A/N: Hello, my old friends. I honestly have no concept of time. I honestly thought I had updated this story 6-8 months ago (still not great), but seeing the last time I touched this was a year go, my mind was absolutely blown. So, so sorry. Well, here is the latest. Enjoy, and thank you for reading!
The taste for the new year hung heavy in the air, but there was also something else attached to it. A foreboding sense of dread. People where still missing and no closer to being found, the Sheriff was fighting for her life, and a painful albeit brief paralysis had seized the entire community, which had people rushing to urgent care and/or their personal care physician reporting the same symptoms. Hands were tied, brains were stumped, yet the citizens of Mystic Falls carried on, because life demanded it move forward.
Yet the countdown had begun.
Retail and grocery stores were preparing for the New Year's Eve, selling festive glasses with the year 2013 emblazoned with glitter, noise makers, bags of confetti, black, white, and gold balloons, and of course bottles of champagne and sparkling cider. Tradition dictated that the masses convene in the center of town, at the clocktower to count down the final seconds of the year. Nothing would impede that.
And it was the kind of cover Esther, in the witch Lenore's body, would take advantage of. She had arrived, as promised, perhaps a day or so ahead of the agreed upon time, but she was here, and with reinforcements. Seven total, herself included, each equipped with a charm that would allow them to move around Mystic Falls without suffering the penalty of traveler magic.
Reaching inside her coat, she pulled out a velvet pouch, and handed it off to the person standing to her left.
"You know your job."
The warlock nodded, and with the flick of his chin, he and the others dispersed, each heading off to their designated area.
Esther glanced here and there, and found herself tumbling back a thousand years where this entire area was forest and huts, and one longhouse that had been hers. White oak trees had been plentiful shading them for the worst of the summer heat, while providing sturdy building materials for shelter and warmth in the winter. Werewolves had prowled unchecked. A man with hazel eyes who defied his clan and fell in love with—
She stopped thinking about the past.
She would have had werewolves for children instead of turning them into vampires. Esther doubted that would have been better.
As she headed south to the clocktower she could feel it. The judgement of vigilant eyes. The faint whisper of condemnation. The air was already frigid, but there was another layer of ice to it that left a metallic and bitter taste on the tongue. Esther was positive the locals couldn't feel it, although they might, at the very baseline, feel something was off about their town. Yet with plenty of strange and inexplainable occurrences happening near daily, they had grown immune to it. Would probably find it suspicious that nothing had happened for a while. It was like living in a house with mold. You couldn't see it building behind the walls, yet the body suffered for it.
The weight of so many mistakes and missed opportunities pressed down on her shoulders. She had made herself a pariah among her kind, and Esther had spent the last thousand years trying to make amends of what she sat in motion. No one wanted to befriend the woman responsible for creating the species that would commit endless atrocities and for what? Because she had not wanted her children to die from a werewolf attack.
But as she discovered, she wasn't the exact mother of vampirism. No, that honor belonged to the progenitor of the Bennett line. Now, she would need the descendent of that line once again.
Esther melted the lock off the emergency exit door of the tower. The heavy, metal door cracked open, dust pluming in the air. She darted inside, and made her way up the staircase reaching the clock face in less than a minute. A sharp wind made the rafters groan worryingly. Esther paused, listening. It was freezing inside the turret, but the cold didn't bother her. Unbuttoning her coat, she removed her burlap bag filled with candles, potions, herbs, and stones.
As she made her preparations, Esther thought over the condition Bonnie Bennett demanded for her help. Would she do it? Would she leave Lenore's body? Would Esther allow her spirit to fade completely out of existence? Were these to be her final hours ever being "alive"?
She was immortal already. Living in the DNA and magic that reanimated her remaining offspring, and her grandchild. A grandchild she would never know and who might never know her, if Klaus had anything to say about it. Regret funneled through her, but it was brutally pushed aside by resolve.
Esther might be many things, but she never went back on her word.
What happened in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours would be a defining moment. For whom? No one would know but the survivors.
He hoped tonight would be a slow night, but it was Mystic Falls. It was akin to asking for it not to rain in Seattle.
