A.N.: Hi! So, there were some questions asked: nobody knows about Giulijah; Uncle Joshua will be hinted at until a future sequel but will play an important part of the story; oh, and Gyda is indeed Elijah's daughter. His only surviving child.
Dangerous Beauty
14
Liz
The Sheriff being held in the dungeon with "food-poisoning" definitely put an edge on the second half of their spring break. It was unavoidable, much as Giulia tried to put it out of her mind. Because…she was ashamed.
Liz knew, and Giulia was embarrassed. There were few people in the world – still living – whose opinions she actually cared about, and whose respect she sought. Caroline's mother was at the very top of that list.
And because of what Liz had learned in the cellar, everything had changed. Everything Liz had thought she knew about Giulia's family – about Giulia herself. Every memory Liz had of them now had to be drenched in doubt. She had to be wondering just how deeply the betrayal went – and how Caroline's proximity to her family had caused Caroline's…death.
Giulia couldn't bear the idea that Liz might blame her for Caroline being turned. She had every right to – from the outside it looked as if Stefan and Damon were the only vampires in town and Giulia, she was their protector. When the shock wore off, and Liz started looking for someone to blame for Caroline's transformation…would she blame Giulia? Think that everything about their relationship was based on a lie? For how long had Giulia been lying to her? Besides Caroline and Damon, Liz was probably the person Giulia loved more than anyone – certainly she often respected Liz more than she did Damon.
And would Liz's opinion of Giulia's dad, a man Liz had loved and respected and been friends with all her life, alter posthumously because of what Liz had just learned. That Zach had been bound by family-loyalty to protect Damon and Stefan. Two vampires who, together, had killed their fair share of Founders, some of whom were Liz's ancestors. And Zach had done nothing when Damon came to town, leaving a trail of bodies – bodies Liz had to clean up. She had the open investigations, the cold-cases piling up on her desk because of him.
And Caroline…
Had the man she thought was her friend really been the one to turn her daughter into something she believed utterly monstrous? Had Giulia brought him into their lives?
As Caroline dealt with her mother knowing her secret by planning, researching, cooking, rummaging through the basement, within eyeshot of the cellar-door but not yet brave enough to approach her mother, and generally driving everyone crazy, Giulia tried to stifle the feeling bubbling up in her stomach…the feeling of being afraid. Ashamed and sorrowful.
Even if Liz was going to be compelled as soon as the vervain left her system, Giulia didn't dare go down into the basement, even to just check she was okay.
She was too afraid that Liz would look at her as if she wasn't the person Liz had always thought she was. Because Liz's opinion of her was important to her, it always had been. Liz was the closest Giulia had ever come to a mother. And it mattered to her what Liz thought of her. She was afraid that she had…disappointed Liz.
"You can only find out one way or another by talking to her," Elijah said softly, lifting a few pieces of paper to see what Giulia was working on.
"But I don't want to find out," Giulia said, agitated and more upset than she had shown anyone but Elijah. She was fidgety and tired, sleepless again and probably annoying Elijah more than he would ever tell her. He had the patience of a saint. Or a thousand-year-old vampire to whom time meant nothing. "If I go in there and talk to her and she…she blames me – they're going to take away her memories but I'll still know. I'm still ashamed. It'll change things."
"You respect this woman," Elijah said softly, and Giulia nodded glumly. She did. Otherwise she wouldn't feel so conflicted, so ashamed about everything. She could do a lot of things without turning a hair – but to see Liz Forbes look at her as if she had lost all respect for her… Elijah sighed, picking up a pencil and smoothing a fresh page of the sketchbook she had thought to give him so he could keep sketching his jewellery designs. A polished wooden case featuring 240 high-quality coloured pencils rested, gleaming, on the coffee-table amid Giulia's books, magazines, paint and fabric swatches, notepads and the remote for the sound-system, their drinks, the little kitty snacks Elijah had been using to make an ally of Firenze, who now sat purring in Elijah's lap, getting hair on his $4,000 pants.
"I do," Giulia said unnecessarily. He could probably tell just by how unsettled she was.
"Just talk to her, Giulia… She sounds like a woman who would do anything to protect her family, her friends… There's no shame in protecting your family," Elijah said softly, with a gentle sigh, and a look in his eyes that said he didn't fully believe his own words.
