Phantom

6

It was almost an hour later before the evil inside him was sated – he could not have stopped before then, however much he wanted to. It had taken him that long to kindle the special energy inside him. The power he felt was unlike anything he had ever felt before, but it had come with a price. Bonnie lay beneath him, as still as she could possibly be while sobs rocked her. She wanted more than she wanted anything to be lost in that darkness she sometimes went to, anything to be away from here.

Stefan winced as Bonnie cried for Damon to stop, wanting to save her but not knowing how. He must think of something before the situation became worse than it already is, before it was too late to save her from death. He wondered even now how he could stand to watch Damon abusing her.

He watched as Damon pulled up his trousers, all the while saying something unintelligable to the pile of flesh at his feet, his eyes like hypnotic pools of onyx.

Bonnie felt as though she had been ravaged from the inside out, and the pool of blood she sat in seemed like evidence to back up that theory. She could not think of anything other than how much she hurt, how much he had hurt her, and each thought was like a blade to her insides. She wondered how she could have been so wrong about him when she had been so sure. Had he been playing her this whole time? Had he been playing them all? The expression on Stefan's face when she glanced at him told her that he was thinking this as well just as surly as if she could read his mind; Had they been played for fools, and how could any of them have seen this coming?

"Not bad, not bad," Damon said to Bonnie, appraising her as he would do an high-preformance car after taking a ride in it, "we should do that again..." He bent down, the toe of his boot spashing in the gore steming from her groin, and smiled at her as if he knew exactly what would happen next.

Nothing he could have said would have sent her heart racing like that did – nothing, not even if he told her that he would keep her prisoner here until she died or outgrew her usefullness, whichever came first. She had been waiting for the day when she would no longer be a virgin, almost desperately, but she had never once considered it to be like this.

There was a knock at the door and Damon laughed at what he could hear. There was a heartbeat, steady and strong, which meant that whoever the unlucky idiot who interrupted him was human. What could a human possibly do to him? He intercepted Stefan as he motioned to answer. With his luck it would the human Matt Honeycut, and there were things he'd much rather be doing than chatting with him.

When the door opened, however, what stood before him was not a man. She was tall and dark and as disturbing as ever. Part of him recoilled from her strangeness, but that part was buried deep in his subconcious. She was just a girl, just a human. What danger was she when he was the one with the deadly weapon? His teeth shone brightly as he smiled at her. "Meredith... what a pleasure it is to see you again..."

Meredith's expression of cold resolution did not waver one bit even as Damon's power washed over her. She had her defences up high so that not even Bonnie's sobs penetrated her concentration. She had spent the last hour before coming here meditating and her year's studying both the physical aspects and the mental of ancient Martial Arts was allowing her to keep him out of her head. The blocks were easy to keep in place around her, and so she could even smile as he struggled against her. Her smile dropped instantly when she saw Bonnie staring back at her, still concious but with blood in a puddle all around her. She didn't even have to ask who had done this, it was too obvious to miss.

"Get away from here," Stefan told her, as desperate as she had ever seen him, "there's nothing you can do."

Meredith shook her head minutely and took from behind her back the Fighting Stave she had thought to bring with her. She held it out infront of her like a sword, but Stefan could tell just by her posture that she knew it was far more than that. She smiled grimly, her eyes never leaving his face, "I will not allow this," she said in a resonating voice that was not quite her own, "I will send this evil back to where it came from."

Stefan blinked, confused, but Bonnie's whole body tensed with antisipation.

"What are you talking about?" Stefan asked, not understanding.

"You can try," Damon said silkily, answering Meredith with a grin, none of his usual hesitance when talking to her evident in his voice. Why had he been scared of her before?

She took a step forwards towards him and began to recite the verse that would summon her power. She felt the vibrations running through the shaft of her weapon like electricity and she waited for it to shock her.

"No!" Bonnie screamed, despite herself, as Damon lunged forward, grasped the stave in his hand... and the scene exploded in a burst of dazzling light that consumed everything and everyone as it spread outwards and washed over all of them.

TBC