Ashes but Ashes...
His lungs, incredibly enough, burned. The sheer fact that he could FEEL oxygen deprivation in his lungs was impressive and probably psycho-somatic. Technically speaking, he didn't need to breathe, being dead already once. However, apparently, his body wasn't interested in the mere technicalities of advanced vampirism. It just knew that he was running at quite the clip and that it wanted to stop.
How unfortunate, Damon mused bitterly as he steered his body clear of the people in the park, that the Hunter wanted him to stop just as much. The Hunter, however, had a more permanent type of "stop" in mind.
And damn but that creature could move!
'Think, Salvatore. How do you get your sorry tail out of this?' Damon ignored the body's complaints, and kept the legs moving. At the speed he was maintaining, he was breaking the residential traffic laws. The sounds of people were fading while the echoes of animals, rustle of leaves, and the burble of the major river running along the border of Fell's Church became more dominant.
'RIVER!' The idea blossomed into his mind full-formed. The river had been a major problem for Katherine, but it could be used to his advantage. Despite his dislike of boundary waters, he wasn't planning on crossing it, but going under it and down. Right down to the old crypts and passageway Katherine had used so successfully.
Down to where the dead guarded the lands against the supernatural. The dead, which owed him one helluva favor, if he counted the markers correctly.
His last bastion of power surfaced, rather like a dying man's last gasp for air. Harnessing the energy, he gave limbs new steam, and raced straight for the river, the Hunter's pace not hastening but still clearly heard behind him. 'Please let it not like water. Please let it not have any brains. Please let it be possessed by Klaus and thereby let me escape.' Damon mentally chanted. 'And if it's not too much bother while I'm humiliating myself with a few begs, please let there be a descent snack at the other end. I'm bloody starving.'
If Heaven or Hell was listening, Damon had no apparent sign of it. As far as he could tell, the odds were still 50/50. Giving no other thought to anything beyond escape, Damon pelted down, the river in sight. 'At least it's not throwing things at me.' He suddenly noted as he vaulted his body to the water.
The thought was precursor to deed, and the slam of a wooden knife into his upper back hit Damon far colder than the water that suddenly submerged him. Being in mid-air while diving for the water, though, Damon had successfully evaded a killing blow. Not that the semi-staking didn't hurt, but that it wasn't going to destroy him. 'Unfortunately.'
Now was the time to move, but the body, already taxed, fair near collapsed from the knifing. 'Come on, old man. Keep moving before---'
A hideous patchwork of flesh and bone slammed down into the water, perhaps a foot from Damon's startled eyes. Rather than dive in after him, the creature counted on Damon having fallen prone in the water and within a fishing range. 'That's it.' Damon growled silently, with his good arm, he reached up and over his shoulder, brutally jerking the knife out. Judiciously, he moved his body to where the Hunter's hand had just been and waited.
Eyes narrowed, despite the flush of water against his opened gaze, Damon's smile extended predatorily when the Hunter slammed it's hand down again, close enough to be reached, but far enough that it served Damon no threat. Smoothly, letting the buoyancy of water ease the ache of muscles, Damon moved taking the knife and sweeping it in an underhand arch in the water, point upwards, it cut through the water effortlessly, smoothly and slammed viciously right through the Hunter's hand.
Damon only waited long enough to impale the knife into the Hunter, and then tossed his body into the undertow that sped him away. Away from the creature that nearly had him in it's grip, and away from the hideous shriek that pierced even the dead sound barrier of the cold, cold water.
Bonnie felt her shoulder's sagging, her eyes glancing about the ruined building with profoundly sad expression. The Hunter had moved up its' kills. No longer did it make one kill site a day, now it was up to two or three. It was only a matter of time before the police began to figure out they were not up against a serial killer.
Dropping her purse in the ironically spotless metal sink, Bonnie wandered about the sweet little kitchen and gently closed opened eyes as she found the mutilated bodies. She had no idea who these people were, they were new neighbors to her parents, but she did feel that their deaths were on her hands.
