Would you believe me if I said I hand't even planned to get Ric in such a state? The story just got a mind of its own, I tell you! The idea popped into my mind, and then I was like, Oh great, I can make him suffer even more!, So I did it.

Anyway, the cat was let out of the bag.


Each a monster, part 24: The only one bloody enough

Why his left hand, one might wonder.

Well, it was simple, really.

His left hand, because he was right-handed, and if by some odd twist of bad luck his coming into contact with Bonnie's barrier ended up with a lot of blood and pain and mistreatment, he'd rather lose his left hand than his right one. See, very pragmatic. And yes, there was no need to feign ignorance, it was completely possible that he'd suffer for this attempt at rescuing the young witch.

So Alaric's fingers came into contact with the third ward.

He'd have screamed, if that would have helped.

He reached out for the now inconscious girl slowly, fearing any kind of haste would see him cast away as Elena and Caroline had been.

The scar on his left shoulder was aflame with pain, and the hunter was pretty certain the redness of his skin wasn't the only redness around it anymore. It felt like the cicatricial tissue was bursting open everywhere on the scar. He wasn't exactly sure he was bleeding again, but he didn't doubt much either. Sure, the blood gurgling out of it was hot, but he couldn't feel it, and that for two reasons.

The first one was, Alaric felt completely numb everywhere else on his back, saturated with the pain from the scar itself, the burning flesh, the itching edges of the wound, the throbbing in his skin... So he certainly wasn't going to feel even a flow of blood dyeing his shirt crimson.

The other reason was that even the pain from the reopened scar seemed dull compared to what his fingers were experiencing.

The first centimeters had been relatively easy, with only minor cuts apparing at the tips as he forced his way inside the wards. He suspected his ability to walk in despite his nature, that the barrier was definitely aware of, given its reaction to his intrusion, had much to do with the negating effect the seal carved in his flesh years ago had on magic of all kind.

It didn't make it easy for all that.

It hadn't taken long. Just a few centimeters, until his hand was completely in.

And then, outbursts.

The minor cuts on his fingers weren't so minor anymore. Ric had now several large and bleeding gashes running up to his wrist, and the pressure on his bones was so high he wondered if it was enough to break them.

Still, in the end, Ric let out a scream when his nails were torn apart and ripped from his fingers.

He stopped breathing for a second, but finally grabbed, not the witch laying on the bloodied floor, but the pendant, still hovering above her motionless form. The ominous jewelry stopped glowing altogether, and Bonnie stopped bleeding so much at the same time.

Yet, his hand was still being torn into shreds, as the wards had nothing to do with the pendant, and if he didn't do anything right now right here, he'd have no hand left within a short time.

So, still holding onto the thrice-damned jewelry, Ric grabbed the unconscious witch and dragged her out of her wards. She looked bad, but not threatingly bad, and when one lived the life he or Elena for example lived, it meant the world.

Letting himself fall onto the floor, the hunter watched as Caroline ran to her friend and forced her to drink a bit of her blood, so that she'd heal whatever the pendant had done to her.

After a short while, Elena looked at Alaric, meaning to thank him thoroughly for rescuing Bonnie when she and Caroline hadn't been able to, but then she spotted a glint of red on the floor. The young woman blinked, suddenly worried, and she remembered how hard going through the barrier had been to her somewhat-illegitimate-stepfather. But he was human, so surely...

She'd think about that particular aspect of the day's mystery once she'd be sure Alaric was alright.

Making her way away from the not-so-talkative-and-very-unconscious witch, Elena joined the hunter to check on him.

That was when the doppelganger saw it.

The pool of blood, and the bloody forearm. The lack of nails, which usually talked of chinese torture in movies. The white of his face, as if he had been drained of all his blood...

"Caroline, come here and fix him! Quick!"

The vampire glanced at her unexpectedly agitated friend and at the hunter sitting on the floor next to her, holding his left arm with his right one, and wincing slightly. With how Bonnie had bled only minutes before, she couldn't tell if he was bleeding too with only the scent, but the man was downright white as the chalk of the wards.

Caroline checked Bonnie was still alive, and joined the two others.

"What's the mat... What the hell happened?!"

She was eyeing the bloodied limb with a bewildered look on her face, still unclear about how they had gone from The Jungle Book to Bonnie unconscious and hurt and Alaric even more wounded.

The young vampire didn't wait for the answer to her question, though, and just bit her wrist, before forcing it against Ric's mouth, who only complied, not even backing away from the disgusting taste of blood. Erm, disgusting for a human, of course.

She found it odd how the man was simply accepting it, without any reaction, as if it had no taste at all. She found it odd that he wasn't complaining much, despite the blood loss, despite the wounds that one minute before were eagerly pouring blood on the floor. She found it odd he had been injured in the first place.

Alaric held his breath as he watched the wounds disappear, but not the blood he had lost, making him look like a mad killer from a horror movie or something, covered in blood from head to toes. Not that it was the first time.

Of course, a mouthful of vampire blood could only heal so much, and his nails were still missing, but well, who was he to complain? The torn skin where the said nails should have been had healed, and that was better than nothing. Now, his hand just looked really weird, with no nails and all, but he'd put on some band-aids and no one would notice a thing.

Elena and Caroline waited a bit for him to get better, and then started assaulting him with questions.