She felt her eyes burning, too tired, hot and agitated and anxious. She wasn't usually a worrier but…this was Liz. "She is my family… Liz is the only mother figure I ever had. She's the person my dad would turn to when he didn't know what to do with me… I don't… I don't want her to be ashamed of me… And I don't – I don't think we should take her memories."
"Have you told the others what you think?" Elijah asked. Giulia shook her head tiredly, rubbing her sore eyes. "What has Liz been told?"
"Not much, I don't think. She doesn't want to see Caroline," Giulia said softly.
"Then you must talk to her," Elijah said gently. "If Liz won't see her daughter, you are the only person who might get through to her. Perhaps telling her everything might alter how she sees things."
"She's spent her life distrusting and fearing vampires," Giulia said quietly.
"The older generations have been known, on occasion, to amend their ways," Elijah said, with a playful little smile. Giulia, tired as she was, smiled back, leaning over to give him a kiss. "And with the motivation of protecting one's daughter…"
"She thinks her daughter is gone," Giulia said sadly.
"Then engineer a situation that allows Caroline to prove her wrong," Elijah said calmly. Giulia smirked. Engineer a situation…
"You mean manipulate Liz," she said, smiling. "I don't think that would help matters."
"Perhaps not," Elijah said, eyes on his sketchbook, pencil flowing lightly over the textured paper. Giulia sighed, pulling off her reading-glasses to rub her eyes, and set her work down on the coffee-table. She curled up tucked up by Elijah's side, and he turned his head to brush a kiss against her forehead as she rested her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes.
The intimacy of their relationship was…grounding. It was raw, unsettling, it gripped her by her marrow, but she had never felt more…free. More relaxed, open. She didn't have to pretend; she hoped Elijah didn't feel he had to either, but they were still getting to know each other. She had never felt like this, this combination of excitement and grounding calm, lust that hit her like a freight-train, a gentle intimacy that made her feel they had known each other for years, reassured by the simple fact of his presence nearby. And they had the game – she considered it foreplay. And despite himself, Elijah was enjoying it, too. After a thousand years what constituted as exciting?
He wasn't the skydiving type.
"What will you do?" Elijah murmured. "With Elizabeth Forbes."
"She's not my only worry," Giulia mumbled, cuddling up and sighing. Mason, Katherine, she constantly worried about Caroline, now Elijah himself, and added to it all, Liz. "But I'll think of something." She always did.
Elijah cuddled up to her, ankles crossed on the coffee-table, drawing in his sketchbook, cheek resting against her head as she dozed, trying to get rid of a stress-headache. She had so much to do that she just needed to nap. She would wake, refreshed and focused.
The hours seemed interminable, left alone with nothing but her thoughts, and the devastation of knowing what her little girl had become. A monster. Soulless, vile, parasitic. Her little girl… And she had heard it, the thing that now inhabited her baby, chatting with Giulia as they sorted through the accumulated junk Zach had only added to over the years, after teasing his parents about never throwing anything away. Perhaps more alarming than finding out her daughter had turned into a vampire was the realisation that everything she had thought she knew about the Salvatore family had been turned on its head. What did she actually know about Zach Salvatore? His death…and what had truly happened to Joshua?
She had asked Damon to keep Caroline away from her; for one day, Giulia stayed away on her own. She supposed Caroline had another committee-meeting or maybe a date or perhaps Damon had done as she had asked and was physically restraining Caroline from loitering outside Liz's new cell like a guard-dog, because she hadn't heard from her in hours. By the food she was being brought on a tray, she knew Caroline had still been around. And she couldn't bring herself to eat a thing. It was strange Giulia hadn't come down to see her – unconsciously she had sort of become a mediator between Liz and her daughter, gentling Caroline's moods and providing an emotional sounding-board for Liz when she feared she was messing up everything. She had liked to think Giulia could come to her with anything. She so often helped heal ruptures between Liz and her daughter, without even realising how intrinsic she was to their small, dysfunctional family. How much Liz had always valued Giulia's friendship for her daughter. Strong, decisive and compassionate, Giulia had always been the good influence, relaxed and self-assured, kind, building up Caroline's confidence, picking her up after every let-down when Caroline wouldn't let her parents near her, pretending to brush things off, burying her devastation.
The two had always been a matched pair, dark and light. Optimism and a spine of steel. Tempering each other, harmonising their more dramatic traits. Devoted to each other, fiercely protective. Liz saw Giulia and Caroline together and was thrown back to high-school. Giulia had never reminded Liz of Zach, not even really of her mother Gianna, whom they had all known for so little time before she was gone, staggering and beautiful and running circles around Zach. It was Joshua she thought of when she saw Giulia, all easy confidence, sharp and deeply devoted.
