished flatly.
Damon looked back at his holy grail of mystery, his finger resting midpage. "Yes." Bonnie's reaction to his blood had been stronger than what he originally had anticipated. Of course, some of that had to do with sheer quantity, and how much of the vampiric blood her body had used directly to repair wounds.
He also couldn't forget her immediate and unconscious reaction as he had fed her. Oh no, the sudden flash of golden fire all through those brown irises… that had not been normal nor anticipated, but it had been a very vampiric response. Gradually, food could be reintroduced to her body, but for the immediate present, it wasn't in her best interest.
"I see." Bonnie murmured, pushing away from the table and disappearing down the hallway.
Damon only gave her leaving the faintest of attention, even when she grabbed her purse and keys as she bolted out the door. Whether the creature found her or not was not worth considering. After all, neither daylight or the sanctity of the hearth and home were sure against this creature. Bonnie was in as much danger in her own apartment as she was in the middle of town.
The paper, however, was proving fascinating. The details Honoria had left out of the diary were all fleshed out here, on the Smallwood family curse, the attraction Fells Church held for the supernatural, and most importantly, the story of two Ancients who had come to Fell's Church over a hundred years ago.
Gul had been, in all likelihood, very like Klaus. Vicious, insane and cruel in both mannerisms and his actions to the people of the town. Slaughtering livestock, and killing rampantly, it had been his obvious goal to make the entire town HIS domain. Like the days of their glory over a thousand years ago.
The ancient had spent months setting things up from the shadows of the forest, leaving his crimes as a statement, but making his face remain unseen. It was the prescience of Honoria Fell that gave the nameless predator both a face, identity and name. He was an Ancient, a First One, a vampire unlike others in that he could not be slain by a stake and sunlight did not harm him.
All of Honoria's spell castings and her charms had proved useless against Gul. In despair, she had done a blind summoning for help, for aid of some sort. But, how God had answered her shook both her faith and composure.
Within two days after the summoning, Shiri had arrived, openly. Gul's former mate, an ancient of equal power and passion measured in compassion. She hid her true nature from the townsfolk, but openly targeted Gul, hunting him down as if he was nothing more than a beast. To Honoria, that was precisely what he was, a cruel rabid animal.
To Damon, as he slowly transliterated the old fragile page Honoria had hidden in her diary, Gul was but an incarnation of Klaus.
Shiri had worked long and hard, finally trapping her brother-in-spirit for a final battle. But, no sooner had that battle been joined when a Hunter arrived. It was the final atrocity reached that had disturbed Honoria's faith in the power of good to triumph over evil, Damon supposed, reading between the lines on the paper.
Shiri had just staked Gul, a means to subdue him but not destroy him when the Hunter intervened, taking Gul's head - and then as the corpse slowly shifted and fell apart in the finest fragments of ash, Gul turned raising his sword at Shiri. Viciously, it had attacked the tired Old One, ignoring both the good the female had done and the lengths she had gone to just to protect the town.
It did not weigh the goodness of her soul against the blackness of her being, it just found her guilty of being an Ancient. Knowing it was a lost battle to fight, Shiri made a sacrifice that had driven Honoria to write this page. In the instant before the Hunter leveled it's axe, Shiri summoned lightening to destroy her body and cast her spirit free.
Free to be reborn as a mortal, Honoria had theorized. Free to rest eternally in the land of the dead, or to transcend mortality as an angel. Whatever became of Shiri's soul, the one thing that Honoria made very clear was that the Ancient was truly free.
The Hunter's axe swept through empty air, his kill vanished and denied forever. It seemed, for a few moments, that the creature had gone insane, swinging out wildly at trees, animals and rocks as if unable to cope with this loss. Yet, just as suddenly as it had lost it's mind and prey, it calmed and disappeared from Fell's Church.
Honoria had never heard or seen any Old Ones, or Hunters, again for the rest of her long life.
'Would it that it had continued as such.' Damon thought ruefully, always amazed at the amount of supernatural activity occurring in the one God-forsaken small town. Shaking his head in bemusement, for his role in some of that activity, and the drama now playing here, he refolded the yellow parchment with all the respect it deserved. Pulling the meaning from it had taken a great deal of time, despite his own familiarity with archaic English. The thee's, thou's and other simple words of a farming community couched in appropriate awareness of 'good language and proper thought' hid a lot of simple fact just to try and keep things clean.
Setting the page in the middle of the table, Damon twisted to look around the room, noting, for the first time, the sparse decoration and furniture of the kitchen. True, Bonnie had only recently moved into the unit, but it still surprised him that her home lacked any stamp or sign that marked it as HER home. It was as vague and transitory as any place, short of the Villa in Italy, that he had ever owned or stayed in for any period of time.
Straying beyond the boundaries of the kitchen, and back to the bedroom he'd usurped last night, he looked about the apartment with renewed curiosity. A few odd photos, and a couple of unique ornaments, but nothing that was so permanent it couldn't be quickly packed and removed if she needed to run. 'Interesting.' Damon mused, idly picking up Bonnie's journal off the edge of her end-table without a thought to the trespass.
The small brown leather book had no lock. It was the worn edges and the creased spine that told the story of much faithful usage, and the consistent blue ink that ran through the pages that detailed a story of a very lonely life. The past year, since Klaus, had not been overly kind to Bonnie McCullough. The gradual drifting from close friends and increase in her own powers all were cause to a painful self-isolation.