Questions he'd rather not answer, but this time, he couldn't see an escape route. So he stayed silent, thinking of what to say, a thoughtful look on his face.

Someone coughed not far away, and they all turned to see Bonnie spitting a bit of blood.

"You're alright?!"

In a flash, a frantic vampire was next to her friend, and the witch tried a poor smile.

"I'll live."

Caroline gave her an tissue to wipe away the blood she had on her face, and Bonnie took it gratefully. The teenage vampire helped her to the sink, where they made numerous failed attempts to get the witch clean of every red stain possible. It took a while, Bonnie's coordination being a bit shaken for now, but in the end they managed.

When the two went back to Elena and Alaric, still sitting on the floor, the witch looked really soaked, but not bloody in the least, and that counted as an improvement.

As she sat down too, Bonnie's gaze fell on her doppelganger friend, still holding onto the hunter's arm as if her life – or, more likely, his – was on the line, and as a consequence, she ended up staring at the blood-soaked history teacher sitting in her living room.

"I guess I owe you a thanks."

It was clear he had been the one to pull her out, because he was the only one bloody enough to have done that. And the young witch was pretty sure most of the blood was not hers.

How he had passed her wards, she wasn't sure. But it confirmed her doubts. He wasn't human, or, at least, not only human, or he wouldn't have been in this state. Alaric Saltzman had overcome her barrier, and the price for his action had come at a high price. How lucky they had had a vampire ready to play blood bank... which, in itself, was a pretty ironic sentence, by the way.

The hunter waved a "It's nothing" at the witch, and everyone got to admire the left hand with no nails. For a moment, Bonnie thought she was going to puke.

Elena stared at her friend for a long time, trying to gauge if she was really okay, and apparently she came to a divided conclusion.

"Did you see anything?"

Bonnie nodded, thankful for the change of conversation.

"The pendant has kept in its magic every supernatural being that ever touched it. I had seen many already, when a woman touched it, early fifteenth century according to her clothes, give or take, and it just blew up in my mind, kind of..."

The witch gazed into nothingness for a second, then shrugged and continued talking.

"The first possessor was a witch, she's the one who made it. A blond woman, powerful enough, I believe... Then I saw several children, and I'm not sure, but I think we know two of them. Klaus and Elijah. Maybe she was from their village, I don't know. One of the children took the pendant at the woman's death, and at that time she had become an adult woman. She kept it for centuries, but sometimes she let someone else take it, maybe only to get a look, or because they needed it for some spell. The others... I've seen you, Elena, but also Katherine, and at least three other women with your face. I guess Katherine wasn't the first doppelganger... I've seen Elijah and Klaus adult, I've seen Stefan, several times, and, if I didn't know any better, through the whole millenium. And then I saw this woman..."

Bonnie was now staring intently at Alaric.

The hunter didn't like that at all.

"I don't know why, but when this woman took it, the pendant... it sort of died. As if the magic had disappeared, just while she held it. And it didn't like that I got to see that. Maybe it has to do with a weakness, after all, the blasted thing almost has a consciousness of its own."

Ric refrained from shifting under the witch's suspicious-though-not-aggressive glance. Why was she looking at him like that already?

The teacher was sure he was going to regret it sooner or later, but he asked.

"Was there anything else you can say about that woman who caused the pendant to black out?"

"Actually, there is."

Bonnie pointed at him.

"When you grabbed it, it blacked out too. That's when it stopped fighting with my mind and magic."

Great, Ric thought. Now, he had the intrigued looks of Caroline and Elena to add to Bonnie's suspicious one.

"This woman, she was one of your kind, wasn't she?"

A puzzled doppelganger and a wondering vampire exchanged a look, turned a bit to look at their witch friend, and went back to staring at Alaric. Elena was the first to ask, half-believing her friend couldn't be wrong, almost waiting for the moment the history teacher would admit to being an alien. After all, they already had vampires, witches and warlocks, werewolves and doppelgangers, they surely could afford an alien. Even if it sounded ridiculous.

"'One of your kind?'"

Plutonian, certainly. Or maybe he was from outside their stellar system. Would they have been able to have a baby, Jenna and him, if he was an alien, and if Jenna hadn't died? Interesting question. Now, what kind of being would the baby have been born as?

Noticing her thoughts were going astray, Elena brushed them aside, but didn't stop arching an eyebrow at Alaric for all that.

The teacher looked unwilling to answer at first, but he finally decided he had nothing better to do than to speak the truth about the Saltzmans, the Falkenbachs, and a lot of other things.

"I'm cursed. It's a family thing."

The three teenage girls / vampire / doppelganger / witch / utimate-supernatural-feminin-team-with-a-knack-to-guilt-trip-you-into-doing-anything-they-wanted didn't say a word but went on staring at him expectantly.

So he told them everything about the Falkenbachs, he told them about the bank, and in the end, they only told him it wasn't his fault if his family was one hell of a cursed one.

"Well, I know, but that wasn't what they were thinking when I went back to high school..."

"They knew?"

"My face, though hidden and bloodied, had been in seven newspapers or so. Those who knew me well enough recognized me. Everyboby knew, but no one would say anything. Ever. Not with my family being who they were."

And so, the secret wasn't one anymore. Oh such a bitter thought...