But after the night and a full day had passed, Giulia appeared. She was quiet, but she didn't have the same unnatural light-foot that the vampires did, and Liz heard her coming. There were few times in her life she had been truly scared – when Logan Fell had kidnapped Caroline had been the last real time. The shock of what had happened down in the Lockwood cellar had started to wear off, left with nothing but time to sit and think. Feet away from where her friend had been found with his neck snapped – by his daughter.
She remembered Giulia when the Sheriff's Department had responded to the call. Giulia's phone-call. Damon and Stefan hadn't been anywhere near. Giulia had found her dad here in the basement. She had been so quiet, so calm and closed-off. Liz knew Caroline like the back of her hand, knew when she was keeping secrets, when she was upset, when she was deeply unhappy, when she was hiding something bad or trying to do something sweet. Giulia was something else altogether; she had always been the hardest to read. People only ever saw of Giulia what she wanted them to see – something she had learned from Zach. Something too like Joshua for Liz to ever ignore. She worried about Caroline before she even woke up every morning – since Zach's death, anxiousness over Giulia followed swiftly. Because she never knew what was going on in Giulia's head. That worried her more than a lot of things.
Giulia appeared, quiet and dressed for the sun, a hairband around her wrist, long hair falling in front of her face. She carried a tray loaded with Liz's favourite sandwich from the good diner downtown, a bag of Ruffles, an iced-tea and a cupcake. That had Caroline written all over it, and Liz stared from the perfect swirl of powder-pink frosting to Giulia, who set the tray down on the chair by her cot, retrieving an old wicker basket full of things.
"There's an old CD-Walkman and Caroline brought over your favourite CDs," Giulia mumbled, an instant tell something was wrong. If Giulia wanted people to know something was up, she was more than capable of letting the walls down – she just rarely did. Like her dad she was completely self-sufficient, emotionally reliant only on herself, physically capable and undemanding. "And…there's Gulliver's Travels, I know that was on your book Bucket List last summer…"
She didn't raise her face, didn't meet Liz's eye. That wasn't Giulia. It was one more indication how warped everything had become. Giulia had never been afraid to approach her before. She said softly, "I'm surprised you haven't come to see me."
Giulia fiddled with the hem of her dark sundress. "I didn't want to."
"Why not?" Liz asked, surprised. She often forgot Giulia was only seventeen; she was fearless and mature and motivated. Liz had been worrying she was headed to a severe psychotic break when the walls she put up with her intelligence shattered from overwork. She'd seen brilliant people burn out far too quickly when they were put under severe pressure, the way Giulia, she imagined, had been under strain since Stefan and Damon had come to town.
"I couldn't bear you looking at me differently," Giulia said softly, in a voice so quiet and young, suddenly she was seeing the seventeen-year-old again. The one who painted her toenails with Caroline, created a voodoo doll at the summer Hay Maze to punish Tyler Lockwood, was teased by her friends for falling asleep during Nicholas Sparks movies, fell asleep during her math classes at school, rolled her eyes but grudgingly accepted that Caroline had signed her up to be Student Council Treasurer. She gave a weird little shrug, turning away in visible discomfort. Giulia's poker-face was so good Liz wished she could have used her to train her guys at the Sheriff's Department how to interview suspects. She'd never give anything away. There were few ways Liz knew how to get Giulia to open up.
One had always been to initiate a conversation by asking about her dad, a man Giulia had loved more than anyone except perhaps Caroline. She had been sitting in this cell, reflecting how it had always made the fine hairs prickle on the back of her neck, knowing this place was down here, that she had to come down here with Zach to pick up the vervain delivery for the Council… Watching the coroners struggling to wheel Zach out of this cluttered cellar on a gurney had replayed in her mind so many times, trying to reconcile the situation in her head, how she had thought his death had occurred, and her dread now that she had discovered the horrifying secrets of the Salvatore family.
The innate detective in her wanted to ask – couldn't bear the answers, but needed to know. Part of her was relieved they were going to compel her to forget her memories of all she had discovered since Mason suggested he spike the lemonade with vervain. The other part, the Sheriff part, the protective mom and community leader duty-bound to protect people, wanted to know, to understand everything. What had happened, what answers could she now find to questions she hadn't even known to ask? The mysterious disappearances, the animal-attacks, that gruesome murder in Grove Hill, cold-cases she had inherited from her predecessors, each as frustrated as the last at the lack of answers.