The front door had been ripped off the hinges and tossed in the middle of the yard. That was the first warning sign Bonnie had physically seen. Her senses, however, had shown others and the scent of blood, heightened unnaturally by Damon's blood share with her, had led her straight to the actual crime.
Time of death, she realized staring down at the linoleum floor where blood pooled from the gory death sprawled across the kitchen table, was in the past two hours. Already, rigor mortis was setting in and the scent was fading slightly.
Given the distance between the victims, the Hunter had killed the two couples in the room within minutes of one another. The furthest a victim had made was to the small enclosure of the back door, perhaps fifteen feet from the center of carnage. 'I hate this.'
Carefully staying clear of the blood and painstakingly avoiding making footprints on the flooring, Bonnie circled the remainder of the house, noting the pristine state of the public rooms, and the rumpled sheets in the master bedroom before returning back downstairs. This time, though, she cut through the dining room and promptly froze.
Blood roses
Back on the street now
Blood roses
Blood roses
Back on the street now
Can't forget the things you never said
on days like these starts me thinking
Her hand went up, to touch the liquid penmanship on the parlor doors dividing the room from the kitchen. It had been unseen from the kitchen, thanks to the lovely white curtains that were pocketed over the windows in the French doors. Inches from the words, her fingers froze, and she curled them under so that the nails bit into her palm.
"Klaus," Bonnie whispered, for a second her mind was transported back to Vickie Bennett's room once again. The moment passed, and logic kicked in. Klaus had haunted the US since the early 50's, and it was reflected in his preferred musical selection and methodology.
This message, this had a symbolic overtone and one that did not escape Bonnie. Tori Amos was a favorite of hers, and the lyrics which followed the chorus hauntingly came to mind: 'You gave him your blood, and your little diamond too'. The Hunter knew that Damon was helping her, and had targeted them both.
Intuition, in women, was a powerful tool. For those females that listened to that soft inner voice, timely warnings were often received. In Bonnie, the voice had a megaphone, and it sure knew how to bellow. Logic snapped facts in her mind within seconds, but the body started working before even that. Almost flying across rooms and through doors, Bonnie raced from the house before anyone had a chance to even notice was she had already investigated.
Damon was in danger, if not already destroyed. That kill and that message were the promise to Bonnie that the Hunter would brook no interference. 'Damn, damn, damn.' She thought furiously, bursting into her parents home with no more thought than that. Her parents were out of the state, and her sister had moved out a year ago, ensuring that no witnesses were around to Bonnie's comings and goings on the property. Neighbors, had they been alive, would have assumed it was the good daughter coming to check on the family home.
Dead, they were ghostly witnesses to the Good Witch trying to battle the forces of darkness, or something melodramatic like that. Bonnie didn't really care, either way. Punching the numbers to her apartment phone, she held the receiver impatiently at her ear, scowling darkly into the mirror facing her with each unanswered ring.
After the tenth ring, her answering machine clicked on, and Bonnie left the only intelligent message she could by slamming the receiver down. 'So, if I was a bloodsucking hunk of an Italian vampire, where would I be at 1:30 in the afternoon?' Bonnie groused, chewing on her lip in vexation.
Fingers tapped impatiently on the hard plastic of the phone, her mind hundreds of miles away. Damon had gone to the library early this morning, after visiting an initial murder site, but in all that time she had no recollection of him feeding. Perhaps he went out for a bite?
"Yeah, right." Bonnie muttered. "If I really thought that, I wouldn't be sitting here worrying about him. I must be certifiable, I'm worried about Damon. Damon, the impervious. Damon, the 'too bad to get in trouble'." The sigh was heartfelt, weary and resigned.
Somewhere in the entire scope of Fell's Church there was a Hunter, and somewhere else in that same region was one nasty bad-boy by name of Damon Salvatore. And lucky her, she had to find one but not the other. "My life just sucks."
Pulling away from the foyer of her parents home, she walked slowly, almost ritualistically up the stairs to her old bedroom. Her parents were predictable, fortunately. Rather than totally stripping the room and redecorating it, they had simply moved extra furniture in and made a spare bedroom of the space.
