"You owe me." Bonnie reminded him, tapping her foot fast and furiously against the concrete curb. Arms folded across her chest, and her back arched slightly, she had the posture of a Warrior Goddess about to incite war.
Damon took all this in with the slightest smile curled around his mouth. The past five weeks had been nothing but an endless adventure. The cocoon Bonnie had broken free of was part of the most interesting chrysalis that Damon had ever witnessed. The rabbit was not the fox, and she was both sleek and predatorial, but very very aware of her guardianship to this town and the pathetic mortals in it.
Too bad that these charming qualities had done nothing to save yet another series of victims in the Hunter's personal campaign. "I am very aware of that, querida." He deliberately invoked the Spanish endearment, knowing it would annoy her somewhat. "However, as I have said before, I do not recall asking for your assistance."
Bonnie shrugged, choosing to ignore that small little detail. "No one ever asks for help when they lay dying." She informed him tartly. "And I went above and beyond the call of duty to get your very dead hide back to health. More so than what you did for me."
Damon rolled his eyes, but wisely kept his gaze facing towards the ruin sprawled throughout the small diner. The Hunter had feasted well, this night. By Damon's initial count, there were 32 dead in the building. The debate he and Bonnie were currently enjoying was on who would do the perimeter search. Technically, Bonnie was right, it was his turn. However, as much as he respected Bonnie's strength of will and her insight to these murder scenes, a part of his upbringing kept insisting that scenes of violent death were no place for a woman. Outdated, but ingrained, as the view were, he followed his instincts all the same.
Truth was, Bonnie had gone to extreme measures to save his sorry ass. How she'd ever dragged him from the catacombs boggled his mind, his physical mass was nearly double hers. Add to that the wit and presence of mind to steal blood supplies from the hospital and directly route the blood via intravenience into his stomach, well it rather blew his mind. For four full days his body had ceased to function, feeding in the blood and mending but without his conscious awareness. He awoke from a coma that was hauntingly like true death on the morning of the fifth day. Scaring the hell out of a dozing Bonnie in the chair beside his sickbed.
"Fine." Damon sighed, turning to see Bonnie's brown eyes almost ringed golden in the odd lighting of the small restaurant. "I will search the perimeter. Be quick in here, though. It will not be long for the police to arrive."
Bonnie brushed past him, her hands snapping on a pair of latex rubber gloves before he had finished speaking. For one moment, Damon paused to watch her, admiring the graceful way she stalked about the room, eyeing down the victims with a cool analytical expression. There was no emotion or hysteria in her face or heartbeat.
Somehow, that worried him. But the moment of concern passed as swiftly as it came, and before Bonnie crouched beside her first chosen observation, Damon had already left to search the perimeter.
Their operating procedure had developed slowly, but was a fixed routine now, having had it proved necessary the last time they had failed to make sure the area was secure and safe. Or at least, as safe as a massacre site could be.
Stalking through the alley out back, Damon willfully pushed back the memory of the last time he and Bonnie had carelessly left a murder site and walked straight into the Hunter's trap. If not for the teamwork, and the clutter of the back exit to the townhouse whose residents the Hunter had bled to death, their fight would have ended in their defeat.
Somehow, though, they did get away, and they had learned. How they had learned. Caution was not a part of Damon's life, but it was growing within him. Stepping only in the shadows he viewed as clear, and minding that his footsteps were silent, he quickly circled the building before climbing to scope the roof. The slight trail of blood that danced along the back ways were legacy to the Hunter's passage, and the gory landmarks of a human head mounted on the TV antenna were evidence to his departure. There would be a corresponding article of evidence outside of Bonnie's home.
The apartment was their only secure base now. In the days and nights that his spirit had withdrawn deep within himself to heal, Bonnie had thrown herself into usage of her burgeoning powers. The research and knowledge she had pulled was astonishing, but the effectiveness unmistakable. The wards felt incredibly strong, and there had been times when his hunger was strongest, that he'd wanted to run far away from the building. His mind and body ITCHED from energies that expressed a clear dislike of any predatory feeling.
So, while waking hungry was not a pleasant feeling, at least falling asleep knowing he would be able to wake hungry was infinitely comforting. Especially after nights like these. 'Bloody hell, there won't be a town left at the rate he's going.' Damon sighed, approaching the grotesquely displayed head without any true emotion. Like all the victims, the head had been brutally severed from the body with visible tearing. The axe of Honoria Fell's tales was not in use here. It was odd, considering the creature had always raised a weapon against both he and Bonnie.