Joshua's Missing Persons file was one she had returned to more and more often as things had deteriorated between her and Bill – the one she had turned to when Zach came to her at the Sheriff's Department, three years out of the Academy, to report his brother as missing. They'd tracked his beloved Impala to a highway heading toward Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, covered with parking-tickets. She wondered whether Damon and Stefan Salvatore had been anywhere near Philadelphia when Joshua had vanished into thin air.
To learn Zach's death might not have been an accident, to think that Joshua may have been dead long ago and that Zach might have been forced to protect those responsible for his murder because of family duty…it was too appalling to think bear thinking about. But Giulia had a gentle candour, people tended to listen to her when she spoke; as long as Liz was still under vervain, not compelled to forget everything, Giulia might honour that Liz now knew the secret, tell her the things she desperately needed to hear to at least make sense of some of this mess.
"What happened to your dad?" she asked softly, as Giulia turned to leave the room. She paused, eyes glowing in the dim light of the murky, cluttered corridor. For a brief moment, her expression flickered. Her tongue swiped along her lower-lip, eyes bright, thinking quickly.
"If I told you that, I'd…have to start at the beginning," she said. "Tell you everything, a century and a half of history. The town history that…we, the Salvatore family, have kept from everyone. And…I don't think you really want to know, not if you're going to have your memories buried by compulsion."
"Why wouldn't I want to know?" Liz asked quietly. The way Giulia's mind worked was a wonderful, scary thing. Listening to her chat with Caroline always surprised her, amused her. She was far too quick. Zach had always known that – Liz sighed internally, recognising why Zach had felt it so important Giulia sit in on Council meetings.
"Because if you knew everything, you wouldn't want to forget," Giulia sighed softly. "You'd want to use what you know to protect the town. And…I can't change Damon's mind if he feels it's safer for everyone if you don't remember." She said it sadly, almost tired, with that extraordinary insight she had always possessed, the ability to guess people's motivations, plan twelve steps ahead. She would make a fine detective. Maybe FBI. She wondered briefly how many unexplained, gruesome deaths were the work of her vampire relatives.
Liz frowned subtly, watching Giulia. She didn't look like she was acting out of fear of Stefan or Damon; and Liz knew her too well to believe she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. She was too aware. She'd seen Giulia arguing back, rolling her eyes, the same girl she had always known, except now Liz was seeing what Giulia had always known. Reflecting, it explained a lot about Giulia's attitude, her easy confidence, her thoughtfulness – and her devotion to looking after Caroline.
"Giulia…please," Liz said softly, eyeing the floor outside her cell. She had been fixated on the place Zach had been found, dead, by his little girl. How could Giulia still bear to look at Stefan and Damon, surely they had been involved…unless they had compelled Giulia to overlook that they had been the cause of her father's death – but, she recalled…Zach hadn't been drained of blood. Had it not been them? "Your dad was my friend. Since we were babies… What happened to him?"
Giulia sighed heavily, glancing into the corridor, then licked her lips, reached into the wicker-basket. She picked two crystal tumblers out of it, and a squat bottle of bourbon. Liz's favourite, the sweet, slightly peaty one she always associated with Joshua, sneaking it behind the bleachers at pep-rallies, by the old well, the good stuff his dad taught him how to drink after one too many trips to New Orleans. Joseph and Doll Salvatore, oh, they loved a good party. And a smile curled the corners of Liz's lips as she watched Giulia casually pour a couple fingers of bourbon into each glass. Even if Zach had always been the quiet one, the introvert, some spirit of Doll and Jo and Joshua had lived on in Giulia. Liz was not unaware of Giulia's more controversial habits – usually, she turned a blind eye because Giulia was always the one who sobered up the instant anything happened, taking charge of the situation, looking after her friends. She didn't know how many times a legless Giulia had managed to successfully sneak a drunk Caroline into her room after curfew, hiding Caroline's hangovers so Liz wouldn't think less of her daughter because she knew how important it was to Caroline not to be that girl. The last few months, Giulia Salvatore had gotten incredibly good at pretending to be sober.
