A/N: Thank you SO MUCH for all of your fantastic reviews! :):):)

Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries belongs to L.J. Smith & CW.

Chapter 17

Elena woke up to the quiet sound of a humming engine. She blinked her eyes open, acknowledging with a frown that she was in the passenger seat of a car. The memory of being lifted off the ground, her hand being torn out of Damon's and everyone screaming flashed through her mind and she jolted upright, wondering where she was, her head snapping to her left to see who was driving the car-

"Matt?" She whispered with a grimace, staring at Matt in bewilderment, which only grew when he appeared to be completely oblivious to her presence, not shifting his eyes to her when she spoke.

Elena reached out to touch his arm, just to check if that'd work to attract his attention, but before she had a chance to do so, she saw Matt's eyes suddenly widen in absolute dismay. Following his gaze, Elena gasped at the sight of Rebekah standing in the middle of the road.

"Matt, watch out!"

She did not scream and yet her own voice reverberated loudly in her ears, as if it was playing from a giant movie screen behind her.

The car skidded across the Wickery Bridge and Elena automatically squeezed her eyes shut when the car broke through the barrier on the side of the bridge. She expected it to crash into the river within a split second-

But it didn't.

It just... stopped. Everything stopped. All the sounds seemed to have drown in eerie silence.

Elena opened her eyes and looked through the windshield at the motionless river below. It looked completely surreal. The river and the car which was, as she suddenly realized, hanging half way down, suspended in the air like a still image, about to hit the water that looked as if it was made out of dark, midnight blue paper.

Perplexed, Elena blinked, beginning to suspect that she was dreaming. Somehow it didn't feel like a dream. But she couldn't think of a more likely explanation.

Her eyes shifted to Matt and she wrinkled her forehead at the disconcerting sight. Just like the car and the river and apparently everything else except for her, Matt seemed frozen in time and space, his eyes wide, his hands gripping the steering wheel in a hopeless attempt to keep the car from crashing into the current.

For a second, the vivid memory of that night returned to Elena and she winced briefly remembering the water feeling her lungs, making it impossible for her to breathe, the pain splitting through her chest, through her entire body, until some kind of a fading connection between her and her surroundings broke; until everything stopped and the light, all the lights, all the light in the world, every last glimmer of it - went off.

Elena looked at Matt, relieved that there was no pain attached to this part of her memory at least, because he hadn't died that night.

Averting her eyes from Matt, Elena looked at the dark, motionless surface of the water below with a faint, warm, conspiratorial smile. "I've never seen you more alive." She hadn't really died that night either.

"That's quite terrifying."

Elena shuddered at the voice that sounded as if its owner was right next to her. After a quick inspection, however, she was certain there was no one in the car with her except for Matt who still looked more like a statue. Then again if it was a dream...

With a determined, vaguely annoyed frown Elena pushed the car door open and looked down at the murky waters of the river. If it was a dream – or even more so if it wasn't – she wasn't going to let herself be intimidated by it. She swung her legs outside of the car wondering what was going to happen if she'd try to stand.

Well, there was only one way to find out, Elena thought with an inward sigh and then, trying to hold onto some happy images in her head, she stepped out of the car.

"Must've been horrible to actually tumble down into this river."

To Elena's astonishment, her feet didn't land on the air. Neither did she fall into the water. Instead, she found herself in the middle of the Wickery Bridge and her eyes met Amanda's unsettlingly tranquil, calculating gaze.

"You?" Elena grimaced, immediately recognizing her, even though she'd only seen her once before when Amanda had splashed the vervained water over her in the hospital cafeteria. "What is this?" Elena asked, looking around. "A hallucination?"

Amanda tilted her head from side to side. "Something like that. A projection. Based on your memories."

Elena glared at her, the idea of someone getting into her head bringing back the very worst associations. And it didn't make her feel any better that Amanda seemed aware of that.

"I should probably start with an apology," Amanda said, taking a few steps toward her. "I really thought you were Katherine Pierce. I didn't know about the doppelgangers," she continued, ignoring the baffled and utterly indignant look on Elena's face. "That's very interesting."

"You have... looked through my memories?" Elena asked in a sharp, slightly uneven voice, her hands rolling into fists at her sides.

There was a glimpse of both cold triumph, but also simmering irritation in Amanda's eyes when she nodded.

"How dare you?"