What was it that set them apart from the others? His vampirism? It didn't make sense since the creature's primary target was the very human Bonnie.
There were no more presents to be found either on the roof or in the perimeter. Standing at the edge of the roof, he scanned the neighborhood with his senses, detecting nothing more than the odd human or two. 'Good enough.' Damon frowned. 'She'd better be done. It won't be much longer before some patron arrives.'
Jumping down, in front of the main doors, he swept inside allowing the bell's to jingle loudly. Bonnie didn't even raise her eyes from the corpse in front of her. "This one fought." She made the observation generally, as if well aware of who was behind her.
For all he knew, perhaps she was aware. The blood hadn't faded as it should have in her body. His sensitivity to her was still strong, inferring that her awareness of him was equally powerful. It was as if she'd been nurturing the blood in her system, although how or why she would do that, even unconsciously escaped him. And the true meaning or cause behind of the lingering bond continued to escape him. He simply knew it was definitely not a good thing. "How so?"
Coolly, Bonnie picked up a severed forearm and hand, a butcher's knife covered in a odd ichor still clenched in dead fingers. In another person, or another time, the sheer casual nature of her manipulation of corpses would have been alarming, but Damon knew the wall Bonnie hid her emotions and responses behind. He himself had been hiding against such a wall since the day Katherine had entered his life, centuries ago.
"So that's what its blood looks like." Damon leapt over a half wall, moving quickly to Bonnie's side. Lowering his nose to almost an inch from the blade, he sniffed, his nose creasing in disgust at the resulting smell. "Definitely not palatable."
Bonnie quirked her lips, gently lowering the remains to where their original position had been. "Big shock. It's not truly mortal or natural, even in comparison to you." The words were spoken without rancor or contempt, they were factual not vindictive or bitter. Methodically, but with indifference to her just worded observation, Bonnie rolled her sterile transparent gloves off her tiny hands, stuffing them into a small ziploc bag and then back into the back pocket of her jeans. The distraction in the task was something Damon had witnessed many times. "Let's get out of here. I think I've seen everything we need, for now."
Extracting themselves from a scene was infinitely more difficult than entering. There were so many possibilities that had to be considered and anticipated, in terms of inadvertent evidence that potentially could indite both of them as accomplices or murderers at these scenes. As of yet, given the lack of sophistication in Fell's Church PD, there wasn't too much technology employed, but intuition was also a dangerous weapon and leaving any trace of "something" was dangerous.
Bonnie's biggest voiced fear was that the death toll would reach a point soon where the FBI would be called in. And while he had not yet said anything, Damon privately agreed. Time was running out on their efforts. For four weeks, the creature had enjoyed a wild murder spree. Humans would only tolerate so much, before they combined much like the mobs of antiquity to burn out the predator.
With Bonnie and himself so enwrapped at the heart of the crises, it was very likely they to would be put on the inevitable pyre. Still, alarming Bonnie was pointless. He needed her mind and spirit intact if they were to survive. As surely as she was primary target, his open assistance of her made him secondary. There was no way out, not now.
"Clear." Damon murmured, shielding his thoughts from her with the quiet word. Companionably, they walked back to the apartment, the ease of their posture and stride all false when compared to the hyper awareness of minds. They were living in stressful times, and short of the time in the apartment, their guard could not go down. It might very well cost them their lives.
"Do you think we'll survive this whole thing?" Bonnie asked rhetorically, breaking the stillness in the night. The tiny shift in her voice was the first indication that her walls about her mind and soul weren't as solid as his. The fear for her own life, and for others was richly imbedded in the slightest rise and tension in her voice.
Looking down at her, without being too obvious to his concern for where this sudden fear would lead to, Damon carefully weighed his words. To give false hope would induce her to take chances, or relax her guard. But to give no hope risked a complete resignation to death.
All he had to offer, to both of them, was the truth, and it was a bitter pill to swallow. "I don't know, I really don't." Stefan, the virtuous, would have promised her that she would live, and Elena would have believed that no evil could strike them. Bonnie was learning the world wasn't full of such candy fluff. So, how could he offer her a positive answer when he didn't have it.
"We need to know what drove him insane this time. For sure." Bonnie sighed, accepting his words with no hesitation. They were all she could hear and believe, that there were no guarantees.
