Phantom

3

Bonnie tried to get them to notice her, but even when she screamed their names neither of them reacted. She could see Damon holding the lifeless hand tightly but she could not feel it like she ought to have, a lingering tingle on her fingertips instead. She didn't know what had happened, she only knew that the nightmare that had swallowed her as she slept kept her hidden – invisible and muted like a faded memory in the back of the mind. However much she called, shouted, screamed his name he did not hear her tell him that this was the page in the spell book that he needed. With how strong Damon was he should have at least felt her presence in the atmosphere around him.

She could see something moving out of the corner of her eye, but when she moved to stare directly at it, the mass of darkness turned grey and disappeared. She didn't have to be told not to let them close enough to touch her; this nightmare, or whatever it was, had begun in the attic and up in there there had been many, many Ghosts, and when one had laid a hand on her shoulder it felt as if she died a little inside. Now they were following her everywhere, intent on contacting her again and she knew if she let them they would inevitably kill her. The intensity of the vibrations in the air spiked and she dodged the hand that had been not an inch from touching her skin.

"This won't work," Stefan said, even as he held the burning herbs between his fingers like Damon had told him to, "we have no witches to cast the spell. It won't work without magic, Damon."

The spell book Damon had... borrowed... from a witch a few centuries ago was splayed open on the floor. It's spine was cracked and falling to pieces in places but the writing was preserved enough for him to read it. The calligraphy was intricate enough that even after so long it was clear enough to read and almost as dark enough for the ink to not have even dried. He ran his fingers over the strange, elegantly written, words and wished he knew what he was looking for in the great volume.

Damon had had about enough of Stefan's remarks, but he could not pause in the incantation to tell him this – besides, he probably already knew he was only making things worse and he didn't want to give his brother the satisfaction of knowing that he was getting to him. He had to repeat this spell three times, and each section was at least seven lines long, and there were fourteen making up the entire spell. Why witches felt they needed to complicate things by writing these poems he didn't know, but as long as the spell worked he knew he could not complain.

Stefan felt the shift in the air even before Damon, which was strange since he had never been strong enough to have the extra-sensory perception needed to sense the spirits. Why Damon was not reacting he did not know, but even he could taste it in the air; it was the same kind as in the cemetery, it was the feel of the dead. Bonnie reached down past Damon's shoulder and touched the frayed edge of the old paper page. She pressed down as hard as she could until there was almost an indentation in the surface of the page, and Damon paused in the middle of turning over the page.

There was something about this one that tugged at Damon's intuition like a hook. He read over the page again, but the words still made no sense to him. They weren't even in English, but instead an ancient language without any Latin origins, but there was something almost physical stopping him from turning over the page.

In all this time that he had had it he never once tried to read from it. He was smarter than that, he knew the power that could be unleashed from a book such as this one, and the witch he had taken it from hadn't been practising white magic, or at least that he had known of. It had been her unrelenting darkness that drew him to her in the first place, and for a time they gloried in each other's darkest passions. But then, of course, he had had to kill her. She had tried to take possession of him one night, after thinking that she had convinced him that her intentions were pure, but he knew enough of her magic to know that there was nothing pure about her. He had ripped open her throat before she could even begin the second verse.

He traced the lines of the spell with the tip of his finger, moving his lips but not speaking the words, and knew that wielding such power came with a price.

Stefan placed the herbs beside Bonnie's head and stepped away into the shadows. Black magic was inherently draining, and Stefan knew he was not strong enough to even stand beside the ring he had drawn with the pail yellow plants.

Damon began to recite the spell out loud and the words seemed to come from his lips as one, the sound a continuous jumble of words, not making sense at all. Midway through reading it out-loud the second time, Damon began to fear that it would not work and trying this was just wasting time they couldn't afford to use if they then needed to find another method in which to banish whatever spirit had come uninvited into this body.

Nothing happened. Bonnie's body sat motionless in the chair, head bowed and ruby curls falling like a curtain over her face. Stefan found that he did not want to rub this failure in Damon's face, not again, but he had been right about there being no point in trying to cast a spell . Vampires were everything that magic was not, they were dead and death was the only thing they as vampires could create.

"There must be something else we can try!" Damon shouted hoarsely, his eyes burning not with tears but fierce, desperate conviction. He had to believe that there was another way, he had too, or else he would go mad . He would give up his soul, or whatever burned inside of him, to bring Bonnie back to life. He crawled to kneel beside Bonnie's body and stroked her cheek almost absently as he watched something dark move beneath her skin. If he could only pull it out of her he would; he would suffer whatever vengeance the darkness might inflict on him for that chance to save her before it was too late.

"Bite her." Stefan said, his voice full of that thoughtfulness that Damon lacked.

"What!" was his response, "How would that make things any better? It would just make things worse, Stefan. It's too dangerous."

"Maybe if you suck hard enough you could draw it out?"

Damon had to admit that his stupid younger brother might have a point. Could he 'suck' the evil out of her? What would he become then? He knew that there was no answer, and he knew that he did not care. Whatever the price, it was worth it. He bent down to her neck, and opened his jaw wide. He could do this, he knew he could do this, but that niggling feeling in the back of his mind persisted. It told him that there was another way in which he could draw the evil out, and he knew he would do it even despite the risk to himself. He would do it because he loved her and always would whatever he became.

He pressed his lips to hers and drank her in as if she were the finest wine. Moments passed before it happened, but his resolve never wavered. The darkness that had been inside her now part of his own, and he had never felt so good.

Bonnie blinked and found herself looking up at Damon, his lips curled up in that half-smile that she loved.

A/N: It's not finished yet. In fact, it's just getting started... ;-)