That meant her pentagram etched into the wood beneath the throw-rug was still undiscovered. Early, after the defeat of Klaus, Bonnie had actively begun studying the roots of her powers, and that meant researching her ancestors. Druidism, in it's modern form, was akin to but not exactly like the ancient sorcerers of the British Isles. A natural change had been to look beyond the territorial religions, and study the entire field of paganism. From there, she had found herself drawn to the earth faiths, and wiccan magick.
Her strength had always been precognitive, but she could see current events when need arose. It wasn't something she liked to do, it left her open to other sights, and some of them were unpleasant. It also made the noise in her head louder, noise her psychic range gathered from populations around her.
'The things I do for the Salvatore's,' Bonnie chuckled humorouslessly. It took a minute to roll up the carpet after shoving the bed clear. But, once that was done, Bonnie was free to take a few risks. In her apartment, she made careful use of chalk to secure her circle, and employed candles as she called the watchtowers, but there was neither the resources or time for those provisions in her parents home.
Cross-legged, Bonnie set her hands on her thighs and calmed her breathing. Eyes fluttered close, and her mind reached out using the connection of blood to isolate and find one elusive and troublesome Damon Salvatore.
The scent of grass and warmth of sun struck her senses, before cold water splashed brutally upon her psyche. This was the trail of Damon's passage, and it was marked by power and blood. 'Damon's blood.' The distant part of her mind noted, already very familiar with the fluid that was running through Bonnie's own veins.
It took her minutes to track Damon, and more minutes to shake the fog from her brain as she emerged from her trance. The images and impressions of her trances were oftimes hard to decipher, but this was not the case. Damon was in the catacombs beneath Honoria Fell's tomb, finding sanctuary amongst the long since dead. He was both hurt and hungry-and the Hunter was after him.
Knowledge gave impetus to action, and Bonnie was no slacker. Jumping up, she narrowly remembered to cover the pentagram and hastily pushed the large old bed back into place before racing downstairs. Her parents had flown out of state, leaving their car behind securely locked up in the garage. As far as Bonnie was concerned, given her loyalty as a daughter, the least they could do was lend it to her.
After all, racing to the hospital and then to the cemetery, two places on flip-sides of town from one another couldn't be accomplished quickly by foot.
Somehow, Damon dragged his sorry body out of the river, and onto the cold hard packed earth. Practically crawling, he found shelter underground and collapsed. Had he looked up and around, his body would have shivered to realize he was in the room where Katherine had held them prisoner, torturing him endlessly until Elena had escaped and sacrificed her life to spare both he and his brother.
The room where his world had collapsed.
Fortunately, hunger and exhaustion spared him the mental anguish, and he curled up into a tight ball like any wounded creature would. His last reserves were truly gone now, it was a matter of time before starvation destroyed him. In all the myths about vampires, there was one that was never truly explored. A lack of blood would starve a vampire just as surely as a lack of food and water would kill a human.
This was not the way he had intended to die, but it was, in his mind, a fair bit better way to die than what the Hunter had intended. Gently, he would slip into oblivion and beyond by starvation and exhaustion's rules, rather than a sudden fiery panic and then cutting pain and destruction.
Yes, this was far better, he mused almost drowsily, dark eyes closing lazily. Even now, he could feel his body relaxing for the final release. How odd, for him it was identified as death, but to a human it would be destruction of the unholy. Worldviews were funny things, especially between different species or subspecies. 'What would Bonnie call this?' His mind was full of bizarre ideas. Images of Bonnie clashed without sense in his head. One was of a frightened little rabbit, and the other a predator with a killer's sharp features.
To either image, he felt an apology was owed, but it was not in his nature to make apologies, was it? Perhaps it was the chemical imbalances that was a prelude to death. Or whatever. His limbs pulled closer, and with a weary sigh, Damon submitted to the blissful darkness.
In the catacombs beneath Fell's tombs, a deathly silence pervaded. Everything was still - the air, the dust, and even the vampire who lay upon the floor unmoving. Still and as quiet as a sanctified church, the holiness profound in the simple and gentle tranquility.