Damon snorted, staring up to a rich golden full moon. "Klaus."
"Maybe. I don't think so, though." Bonnie pulled her light spring jacket tighter across her chest as a shiver rippled through her body. "Why would he wait so long to come after me? Or to come here?"
A valid point, Damon realized with mild surprise. In his mental ramblings, that was a fragment of fact he'd never analyzed. "I never thought of that." He admitted, not to show weakness, but to clarify his standing. They needed to work together if any survival was to occur. And there had to be trust, as loathe as he was to trust anyone or have anyone put trust in him.
"So?" Bonnie's head bent down, studying the pavement passing beneath her moving feet. The pace of her heart and apathy in her actions were signs of fatigue both emotional and physical.
"So, you may have something." Damon hated saying the words. It undermined everything he'd assumed. If the creature was not hunting them because of Klaus, if the complete insanity and homicidal spree had no basis in Klaus' destruction, then why was it after Bonnie? For her power? That was counter to all that Honoria had imparted about the Hunter's to them in her journal. "And we have less than nothing to understand the creature by."
This time, Bonnie's shudder was not hidden by the jacket. "How can we understand it? It's insane. I just want to know what drove something that should be so good to become something so horrid."
Damon flicked his gaze in her direction, feeling the thrum of the link between them. The tension in her, and fear that there was something far worse awaiting her in the near future. "Perhaps that will tell us how to stop it." He offered tentatively. "There is nothing to do for it tonight. This is the fourth mass homicide the creature had made. If he follows true to form, there will be no other on this scale until Saturday." In truth, since the household family that he had burned out he'd witnessed four scenes of carnage, a surprisingly small number for nearly a total seven weeks of his occupation in the town. According to Bonnie, however, there had been five other kill-sites he'd not discovered both before and after his return. Two of them occurring while he had been comatose.
"Maybe." Bonnie sighed, looking up at the moon and then over to him. "Somehow, I have the feeling things are about to get worse. Like something wickeder is coming our way."
Damon rolled his eyes, reaching out in an unusual gesture of camaraderie, and placing his arm about her shoulders, tucking her body close to his. "How lovely. It simply MUST be Stefan."
Bonnie smiled, leaning against his supporting frame. "Gods please forbid. Can't you just hear him now?"
"Always. 'You're doing this! You're setting Bonnie up to kill her'" Damon mimed bitterly. "Oh yes, if something wicked this way comes, for me his name would be Stefan. My own personal redeeming demon."
Bonnie giggled, relaxing as they rounded the corner and saw her apartment in sight. As per usual, sprawled across the steps was the gracious gift from this night's murder. She didn't even sigh, or let the smile fade from her face. With more willpower than she thought she had left, she pushed past the horror and denied it the right to etch itself in her mind and psyche. "I wish he'd stop bringing presents."
Damon eyed the dismembered torso curiously, it was probably from the head mounted on the roof of the building. "Indeed. Flowers would be a nice change."
Bonnie paused at the path to the apartment, gazing down expressionlessly at the corpse. "He already did that, Damon. Mrs. Flowers."
Damon shook his head, stepping over the ruins of a body and up the stairs. Bonnie stood where she was, staring down with neither awareness or concern for her isolation in an open unguarded area. The Hunter wanted her to see the dead, it wanted her to scream or break at these offensive gifts.
"Go inside, Bonnie." Damon instructed her, appearing as if out of thin air, a green plastic garbage bag in hand. "I'll deal with this."
A gift and a blessing, Bonnie realized almost numbly. Not from the death or the murders, but from her own mental exhaustion that seemed to sweep her body as soon as she entered the guarded apartment. Damon was repaying his debt to her by sheltering her sanity.
Amazing what friendships could be born in trying times, she thought with a small lifeless smile. The coat fell to the floor by the door, and her shoes were kicked off before she left the entry hallway. 'A shower. I need a shower.' She decided, fingering the cotton T-shirt she was wearing. The stench of blood and waste products that littered the restaurant seemed to embed itself in her clothing, and suddenly all she could think of was getting out of such garments and feeling clean again.
The shirt was on the floor in the hallway, and the jeans just outside the bathroom door. Her bra and panties hit the ground inside the bathroom mere seconds before the water hit her body. The luxury of hot water, and soothing bliss of a soap on skin that crawled gave a quick restorative to her tried and tormented soul. In minutes, the body recouped and began making other more mundane demands - like food and drink.