"So, imagine it's 1864," Giulia sighed, handing Liz one of the tumblers, and sat herself down on the cot beside Liz. She had to hand it to Giulia, she was a wonderful story-teller. Unbiased, truthful, but entrancing, she half-believed everything Giulia told her, starting with an orphan girl's arrival in Mystic Falls after Atlanta had burned. The twist on the Lockwoods' involvement; the real reason for the fire; and why Damon had returned to town after one hundred and fifty years. She told Liz about the origins of a brotherly feud that had spanned decades and multiple continents; of Giuseppe Salvatore shooting his own sons in the back, his untimely but not underserved murder at the hands of his younger-son. The choices Damon and Stefan made with their diets – horrifyingly, why Stefan chose to drink animal-blood, as she had witnessed in the Lockwood cellar. It was a story, told in sequential order, the details too rich, Giulia's delivery too tired and honest to second-guess, making her head spin, but she listened, not interrupting. Just let Giulia talk. Once she had started, Liz wondered if she could make herself stop; and it occurred to Liz that since Zach's death, Giulia had had no-one to share this secret with. This intense family-history.
Oh, Elena Gilbert knew, she was told. Giulia had actually called her a 'terrier', in her stubbornness and refusal to give up hunting until she got to the bottom of the mystery that was Stefan Salvatore, the quiet loner who had come to town and made waves at Mystic Falls High, brief star of the football team, dating the once popular, now-orphaned beautiful Elena Gilbert, cousin to Giulia Salvatore, the girl everyone thought couldn't get any cooler, with her vintage car, her creepy mansion, her cheekbones and eyes. And once Elena had learned the secret, others had started to unfold. Bonnie Bennett was a witch – just like her grandmother, who had sat on the Founders' Council longer than Liz had been alive. Jeremy Gilbert had discovered the secret when a little vampire Anna he had been dating had put things into play to get her mother out of a mystically-sealed tomb – a tomb full of desiccated vampires Giulia had put to flame to ensure the safety of the town, after releasing two and realising the girl Damon had been trying to save, the girl he had loved for a hundred and fifty years, had never been inside it at all.
She answered a lot of questions Liz had had over the last few months, disappearances she knew about, confirming some she didn't – the vampire Logan Fell had been killed not by Damon or Stefan but by vampire-hunter Alaric Saltzman – the strange deaths, the farmhouse fire outside of town, Vikki Donovan's fate, John Gilbert's attack. Tyler Lockwood's accident; Caroline being put in the hospital – Richard Lockwood's death. Giulia explained her father's death in a detached way, calm and tired. She blamed both Salvatore brothers, and Elena Gilbert for being Stefan's motivating factor in trying to desiccate Damon in the very cell Liz was now being held.
"You still stand by them, protect them?" she frowned. "They're still your friends."
"Damon is," Giulia corrected on a sigh, plucking at the fabric of her sundress absently. "Stefan and I have never been close." Because he was a vampire who ripped people apart if he fed on human-blood, and he had always been anxious about her fragility as a human child.
"But they killed your dad," she said softly.
"I know. But I don't want to spend my life angry at them," Giulia said softly. "Destroying my life over it… I don't think Dad would want that, ruining my own life trying to avenge his death." Liz sighed; she was absolutely right.
The story continued. The revelations about Elena, her biological parentage – Liz had already known Grayson and Miranda had adopted the abandoned baby when her teenage mother disappeared shortly after delivery, but had no idea the child's father was John Gilbert. But that was typical John – always relying on his older-brother to clean up his messes, pushing away any responsibility and swaggering off, superbly arrogant. And Elena's biological mother was Caroline's history-teacher Alaric Saltzman's dead – vampire – wife, a professor of parapsychology at Duke; Damon had turned her, at her request, leaving Ric Saltzman's world spinning, bent on finding her – finding the vampire who had killed her, hidden her body. Until they all realised Isobel was "still, technically-ish, alive," Giulia sighed, with a tiny grimace.
In tune to the very subtle emotional tells of her daughter's best-friend, a girl Liz had always looked on with a deeply maternal instinct, she saw the morose dip to Giulia's lips, the way her eyes shadowed, and she knew, even telling the story of how Elena, who had lost her parents in one devastating accident, had been given another chance with an undying birth-mother and a biological-father who had been on the periphery of her family since birth, working with the Founders' Council to ensure the little girl would always be safe from the monsters who went bump in the night, had taken its toll on Giulia. There had to be some lingering resentment, a feeling of unfairness, that Elena had been handed another set of parents to replace the old ones, when Giulia was a girl who had never known what it meant to be hugged by a mother. No mother, no brothers and sisters, an introverted father whose own brother had disappeared into the ether over twenty years ago. The two of them alone in this creepy old house with nothing but monsters.
