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Chapter 4

Caroline stood in the entrance to the Salvatore library watching as Damon worked his way methodically through a bookshelf, his back turned toward her. She held little affection for the man, but there was no denying he was unfortunately attractive from all angles.

Extracting one large volume and rifling through it, he didn't spare her a glance while coolly asking,

"Do you have something useful to say? Or are you just standing there watching because I'm pretty?"

"How did you know she would run?"

Damon pointedly ignored the question and shoved the book back in place before moving onto the next shelf.

"You warned us not to give her the daylight ring yet. We didn't listen."

"How's that for novelty?" he muttered dryly, eyes trained on the volumes in front of him.

Caroline bit back a retort that wouldn't serve her purpose. "You were right, okay? I admit it. How did you know? Elena never runs away."

Damon made a derisive noise. "That would be novelty." He pulled out several ancient tomes, scanned them, and shoved them back. "Anytime danger threatens, Elena runs straight toward it all damn the torpedoes and let me die for my friends and family."

She had to admit that was an apt, if insensitive description. "So then why would she-"

"Because this time she's the danger, Caroline." His tone was withering. "And she's running as far away from her loved ones as possible."

She scowled, unable to argue the point. The thought that the evil vampire knew Elena better than Caroline, who had grown up with her, was unsettling.

"What are you doing?" She walked up the library railing and braced her hands on it.

Before she knew what was happening, Damon had vaulted over the railing and slammed her into the farthest wall.

"I'm not killing anybody," he hissed, fingers wrapping around her throat with brutal strength.

Caroline clawed at him, knowing she couldn't begin to fight him off as she once had when he attacked her father. This time the vampire was not only older but far, far angrier.

"I want to kill somebody." Before her eyes, Damon vamped out, his handsome appearance turning demonic as he shoved his face into hers. "If the streets of this town were bleeding, it wouldn't be enough for me."

She flailed, vision beginning to cloud as his grip tightened.

"Why is it that suddenly nobody else can count to three in our supernatural little family?" He jabbed his fingers into her chest as he elaborated. "Elena dying." Jab. "Turning." Jab. "Fleeing." Jab. "Has all the hallmarks of a Damon rampage."

He flung Caroline across the room, sending her crashing into a sofa. Before she could recover, the older vampire was on her, snarling.

"I want to kill, Caroline. But I can't. Because then Liz will show up on my doorstep all 'Help me, Damon, help me,' and that would be a distraction from finding Elena before she breaks down, feeds, and accidentally kills somebody. That's something she may never recover from emotionally. I can't allow that to happen." Abruptly, he released Caroline and sped back to the library shelves, resuming his previous activity. "You are a distraction. Go away."

Slowly, Caroline got to her feet, wincing as she reoriented several dislocated bones. Try as she might, she couldn't find it in herself to be angry. Stefan was the one Elena had loved for years and she'd put herself in peril repeatedly to bring him back from the edge where Klaus had pushed him. Yet he was off somewhere soaking in self-righteous pity, still insisting he'd done the right thing in honoring Elena's wishes even when they wound up leading her straight to an early grave.

Damon, the bad brother, the dark Salvatore with the reputation for callous cruelty, was the one turning the world upside down, book by book at the minute, to track Elena down and bring her back safely.

Caroline approached the bookshelves again, feeling Damon tense up as she neared the railing. She studied him for a long minute, considering the implications of him denying his bloodlust in order to focus on finding her friend.

"You really love her, don't you."

"Haven't you heard?" he sneered, slamming a book shut. "I'm incapable of feeling."

She sighed and decided the taste of crow was the only thing that was going to break this stalemate. "The other day you apologized to me. Turnabout's fair play."

Damon ignored her completely, total disinterest radiating from him in waves.

"You're still a total ass and a jerk and an overall danger to everybody. But." She jumped over the railing and grabbed the book currently in his hands. Damon's lip curled in warning but Caroline stood her ground. "I was wrong. You're not just after Elena because of the whole bad blood between brothers thing. You actually like love her love her."

"Duh." He rolled his eyes and yanked the book away, turning toward the shelf yet again.

Caroline stifled her impatience at his rudeness. She'd earned at least some of it. "I'm sorry."

Damon shrugged. "Apology accepted conditionally."

"Conditionally?"

"I know Stefan has been scheming to keep me out of the loop for obvious reasons. You guys have to have been meeting, but I haven't exactly been invited. With Ric gone, I no longer have an 'in' with the werewolf-hybrid-human-witch-ghost seeing groupies."

However well he couched it with sarcasm, Damon couldn't completely hide the loneliness in the voice. Caroline frowned, unhappy to have her perceptions of him so completely overturned. Lonely, loving Damon was so much harder to hate.

"You're Ms. Organization. Clearly, you haven't been sitting around doing nothing in the 48 hours since Elena went missing." Damon blew the dust off a particularly ancient volume and glared at the cover. "Tell me what you've been up to and all will be forgiven."

Caroline nodded. Fair enough.

"I have my mom checking for a paper trail in case Elena slipped up and paid for anything with plastic. Jeremy and Meredith are calling all the car rental places they can find in Virginia and neighboring states. Stefan was supposed to becalling hotels."

Damon raised an eyebrow. "Was?"

Somehow it felt like a betrayal telling Damon about his brother's consistent refusal to help with much of anything.

"He keeps insisting we honor Elena's choice and let her establish a new life somewhere else without interfering."

To her surprise, Damon didn't fly off the handle. "Naturally." He went back to his book browsing. "My brother is nothing if not predictably unpredictable. He let her choose to die, now he wants to let her choose to live. Meanwhile, Elena's undead in unfamiliar territory with nobody to show her the ropes of her new identity. But that's okay, because as long as St. Stefan lets her keep choosing, she'll never be angry at him."

"I never thought of it that way," Caroline said slowly.

He lifted a shoulder in mild disdain and continued with whatever he was doing, selecting books and then shoving them back again almost immediately. "Credit cards, car rentals, hotels. Have you called airlines yet?"

"Yeah. That's all Matt and I have been doing for the last two days. Elena's name hasn't shown up on any of the passenger lists yet. All the customer service departments are closed for the evening. That's why I'm here."

"Hmmm." Damon drummed his fingers on a shelf as he studied it closely. "What's Judgy's delegated assignment?"

"Uh ..." Caroline hedged. "Bonnie's sort of in between jobs."

Again, Damon seemed casually unsurprised. "Let me guess. She can't make up her mind about whether or not she's with Stefan on this."

"You can't blame her," Caroline protested. "Bonnie wants what's best for Elena. Except ..."

"Except now Elena's a vampire and Bonnie's not sure about whether she can handle yet another an undead bestie." Damon waved one hand and pulled an ancient leather journal free with the other. "More to the point, she can't decide if she can handle another fanged Mystic Falls citizen." His eyebrows drew together as he read the cover of the book. "But ... you're going to have to rope her into joining us anyway."

"Why?" Caroline craned her neck to peer at the journal but couldn't understand the writing.

"Tell her to bring her witchy stuff and self over to Ric's place ASAP." Damon moved away, striding purposefully toward the door before turning as if an afterthought had just struck him. "You better come too, just in case she decides to juju me."

"Why Alaric's place? And how will whatever's in that book help Elena?" Caroline asked in bewilderment.

"By now you should know, Blondie." He smiled, grim satisfaction hardening the planes of his face. "When it comes to the Gilberts and their individual calamities, the answer's almost always somewhere in writing."

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