Matt Donovan quickly stripped, hopped in the shower to wash the stink of grease and smoke off his body. He had worked a double at The Grille, and his pockets was bursting with tips. He didn't mind making extra money, but he wasn't sure how long he'd be able to keep up with his grueling schedule. Wiping wayward drops of water from his eyes, Matt blindly reached for a towel, but it felt like someone handed it to him. Hesitantly wrapping it around his lean hips, Matt stepped out of the shower, and went to the sink. He wiped the condensation off the mirror and thought he saw someone looming behind him.
He spun around. No one was there. The hairs on his body began to rise and he felt cold all of a sudden despite the steamed warmth of the bathroom. He listened and waited. Not much could be heard other than the heat kicking on, and the usual creaks and groans of an old house.
Yet ever since the night he shot that woman, he would swear something had attached itself to him, keeping a record of everything he did. Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe it was the caul of guilt. Whatever it was, Matt tried to mitigate it by focusing on the fact that had he not acted, Bonnie might have killed herself in a battle of wills. It didn't lessen the guilt, but quieted it enough for him to go about his day.
After shaving and dressing, Matt bounded downstairs, cell mashed between his cheek and shoulder. He sauntered into the living room. "Yeah, I'm calling to check on a patient that was admitted two days ago. Cherise Tomlinson."
"Are you a family member?"
"Yes, she's my cousin," Matt fibbed.
He listened as the charge nurse typed away on her computer.
"What's your name?" she asked a moment later.
"Can you just tell me if she's still in serious condition?"
"I'm sorry but I'm not at a liberty to release that information. You can stop by to visit, but that's all I can disclose. Again, I'm sorry."
Matt repressed a sigh. "I understand. Well, can you tell me if anyone has been in to see her? I know she's been missing for a few weeks."
"Again, I can't disclose."
Well, what the hell can you tell me, Matt fumed, yet said, "Thanks." For nothing.
"Mm-hmm. Have a good day."
The line disconnected. Matt hung up. Perhaps he should have pretended to be a detective investigating her case. That might have gotten him more information. This might be the only time he wished he had the ability of compulsion.
Shoving his phone in his back pocket, Matt resumed getting organized. He paused at the sound of the front door bursting open, and footsteps thundering inside.
"Oh. Hey, Jer."
Jeremy startled at seeing Matt. "Hey."
Matt hadn't seen Jeremy in the last few days, their ships always missing one another. When Matt was getting in Jeremy was going out, and vice versa. He didn't believe in micromanaging, yet knowing Jeremy was still pissed and hurting over what had been done to Elena, Jeremy going quiet was never a good thing. "Hey, you good?"
Jeremy charged up the stairs, paused, and said over his shoulder, "I'm fine."
"Jer, if you need to talk—"
"I said I'm fine, Matt. Gotdamn." Jeremy took the stairs two at a time.
Matt winced at the sound of a door slamming shut. Whistling, he resumed preparations.
"Damn, this would be so much easier if I Caroline's ability to get people to talk." Thinking about Caroline made him think about Sheriff Forbes.
Matt had another phone call to make. He pulled up her name in his contacts, and listened as the phone rang. The second their lines connected, he said, "Hey, Care. How are you? How's your mom?"
"Hey, Matt. I'm hanging in there and Mom is…well her vitals have been stable for the last twelve hours, so that's good. Now I'm just waiting for her to wake up."
"Good, I'm glad she's stable. The sheriff is tough. She'll pull through."
"Yeah, that's what I tell myself, but after that attack the other night…what if it's caused more damage?"
Matt didn't have an answer to that. He had loosely gotten the gist of what happened from Alaric. "Have you tried giving her your blood?"
"I've been refraining. Vampire blood and hospitals don't exactly mix in my family."
"Understood. I'll try to stop by later."
"She'll be happy to hear from you. I know she can hear. At least that's what the doctor says, so I've been constantly talking to her. I'm sure she wants a break from my voice so you coming to see her, she'd like that. Anything new happening on your end?"
"Not really. I'm getting ready for patrol."
"Do you think it's safe?"
"Of course not, but someone has to do it." Matt shoved rope and two daggers into his duffel bag.
"It goes without saying, but be careful. We're not there to back you up if things go south."
A twinge of pique traveled through Matt. He had survived the summer and beyond without the interference of his vampire friends. He knew how to take care of himself. "Yeah, yeah," he said through gritted teeth.
"You're not working the rest of the week, are you? New Year's is in two days."