"Don't get too agitated," Amanda said lightly with a faint sneer flickering across her face. "I'm in control of this right now," she said, glancing at their surroundings as if she was taking an assessing look around a furnished theater stage. "And if I get mad..." She looked straight at Elena, the tone of her voice changing to match the hard look in her eyes. "I may start erasing things."

xxxdelenaxxx

"Where are you going?!"

Alaric ran after Damon when ten seconds after having seemingly agreed they should sit down and decide what to do without giving in to panic, Damon had stormed to his feet and demanded car keys from Jeremy who, despite Alaric wordlessly communicating to him not to do that, had given the keys to Damon without arguing.

"I'm going to find them," Damon snapped, jumping into the car.

Alaric shook his head with a grimace, opening the passenger door and peering into the car. "How? We don't know where they've been taken!"

"Oh, and because we don't know we shouldn't bother checking the most likely places," Damon snarled angrily, starting the engine.

Alaric sighed in exasperation, glancing at Jeremy, Bonnie and Rebekah over his shoulder.

"If I could at least read these," Bonnie whispered through her teeth in frustration, glancing at the small grimoire she was still holding in her hands.

Rebekah's head turned toward her. "If reading is the problem, I can read these," she said, receiving stunned looks from everyone. "My mother was teaching me," she explained with an impatient huff.

"Well, reading is one thing-" Bonnie started, but Alaric cut her off in mid-sentence.

"Go somewhere safe and try to figure... something out," he said, looking at Jeremy who nodded quickly. "We'll be in touch," he said, checking if he had his phone with him, before throwing himself into the passenger's seat at the last moment before Damon drove off, the sound of screeching tires reverberating loudly in the garage.

xxxdelenaxxx

All kinds of heedless ideas were rushing through Elena's head as she was trying to think of something to do to get out of her current predicament. Even if it was some kind of a projection based on her memories and not her memory itself, it probably still meant that, technically, they were in her head. It was all in her head. So whatever Amanda was saying, she was not in control of it. She couldn't be. She was most likely bluffing... at least to some extent.

Drawing a sharp intake of breath, Elena closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, with all her might, on a different memory.A beautiful one. A safe one.

And to her relief, when she opened her eyes again, it seemed that her idea had worked, because she wasn't on the Wickery Bridge anymore.

"I just have to say something."

Elena looked around her old room and smiled, the smile almost bringing tears, happy tears to her eyes when she saw Damon, frozen in time and space but Damon no less, sitting on her window seat with her vervain necklace in his hand.

Moving between her memories instead of doing something more along the lines of "waking up" was probably not the greatest achievement, but at least Elena felt like she had made a step into the right direction.

She sat down on the window seat next to Damon and leaned her head on his shoulder. "I could use some advice on what to do next," she muttered with a sigh.

"What about: start listening to what I'm saying?"

Elena jumped to her feet, her eyes darting to Amanda who was standing across from her on the other side of her room.

"I like the wallpaper," Amanda said conversationally, scrutinizing Elena's room with her eyes narrowed.

"Get out of here!"

"I see you really don't understand."

A twinge of cold pierced through Elena when Amanda's eyes drifted away and then a quiet sound made Elena abruptly turn around, her gaze darting toward the window.

Her vervain necklace was lying on the floor below her empty window seat.

Elena frowned. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Everything seemed the way it was, except that... except that... Elena felt a sense of dread wash over her like an icy cold wave. Except that she couldn't remember what had happened. Why was her necklace on the floor?

"What did you do?!" Elena yelped, whirling around, unable to shake off a strong, painful feeling that she'd just forgotten something, that something had happened in her room, with her necklace, that she couldn't remember. She remembered brushing her teeth in the bathroom, walking back into her room... and finding the necklace on the floor. But there was something in between. There was something more to that. Something she could no longer remember.

"I did warn you," Amanda said in a low voice. "Start paying attention or I'll erase all of it."

"What do you want?" Elena asked, blinking back the tears, feeling as if she'd just lost something more than a memory. "Why are you doing this?"

"I want to help you," Amanda said in a strangely sincere tone.

"Help me? I don't need any help."

"Well, you think you don't, because you learned to adapt. That's what we all do when we have no other choice."

"What are you talking about?" Elena asked with a grimace.

"I can't turn you back into a human, but I could erase all of your vampire memories. You'd feel almost human. You could become one of us. An Augustine. You could continue your father's work and help us freeing the world from monsters. You didn't want to be a vampire. I saw that in your memories. You didn't make a conscious choice to become a vampire and you had a hard time learning how to be one."

"Stay away from my memories!" Elena said through her teeth interrupting Amanda's speech and hurling a stash of books at her.