Heaving a giant sigh, Bonnie shoved the water control to the off position, and wrung her hair. 'I feel like some sort of robot.' She realized, wondering if that was how Damon saw her actions. 'There's no feeling. Just-emptiness--- when we find them.'
Her fighting skills were improving, though. Damon's frustrations at the stalemate against the Hunter had to have an outlet. Given the violence in his past and the lifestyle of his choosing, it was only natural that his outlets were very brutally physical - and he dragged Bonnie along for the ride. 'Ah, it's good for me.' She vigorously toweled her red hair dry, before patting down her body with the soft cloth. 'Otherwise, I'd have nothing to vent through. Crying isn't solving anything, so move on, McCullough.'
Her terry-cloth robe was hanging on the back of the door, where she'd deliberately been leaving it since Damon had become her houseguest. Shrugging into it, she belted it tightly and padded barefoot to the kitchen, absently picking up her filthy clothes as she went and bundling them into the wet towel.
The fridge was better stocked, now. Taking time away from her days, despite the fact she'd moved to an almost nocturnal pattern, Bonnie was weekly obtaining both food for herself, and blood for Damon. The first from the grocery store, and the second from the hospital. It disgusted her to use her powers to cloud minds the way she was at the hospital, but walking out with a cooler of blood was otherwise not possible. And she far rather have obtained the blood this way than to allow Damon to feed on the living.
Too many were dying without that additional predator on the loose.
The sandwich steaks were sitting in the careful butcher shop wrap, her planned meal for this night. Lifting them out, and tossing a kaiser onto the counter, Bonnie set about the task of making a quick dinner. Engrossed in the saut‚ing of onions and mushrooms to accompany her steak, she never heard Damon enter or saw him feed at the kitchen table from one of the cold plastic bags of blood.
She felt him, though. Felt his presence behind her and the faintest thread of his hunger. "I buried it." He announced unnecessarily as the bag was emptied. "Far enough away to keep the police away from here."
"Good." Bonnie sighed, piling the steak and trimmings onto the soft fresh whole- wheat kaiser. Calmly, she sliced the sandwich in half, her fingers not even trembling to hold a knife, despite all the cuts and tears that she was practically seeing daily in human flesh. With one hand, she carried a plate over to the table, the other hand judiciously tucked her robe more discretely across her body. "I've been thinking," She began, almost idly as she picked up half the sandwich. "About the reasons why the Hunter is insane. Could I be the reincarnation of Shiri?"
Damon folded the bloodbag in half, and then half again. Small actions to keep the elegant hands busy. His blue ring winked at her, as his fingers moved. "Perhaps, but I don't feel anything from you like that, not before when Klaus was here and not since. So I fail to see how the Hunter could perceive you as anything more than simply human."
Bonnie nodded, chewing in silence on her sandwich. Her eyes beckoned him on.
"I'm wondering if it doesn't have something to do with what draws my kind, Klaus' kind, to this town." Damon sat very still, choosing words that he could elaborate on. "There's a magnetism to Fell's Church, powers that call to powers."
"A crossroads." Bonnie mumbled. "A convergence of lines of power in one place."
Damon studied her, interested. "In this town?"
Red hair bounced as she nodded. "Yeah. It's focused in the catacombs that I found you in, the river leads to it, Honoria's tomb lead to it, hell, even the entire town seems to lead to it."
A convergence was an unusual, thin border between reality and non-reality. That next plane of existence lay beyond, the realm only psychics and the supernatural could sense and see. To control a center of convergence would be tempting to any of great power. Damon himself even toyed briefly with the notion, before dismissing it as too great a task. "It might have done it." He mused.
Bonnie polished off the last half of her sandwich as Damon considered possibilities. Pushing her plate back, she rattled his cage some more. "There's one more thing." She murmured. "I've been doing some math."
"Congratulations." Damon offered dryly, black eyes glinting with sardonic amusement.
"Shutup." Bonnie folded her arms across her chest. "My dreams began the day Matt left me. They escalated the day after Stefan and Elena told me of their upcoming trip. And they dropped off the day they left. Exactly one day after they departed, the Hunter began attacking."
"It's tied into my brother?"
Bonnie shook her head. "No, it's tied into Matt. And I think the tie is Kiera."