"Well aware and it's not like I have anything planned. Throwing parties is your specialty."
"The only thing I'm in the mood to celebrate is Mom waking up. You know, I can't remember the last time we actually brought in New Year's together. How sad is that? I've spent the last few years being this independent super woman, but every time I look at her in this damn hospital bed, I realize how much I still…how much I still need my mother," her voice cracked, thick with emotion.
"She'll wake up, Care. You just have to stay positive."
"Yeah, that's me Miss Positivity." Her laugh was watery. Yet she brightened a second later. "I heard Brit Young is throwing a party at her cousin's townhouse. You should go."
Matt wagged his head. He knew he was going to get an earful for the next couple of hours.
College was not an experience Damon Salvatore lamented on not having. He had spent more time than most loitering around historical and/or ivy league campuses to get the gist of what being a full time student was like. Still, he always caught a perverse thrill out of plopping down in a classroom to hear a lecture on something he lived through decades ago, and when he was in the mood, correcting the professor on a fact the history books had gotten wrong.
But he also hated colleges. A lot of questionable, stomach-churning research had occurred behind those hallowed doors. One kind of research that hunted his kind, locked them in cells, and did violating experiments. To this day he was still washing the blood of the Augustine descendants off his hands.
Today he was schlepping through Whitmore's campus because Alaric said there was something urgent he needed to discuss or show him.
Damon found his way to Saltzman's office located in one of the oldest buildings on campus. It had no central air, a few of the windows were painted shut, and a classroom was rumored to be haunted, but the place had charm, at least to Damon. Other than that, the place was dead, the entire student body and staff still on winter break. He spotted a maintenance person here and there, but otherwise, the campus was a virtual ghost town.
Unconsciously his head turned as he walked past Pegram Hall. On the third floor in classroom 306 his path had crossed with a radical professor he was glad was dead. Atticus Shane.
"What a dick," Damon muttered.
Two minutes later, after jogging to the second floor of the Experimental Science building, Damon paused outside of Alaric's office, rapped on the door with his knuckles before letting himself inside.
The office was just big enough to hold the necessary amenities. A desk that had probably been trendy in the 70s, a chair opposite of it, three file cabinets lined together against the adjacent wall, a sad spider plant on top of the middle one. The far wall possessed a window that let in pitiable light, and a couch beneath that sunk in the middle. The man hadn't decorated his walls with posters of aliens or deceased musicians, or historical figures, not even a degree could be found gracing their barren wood panels. If Damon was the sort of creature that liked to nest, Alaric's office would have been perfect.
Sleep Token's 'Take Me Back to Eden' played low from the iPod dock hidden in the corner of the office. Damon helped himself to the lone visitor chair, his ass pinched by a spring that had poked through the cracked leather.
"Yo!" he bellowed.
Alaric's head snapped up from the notepad he had been outlining his spring syllabus on. "Hey."
The two men gave one another a measuring look, noting what had changed or stayed the same. They weren't the sort of friends to toss out compliments other than to remark one looked less dead than usual. Once Damon was satisfied Ric didn't appear as if he had been on any kind of bender or was battling a blood addiction, he got down to the preliminaries.
"I hope today's visit isn't something that could have been sent in an email," he griped.
Alaric, distracted by a popup notification on his laptop, replied, "Do you even have an email address?"
"Sure I do. It's D-S-is-hung-at-gmail dot com." Damon grinned smugly.
Alaric rolled his eyes. "Charming. I wanted to touch base because we haven't spoken in a while…Jo said you paid her a visit at the hospital."
"And you're just now bringing it up to me? That happened a while ago."
"I'm sure it was last week."
Damon shrugged, kicking his feet up on Alaric's desk to which the man gave him a hard look. "You know how days run together at the end of the year. Who can keep track? But yeah. I did pay her visit. Did she tell you what it was about?"
"Yeah, which led to a very uncomfortable conversation."
"That you were long overdue in having. How long did you think you'd be able to keep secret that you like your meat extra bloody and extremely rare, as in, still alive? You want to be with that chick, you needed to tell her the truth."
"I was going to, Damon. On my own time and in my own way. I didn't need you to hint at anything."
"She was already having suspicions about what you were. So what I implied you're a vampire after revealing what I am…Did she dump you?"