Closing her eyes, Elena once again tried to focus on a single memory and when a moment later she looked around, she was at the Mystic Grill.

There was something chilling about everyone standing perfectly still, caught in mid-action, in mid-smile, the place very quiet despite the number of people gathered inside. Jeremy was sitting not very far away from her at one of the tables, a grim expression on his face. Elena glanced at him with a faint, sad smile, before her eyes shifted to Damon and she snorted weakly at the memory. Damon was standing right in front of her, doing "the eye thing" after she'd just asked him not to do it ever again.

"I need to get out of here," Elena whispered, cupping the motionless Damon's face in her hands and pressing a soft kiss to his still lips.

She stepped back and quickly looked around the Grill with wary eyes. She didn't know what to do. Running away and hiding was not a solution. She had to find a way to get out of this memory world, hallucination, projection, whatever the hell it really was.

She ran outside and looked around, wondering if maybe she should get herself "killed" in this memory world. It was a crazy thought, but she was pretty sure she had seen something like that in a movie once. Someone had to get killed in a dream to wake up. So maybe if she "died" here she'd regain her consciousness in the real world?

Then again it could be the opposite. Elena brought her hands to her head, quickly tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. She took a step forward, but then turned around at the sound of a car speeding through the town, heading straight for the Grill.

Elena's eyes widened when she recognized Damon's camaro and she was going to step out of its way, but the car was faster and it flew right through her before it crashed into the Grill, the explosion setting the building on fire before it collapsed, the remnants of it burning in flames.

"These may be your memories, but now I'm controlling them," Amanda said, suddenly appearing in front of Elena whose eyes darted from the charred building to her. "It will save us time and trouble if you finally accept that. And I'm sure that you'll thank me, eventually, anyway" she continued, undeterred, despite a disdainful grimace on Elena's face.

"Thank you for what?"

"For cleaning your memory. When you wake up, you won't remember what it was like to be a vampire. All of your memories of the time when you were a vampire will be wiped out. You won't remember anything past that accident on the bridge."

xxxdelenaxxx

"When did you become so whiny?" Rebekah asked sharply, giving Bonnie a narrowed-eyes look from above one of the grimoires.

"Hey, stop that, OK?" Jeremy said warningly, shooting Rebekah a glare before slumping on the ground next to Bonnie.

They'd decided to go to the abandoned building where Rebekah had said Enzo had mentioned having his headquarters and despite the fact that Bonnie wasn't too thrilled about choosing that particular spot for their safe harbor, she'd agreed.

They'd already spent almost an hour reading the spells with Rebekah and although the words were now making to Bonnie more sense than before, she was still very much at a loss as to what to do with them.

"I'm just saying that I don't know what to do with these spells. I don't know how to make them... happen, work, whatever. That's not being whiny. That's just the truth," Bonnie retorted, thrusting up her chin. She doubted if Rebekah even suspected that if there was anyone who was beyond annoyed with her lack of magic at the moment, it was Bonnie herself.

Rebekah rolled her eyes. "You can channel the power of some other witch to kick things off." Explaining the simplest things to everyone was beginning to really irritate her.

"Oh that is very helpful, thank you," Bonnie said sardonically, crossing her arms over her chest.

"What about all those witches in New Orleans?" Jeremy asked with a grimace, wondering if they should try contacting Verona, the witch that Elena and him had gone to see in Italy. At least they knew how to find her, which couldn't be said about Liv and Luke who had disappeared without a trace. Granted Caroline had snapped Luke's neck, but-

"Are you serious?" Rebekah's snarl interrupted Jeremy's train of thought. "How not up-to-date are you? They wanted to murder an infant!"

"Caroline mentioned some witch named Davina..." Bonnie started, vaguely recalling Caroline's rant concerning her and Stefan's involuntary side trip to New Orleans.

"First of all, I don't know if she'd be willing to help," Rebekah said after a brief moment of consideration. "Second of all, she's a newbie witch with anger management problems and I don't know if she even knows what she herself is doing."

"Well, she knew how to bring Mikael back," Jeremy observed in a grim voice.

Rebekah's eyes darted to him. "Because he told her how to do it."

"Alright." Bonnie raised her hands, silencing them both. "What about... channeling the power from my ancestors?" she asked, giving Jeremy an inquiring look, remembering him mentioning that. "Or... the spirits?" She frowned, not sure if the ancestors and the spirits weren't actually the same thing, but deciding not to dwell on all the details too much right now. She was barely navigating her way through all of these supernatural facts anyway. "Or nature? Or something like that?" Bonnie carried on with the questions, hoping that she'd eventually manage to say something that ignited a flicker of encouraging enthusiasm in Jeremy's eyes. But unfortunately, so far, he looked predominantly skeptical.