Reaching the last few weeks worth of pages, Damon frowned at her encounters with the Hunter. The creature's obsession with Bonnie disturbed him far more than he was willing to admit. While it did, on some level, make sense that it was reacting to her 'scent' at the killsite for Klaus, it did nothing to explain the depth of obsession and perversion in the creatures normal habits.
The Hunters did not kill humans, and none of the victims had been anything less than painfully human and terribly mortal. The vicious delight in the slayings, the artistic extremities were far more akin to Klaus' style, meaning an "Old One's" approach to the kill than to a Hunter gone insane. Logically, if the Hunter had snapped, the killings should have remained isolated to the things connected to the denied target. Bonnie, himself - vandalism of the graveyard, the butchery of the remaining Bennett family - attacks with a structure or logic to them. The rampant and random killings were much to much akin to Klaus' approach.
'Perhaps that is it.' Damon mused, his fingers setting the soft diary pages fluttering in a fan-like action. Stroking up the soft edges, lifting them, and letting them flutter downwards before stroking upwards once more. 'A possession, just as Bonnie said.' Licking at the corner of his mouth, he suddenly recalled how long it had been since his last feeding. He had meant to visit the hospital and beguile some supplies, or make a mercy killing or two, but the old document had caught far more of his attention.
Dropping the book carelessly, Damon strode from the room, every stride full of purpose and determination. Grabbing his sunglasses off of a small ledge against the entrance-way wall, he reefed the door open and walked right into the Hunter itself. 'Oh, bloody crap.' Damon barely managed to drop to the ground before the creature swiped at him.
The thing hovered before Bonnie's threshold, seeming to test the air with the way it's head leaned forward and bobbed slightly. 'Bonnie's scent?' Damon wondered absently. The girl had a marvelous scent to her, a mixture of both her shampoo and her power. It called to creatures of power, but spoke of equivalency. It wasn't something that could get Bonnie killed, necessarily, but rather a scent and impression that should have kept things from attacking her.
The pause was all the opportunity Damon needed. Chuckling egotistically at his superiority, Damon pulled his strong limbs into a tight crouch, tensing muscles and forming the shape needed for his escape. Length of limb and muscle all uncoiled in a powerful burst as Damon leapt through the creature's spread legs. Lunging, he smoothly tumbled feet over his head, his shoulder's striking the hard landing with satisfaction and his feet arching towards a graceful rise. This was the expected outcome, Damon truly hadn't anticipated smashing his body rolling down the first step and from there, falling down the rest of the way.
It was against his ego to yelp at the insistent pain that wracked his hungry body with each thud, thump and smash from the sixteen concrete steps down to the landing. "In the immortal words of mortals everywhere: Ouch." He muttered, pulling the bruised and abused body up to his feet by sheer willpower and a centuries old survival instinct. With one hand bracing a neck he'd narrowly avoided breaking, Damon looked back up the stairs for the Hunter. Either he fell faster than that thing walked, or it was in the apartment.
'Two options... stay here and fight the Thing, or find Bonnie and get the hell to high ground.' Damon mulled his options for all of a single second, before a flash of motion made up his mind for him. With a terrific jump, he bounced out of the Hunter's range, not missing the very feline movements in the Hunter's leap. Setting a pace that would have been impossible for a human, but easier to sustain if he had power enough to shift form, Damon ran from the building and towards a nearby community park.
Predictably, the gruesome representative for insanity followed suit. 'Honoria, you could have included a chapter on 'how to destroy Hunters.'' He grumbled silently, bones and muscles aching their complaint at this abuse. The fact he hadn't fed crippled him more than he wanted to admit.
Virginians prided themselves on their forests, the thick trees and lush land were as much part of the natural environment as they were of a society's heritage. Tall, dark and graceful, the trees reached high to the sky and spanned broadly with their great age. Not only did they provide shelter for the local fauna, but they made for a wonderful maze to weave through. Darting from tree to tree, Damon increased the distance and distraction of the Hunter as much as possible.
The senses it used to stalk Old Ones apparently also applied to vampires, though, for as much as Damon was able to increase the space between himself and the Hunter, the Hunter never lost sight of where Damon was or what direction he was heading in. 'Damn.' Damon cursed, wishing he could shift to a bird, now. The power required for such a transformation, however, was out of his grasp. Not that he couldn't change, but in that he couldn't change BACK. 'So, what else will work?'
The squeals of children and murmur of adult voices around him were the first alert Damon had to the potential for disaster that could occur. In a town as small as Fell's Church, an open and unpopulated battlefield could only be found in the deep forests or past the farmed lands. The town itself had grown to dense with people.
People that could either provide him with a meal, or die at the insane Hunter's hands. "Oh, such a marvelous bounty of choice." Damon thought with furious scorn, at both himself and the universe for the situation he was in. To fulfil his debt to Bonnie, he had to stay alive. Yet, to give the Hunter this massive opportunity to slaughter also wasn't in his best interest. Not for any humanistic reasons, but he feared that each death made the creature stronger.
It was already too strong to fight, more power would make everything a complete nightmare. There was nothing left to do but run, as hard and fast as he could until those final reserves of power were gone. Once that happened, he would be sitting dead. A wide, open and easy target for the Hunter. 'Won't little Red be disappointed?' He grinned mockingly. 'The big bad wolf axed by the Hunter.'