The one thing Giulia seemed uncomfortable talking about to her was Caroline. But she seemed to force herself to, possibly trying to enforce on Liz that… "It wasn't her fault."
"Then whose is it?" Liz asked tersely. Giulia sighed, glancing at her.
"A lot of people's." The story went on. After Caroline had been wheeled into recovery following Tyler Lockwood's accident, Damon had slipped Caroline some of his blood to ensure her survival. That surprised Liz, and her mind flew to how Caroline had been turned into a vampire – "simply ingesting vampire blood doesn't turn you, any more than a vampire biting you would. It actually heals you."
"So then how are people turned into vampires?" Liz asked, frowning. The journals mentioned nothing on this. But listening to Giulia she realised just how out of date, and out of touch, the journals were. Giulia had explained how Damon, Stefan and even Caroline could walk in the sun without pain or death, but she doubted that vampires had evolved as a species since the Civil War. Fundamentally the dead were incapable of evolution.
"Like Buffy said, it's a whole lot of sucking – you have to die with vampire-blood in your system," Giulia sighed, replenishing Liz's glass, opening the bag of Ruffles she had brought in for Liz; while she had listened, Liz had consumed her favourite sandwich, too distracted not to realise Giulia was manipulating her out of her hunger-strike. "When you wake, you have to either feed on human blood and transition into a vampire, or you die."
"So Stefan and Damon…"
"Katherine Pierce had been slipping them blood for weeks, compelling them to forget – well, compelling Stefan. Damon wanted to turn, at least when he'd thought he would be spending his eternity with Katherine," Giulia said. "When he and Stefan tried to save Katherine when the Founders rounded up the vampires, Giuseppe Salvatore shot them both in the back… When Damon thought Katherine had burned in the fire, he was ready to die. Stefan transitioned first; then he made Damon."
"And…?" Liz trailed off, couldn't bear to even say her daughter's name out loud let alone think of the implications.
"Katherine Pierce showed up at the Lockwood mansion during Richard's wake," Giulia said, and her expression turned very dark. "Waltzed right in, knowing no-one could do anything. She'd already masqueraded as Elena, kissing Damon, stabbing John Gilbert. Apparently she met Stefan. Words were exchanged. None of them good. Bonnie told Katherine about Damon having given Caroline his blood, not even realising she wasn't talking to Elena… After Stefan pissed her off, Katherine killed Caroline, knowing she'd go into transition."
"And…she fed to complete the transition?"
"Caroline told me the guy in the next room was having a fresh blood-transfusion," Giulia sighed. "She could smell it. I mean, vampires don't have to kill to feed. Most don't, especially these days. Too much bother to hide the bodies. But compelling people to forget after snacking on them is easy… A lot of vampires survive off blood-bags if they're trying to keep a low-profile. It's not as good – imagine living off microwave Salisbury steaks, when you could go to the steakhouse and have a juicy medium-rare butter-seared filet." Liz stared at Giulia; perhaps the second glass of bourbon wasn't a good idea, but her mind was spinning – the sheer amount of information she was trying to absorb was staggering. Giulia had warned her, a hundred and fifty years' worth of history. "But they can exist without leaving a trail of bodies."
"But Damon does kill."
"Not recently," Giulia said. She sighed heavily. "He only did when he first came back to town to make Stefan anxious. He didn't think he'd be sticking around, otherwise, well…he can be very discreet when he wants to be."
"So I've learned," Liz said drily. She gazed at the entrance to her cell, the place Zach had been found dead bathed in insipid white light from flickering old bulbs. There was a lot to process – too much. And Giulia had been right, as she so often was with Caroline; Liz didn't want to forget anything. All she had learned from Giulia was far too valuable in the protection of her town, a community she had pledged her life to safeguard. If anyone could say anything of her, it was that Liz Forbes had always been passionate about upholding the oath she took when she graduated the Academy. Not out of a sense of obligation – it was personal for her. To protect people. Catch the bad-guys. See her community thrive. In a self-serving way Damon had often helped her do that, hunting Logan Fell as much a personal vendetta as his civic duty, trying to ingratiate himself with the most approachable of the Council members by saving her daughter from a manic, spiteful vampire. The number of disappearances and deaths had dropped off remarkably in the last few months, they had started to hope they had skated through the bad patch. Until John Gilbert had arrived, stirring everyone up, arrogant and slimy, getting everyone riled and panicky again.