Bonnie groaned inwardly, every fibre of her body beginning to hurt out of mere sense of hopelessness. Ever since Damon had told her that it was her grandmother who had brought them back to life, she couldn't get rid of a nagging certainty that there must've been a reason for them to wake up in this particular place. Even if her Grams had done it unwittingly, there must've been a reason. It was like a missing puzzle piece, the very last one but also the one containing the crucial part of the picture. She just had to find it. She had to get it back.

She just had to get it back. Bonnie squinted into the distance, feeling a twinge of warmth pierce through her heart. She wanted to get it back. "If the situation was reversed, would you do it for me?"

She would, Bonnie thought a little breathlessly, the memory clearer than the last time, than the first time it had sprung to her mind. The muffled sounds of a party and Elena vehemently arguing with her... But she was not to be swayed. Because she would.

Bonnie drew a breath, glancing at Jeremy. They would've done it for her. They would've done everything for her and they had. Just like she'd done, apparently, everything she could've done. Maybe that was the real magic. Maybe that was where it was really coming from? From that clash between all the love she felt and all the love that was directed toward her.

"What happened with all that magic in Mystic Falls?" Rebekah asked, struck by an idea. "The Travelers' spell, I know," she said quickly before Jeremy managed to interrupt. "But all that magic couldn't have just disappeared. It's probably just... suppressed. Maybe you could access it?"

She looked at Bonnie and Bonnie blinked rapidly, not sure if she should find the question frustrating or flattering. How was she supposed to know?

"What about your niece?"

Bonnie's eyes shifted between Jeremy and Rebekah who looked positively puzzled.

"What do you mean?"

"Matt said she's been doing some magic."

Rebekah chuckled humorlessly. "Hope? Doing magic? What's that supposed to mean? She's six months old!"

"I don't know if channeling magic from a baby would be a good idea anyway," Bonnie said cautiously. "It sounds rather risky and dangerous."

Rebekah's mouth twitched and Bonnie wasn't quite sure what to make of a look Rebekah gave her, especially that it seemed to be accompanied by an odd, faint, exasperated yet warm smile.

But then Rebekah's expression changed and she straightened up, her eyes widening in sudden dismay.

Jeremy and Bonnie exchanged uncertain looks while Rebekah's eyes wandered around the empty space surrounding them. She stormed to her feet and put her hands to her head with a grimace.

"What if they weren't tracking me?" She whispered, still not looking at them. "If that Augustine doctor's daughter is a witch... What if they were after Hope?"

Jeremy gave her a confused look. "Why would-" he started by then remembered what Caroline had said about there being some kind of a prophecy that the baby would bring the destruction to all the witches. "But it sounds like the baby is a witch," he reasoned. "How can a witch bring destruction to her own kind?"

"If she can do magic in a place that doesn't have magic, because it's being suppressed there..." Bonnie muttered with a frown, trying to follow some vague thread of logic in her head. "Doesn't it mean that she can, somehow, absorb all that magic? Maybe that's what is meant by bringing destruction to all the witches?" Bonnie continued, a little rejuvenated by her ability to draw any kind of at least remotely sensible conclusions out of all those crazy pieces of information she'd been given. "Maybe she's able to take away their powers by absorbing all the magic?"

"But she's a baby, so if she does it, if she's somehow doing it already, she isn't doing it on purpose and she can't know how to use it." Rebekah sat down again, her head spinning with all the incredulous thoughts. "But maybe she could, I don't know, awaken your powers by absorbing them and then if you could channel all that power that she has-"

Bonnie didn't even have enough time to begin wrapping her mind around what Rebekah was saying when Jeremy cut in, not really making the matters much clearer.

"Of course she can't know what she's doing. It must be some kind of an unconscious, subconscious mechanism. Matt merely mentioned out loud that he didn't have a room that would be appropriate for a baby and your niece somehow made everything in the room appear. Maybe if he mentioned that she should give the power she has to Bonnie..."

"Wait. Did it ever happen with you?" Bonnie asked, giving Rebekah a questioning look, trying to be the voice of reason, feeling like they were just making overoptimistic assumptions. "Why would your niece 'make miracles' at the request of some random stranger and not her aunt? Or her parents? Or whoever else was taking care of her since she was born?"