She sighed. "So this Katherine woman… She's dangerous."
"Very," Giulia sighed. "Five-hundred years old, and strong. Vengeful, selfish, manipulative and heartless. She'll not let anyone get in the way of her getting what she wants."
"And what does she want?" Liz asked.
"She claims she wants Stefan," Giulia said, in a suspiciously light tone.
"And you don't believe that," Liz guessed. Giulia's smile was ironic, and she shook her head. Liz sighed, resting back against the wall. The second dose of bourbon had been ill-advised. "You think she and Mason Lockwood are up to something."
She recalled the impossible details Giulia had provided on the Lockwood family legacy – a history they themselves had forgotten. It explained the Mayor's death, why Tyler had lost control of his car that night. At least, as much as them bearing a latent werewolf gene in their DNA could explain anything! According to Giulia, the device John Gilbert had used on the vampires they had known were coming to town was designed not just to incapacitate vampires – it had been spelled by the witch, Sheila Bennett's great-grandmother Emily Bennett to cause debilitating pain to any supernatural being. According to Giulia, the spell caused such creatures to suffer constant brain aneurysms to the point of unconsciousness – being immortal, vampires would heal, but when it was done over and over again…
"No, I believe Katherine is up to something," Giulia said. "She's just using Mason to get what she wants. As soon as she has it, he's utterly expendable. Katherine doesn't believe in loose ends."
"So a vampire is using a werewolf for some reason," Liz frowned, shaking her head on a sigh. This was too much. She blurted, "How can Mason be a werewolf? I watched him grow up!"
"It's a latent gene passed down through the Lockwood family," Giulia said. "I'm not sure I believe that the origin of the werewolf species is entirely Native American – there are instances of men turning into beasts all over the world – but according to Jeremy who heard it from Tyler who was told by Mason, the gene is triggered when you take someone's life. An accident or murder, either way, you turn into a wolf on full-moons."
"Richard and Tyler aren't werewolves, then," Liz sighed. This conversation was far more than she had expected; but she couldn't stop asking questions. Her mind was working too hard. "So George Lockwood used the vampires created by Katherine to mask his own murders on full-moons, and worked with Katherine to get rid of the vampires when she wanted to fake her death."
"And she gave George something he wanted in return," Giulia mused, "something valuable. I'm still reading the Lockwood journals to figure out what."
"Lockwood journals?" Liz blurted. "I thought the family lost those along with everything else when their plantation as burned to the ground."
"No, they just lied," Giulia shrugged. "Although I'm not sure anyone in the family actually read them until Richard and Mason's dad triggered the curse during the Vietnam War."
"He was killed in an animal-attack," Liz murmured. She remembered the day Richard had found out about his dad's death.
"I don't think Stefan and Damon had anything to do with that," Giulia said thoughtfully.
"No, he was torn apart, literally limb from limb," Liz said, clearing her throat. "So Mason is a werewolf. What does that mean?"
"I don't know," Giulia said slowly. "But I mean to find out." She gave Liz a sidelong glance, explaining, "Damon and Stefan both strangely seem to agree that killing Mason is the way forward – he knows about them, he's tried to expose them, get them killed, and he can't be compelled away. More than that, he's allied with Katherine. But I don't know… If the rumours are true, a werewolf-bite can kill a vampire. As long as Stefan, Damon and Caroline take precautions every full-moon, there's no reason we couldn't use Mason's presence as a deterrent to stop other vampires moving into town."
Liz glanced at Giulia, and after processing what she had said several times over, she smiled. Related as she was to vampires, loyal to the family legacy of protecting them, Giulia had nevertheless been raised by a man devoted to protecting the friends he had in his hometown, his daughter. Giulia had been raised with a very strong sense of right and wrong, of loyalty; she was too bright not to think about the possibilities, to examine the repercussions from every angle before acting. Giulia did not let her dad down.
"Do you intend to turn Mystic Falls into a sanctuary for supernaturals?" Liz asked, not unkindly. She was curious how Giulia's mind was working.
"Mm. No. Just safe for Stefan and Damon and Caroline," she said thoughtfully, shrugging. "I'm all but officially on the Council now, Carol has asked Damon to head it. He's the only viable option besides you, and you have your hands full with the Sheriff's Department…"
"Why do you say he's the only viable option?" Liz asked curiously.
"The others are idiots – not Meredith; she's medically curious about vampires, she doesn't buy into the hate," Giulia mused. "Carol never took much interest beyond wearing vervain. Pastor Young believes in Creationism, which is his right but it has nothing to do with vampires. The other Council members view it as more of a secret-society to feel superior over everyone else than any sort of real dedication to the cause… I think it needs a change."
"The Council?"
"Yeah. It's a bunch of entitled pricks swaggering in back-rooms sipping expensive liquor, getting a high off the superiority of knowing the secret of the supernatural – but their intel is outdated, their prejudice is horrifying and belongs back in the 1930s when lynch-mobs were still the rage," Giulia said, her eyes lighting up with that passion Liz knew well. "It's more a club to discuss how to keep big corporate businesses away from developing Mystic Falls and protect the interests of the select golden families than safeguard the entire community."
"And you, you would work with these…these people to keep the town safe?" Liz said, gazing at Giulia. She had to admit, listening to what Giulia had told her, knowing what she did of Damon and Stefan's abilities, the deterrent of a werewolf's bite making even Damon anxious, well…better the devil you know. Giulia glanced at Liz, looking sad.
"Do you know how difficult it is for Stefan and Damon? They can't settle anywhere for more than a few years before people get suspicious," she said softly. She sighed. "It'll be the same for Caroline… I want to make sure they always know they'll be safe if they come home – and make sure they know they'll be asked to ensure the safety of the town when they do. Reciprocity… Besides, Damon's far too territorial to let other people come and torment the people he likes to play with. And he's not all bad, you know… He really does respect you, Liz."
She didn't want to think about that for the moment; it was all too unsettling.
"You said vampires can…can turn off their emotions," Liz said thoughtfully.
"That's what they say. I'm not so sure."
"Wouldn't they know better than you?" Liz smiled.
"I suppose… From what I have seen of vampires without their 'humanity', they're actually just vicious little bitches," Giulia said, and Liz chuckled, eyeing the perfect pink swirl of frosting on that tempting cupcake. Caught for a brief second, thinking that Caroline had probably used the last of the butter and powdered-sugar in the house, she got a sudden chill. Caroline. "But I would think that the lack of emotions would translate to something like suffering intense depression. For example, love isn't the opposite of hate."
"Then what is?"
"Indifference," Giulia murmured. "I think love and hate are two emotions that branch out from indifference. The motivations from hatred and love are remarkably similar… Anyway, I believe vampires use their 'no humanity switch' to ignore their conscience. There was a time when turning off his emotions was the only way Damon could survive. Stefan turned his emotions off to not feel guilt. Emotions are heightened as a vampire, so it's not that they're evil because they react so strongly, it's because they feel with such intensity. Being a vampire doesn't change who a person is – it heightens every aspect of their personality, brings out their best traits, magnifies them…"
If Liz hadn't known her better, she might have thought Giulia was trying to mend things between her and Caroline. But she did know Giulia; that wasn't her style. When she got too frustrated by things, she'd explode with a well-placed, proverbial slap to bring them out of their drama.
She had given Liz the facts, as she knew them. Told them the history Liz had never had any idea about. Given her something to think about in this hell, something she could fixate on while trying to avoid the thought of Caroline…
And she did think about everything Giulia had told her, long after Giulia had traipsed back upstairs after promising to bring down War and Peace, a novel Liz had been determined to read since high-school.
She wished she had a pen and paper to write everything down, notes she could find later and decipher. But if her mind was wiped of the memories of writing them in the first place, would she start second-guessing her sanity, wonder whether someone had forged her handwriting. What she had been thinking, listening to Giulia's stories, half-agreeing with Giulia's idea of enlightening the Council and moving them in a different direction to better safeguard the town using the means at their disposal, would look to her, if viewed without the knowledge of the supernatural she had gained just from Giulia talking to her, as if someone was trying to manipulate her into altering things for the benefit of the vampires.
The vampires. Of whom Caroline was now one.
A.N.: Please review. I just love Liz so, so, so, so much. And I just watched the TVD episode where Klaus tells Caroline he was sorry to hear about Liz's death… Kinda love the idea of Elijah swooping in to help Caroline and the twins, since Klaus is disappeared from New Orleans (ugh, with Hayley – she'll be cropping up soon in this story, BTW).