Rebekah seemed to ponder this for a while with a frown until, suddenly, the grim, confused look faded off her face, replaced by a smile, that Bonnie thought was strangely, deeply wistful. "Because he's human," Rebekah said quietly and a little sadly, looking at the ground.

Then her eyes shifted back to Bonnie and Bonnie was once again caught in between two conflicting emotions... Unless feeling afraid and fearless weren't exactly conflicting emotions, she thought abstractly when out of the corner of her eye she noticed that even Jeremy smiled weakly at Rebekah's next words:

"This is going to sound cheesy, but... if there's one witch on this planet I wouldn't mind being all-powerful... it's you."

xxxdelenaxxx

"You do remember you're human, right?" Alaric muttered and cleared his throat in a grimly apologetic manner when Damon shot him an unamused sideways glance as they walked up the steps leading onto Dr. August's house's porch. "Just making sure."

"Well, this isn't going to stop me from applying appropriate methods of persuasion, if that's what you're asking," Damon said with a frown, knocking on the door so loudly Alaric considered suggesting that perhaps a more diplomatic approach could've been better, but the door opened before he had a chance to suggest anything.

A middle-aged woman with a friendly smile appeared in the doorway and as surprised as she looked at having visitors at this hour, she didn't seem upset at all.

"James! What a surprise!"

"It's Damon," Damon corrected rather brusquely and Alaric smiled as cheerfully as he could to divert Mrs. August's attention from Damon's tone. "Could we come in?"

"Of course!" Mrs. August said pleasantly. "Please, come in," she said letting them both in and Alaric just hoped it wasn't a trap, but rather only some vague, prospective son-in-law sentiments at play. "You wouldn't believe it, but we're actually eating dinner right now. My husband came back so late-" Mrs. August trailed off when Damon headed straight for the dining room in fast, decisive strides.

"Where are they?" He asked sharply right away, before Dr. August even had enough time to look up from his plate.

Mrs. August looked between Damon and her husband in confusion, while Alaric kept shooting wary glances around the room and into the hallway.

"I'm sorry," Dr. August started after a briefest moment of hesitation, slowly putting his fork away. "I'm not sure what-"

He stopped in mid-sentence while his wife stifled a bewildered scream when Damon grabbed a handful of the tablecloth and pulled it off the table so violently that all the tableware, dishes, porcelain cups and cutlery crashed noisily to the floor.

"Where are they?" Damon repeated and Dr. August moved, albeit rather sluggishly, his gaze from the mess on the floor to him.

"I truly don't know what you're talking about," the doctor said, rising to his feet, regarding Damon carefully, his voice so different from the voice Damon had got used to over the last three months.

The seemingly natural, eager friendliness was gone, replaced but cold sensibility and Damon couldn't help feeling a little ridiculously sad and disappointed by that.

"Your daughter seems to have kidnapped a few friends of ours," Alaric cut in, his voice low and even. "We thought you might know where she is. We just want to find them and leave."

Dr. August took a step around the table and made his way across the room. "I haven't seen Amanda in a few hours, but I can't recall her mentioning that kidnapping was on her to-do list for today."

"Well, a few hours ago I didn't know that killing people was on my to-do list for today either," Damon deadpanned.

"Don't you think it's a little preposterous, throwing threats around, while for all you know you may not be able to walk out of here alive?" There was something eerily calm about Dr. August's tone that Alaric decidedly didn't like.

"Ditto," Damon said in a grim, sing-song voice. "And I hope you're insured," he added, making a hushed explosion noise.

"That's twenty three centers worldwide, right?" Alaric said, taking a leap of faith and hoping that Enzo's research was correct and therefore would now helpfully validate their empty threats. "Not counting all the private residences," he added, looking around the room.

"She just wants to help them," Mrs. August blurted out, glancing at her husband whose eyes flashed, but he seemed to stop himself from silencing his wife.

Damon whirled around to face her. "Where are they?"

His voice was on the verge of breaking, his eyes glimmering with desperation that Mrs. August seemed to notice and she hesitated for a second before she said in a low voice:

"They're probably in the old hospital. It's a building right behind our hospital."

Damon stared at her for a second, not sure if she was driven by genuine compassion or perhaps just intended to send them into a trap, but either way, it seemed that she was at least telling the truth as far as the location was concerned.

He made to head toward the door, but then stopped abruptly in his tracks and gave Mrs. August a grimly irritated look. "There are no other buildings behind the hospital."

But Mrs. August didn't seem thrown off by his statement and after holding his gaze for a second added. "Not any that you can see with human eyes."