Alaric pushed away from his desk, reclining back in his chair that groaned at the shift in weight. "Worse, she wanted me to prove I was human."
Damon made a noise in the back of his throat. He arched a brow. "And?"
Shaking his head, Alaric pinched the bridge of his nose. After Damon's visit, Jo had shown up at his apartment. They talked and the longer they talked the more it began to feel like an interrogation, until Alaric finally stopped her and asked point blank what she was getting at, what she honestly wanted to know about him. So she came right out and asked:
"Are you a vampire?"
Alaric had spluttered and tried to lie, but then Jo had leveled him with an ultimatum that if he wanted their relationship to continue, he had to prove he wasn't undead.
"I asked her to take a drive with me," Alaric admitted softly. "We drove out to the border of Mystic Falls, got out of the car. I walked across and immediately I started crashing. Jo, she, she rushed over, and she pretty much saved my life."
Damon dropped his feet to the floor, the hair on the back of his neck rising. "What are you saying?"
Alaric's lip twitched as he fought to contain his smile. "I'm saying, I'm not a vampire anymore. I'm human. Again."
Damon was floored. "What?!"
"I couldn't believe it either," Alaric scrubbed the back of his neck. "It shouldn't have been possible, but the anti-magic bubble over Mystic Falls, it stripped me of my vampirism, and with her skills as a doctor, she saved me from dying from the initial wound that started everything."
"I just…" Damon's mouth moved but little sound followed. Alaric was human again, and he didn't need a magical cure in a bottle to achieve it. Had that been the solution all along. Create an anti-magic bubble, toss a supernatural inside, and then administer medical attention to stop them from dying from their wounds?
Was it possible he…?
Damon shook the idea away. He knew better than to hope for anything.
Unfortunately, the hands of remembrance snatched him back to that lonely stretch of road where he confessed to some chick named Jessica that he missed being human, that he regretted ever becoming a vampire simply because he lost Rose, a vampire he sort of became friends with. His head and heart had been scrambled like eggs, twisted into knots because of so many factors: Katherine's deception, suffering with unrequited love for her doppelganger, hating, loving, and feeling inferior to Stefan, feeling like he would never be good enough for anyone to love in spite of his behavior and actions.
If he could go to the barrier, walk over it…
"I know what you're thinking." Alaric smashed through his reverie. "I know that look on your face."
"What are you talking about? There's no look on my face."
"There is—was. You have your Damon thinking cap on, but I need you to stop and not rush out of here to do something monumentally stupid."
Damon scoffed yet his stomach soured guiltily. "You don't know anything, Saltzman."
"Damon, you died by a bullet to the chest a hundred and fifty years ago. If you lost your vampirism, I'm sure you'd instantly turn to dust."
"Hey." Damon glared.
"I'm not trying to be funny, but think about it. You might age rapidly, you might not. Don't forget you died a second time in a fiery blaze of glory. There's no treatment for that kind of a burn."
Hearing those words made the vampire deflate entirely, "All right. I get it. It was a stupid thought."
"Not stupid, just futilely hopeful."
"Yeah." Damon grimaced. "So now what? You're boring, human Alaric once more. A walking liability. If you get severely injured again, which knowing your luck will happen, will vampire blood do you any good?"
"I don't know, and I'm not trying to find out. Once this issue with the revenants is squared away, I'm retiring."
"You say that now…"
"No, I mean it. I'm not supernatural and I'm not looking to go back. If I die, I die. At some point we have to let the natural order of things take its course."
"Nice philosophy to have and live by," Damon grunted and rose from the chair, needing space.
Alaric watched him pace. He was glad to get that off his chest, but he hated that his return to humanity wasn't the explicit reason he had Damon come all this way. Alaric picked up his phone to see if Jeremy had texted. Nothing. He had no idea what that boy was getting up to, but he knew it involved Bonnie, because why else would Jeremy guilt trip him into coming up with an excuse to keep Damon distracted? Damon who spent every waking moment with Bonnie.
Hopefully being coconspirator wouldn't lead to tragedy.
"Something you want to get off your chest, Salvatore? You have the floor."
"Did your lady love tattle on what the majority of our conversation was about?"
Solemnly Alaric nodded. "About your mother."
Damon shocked the teacher by asking, "Did you have a good relationship with yours?"
"She died when I was fifteen. I would say we had a typical mother/son relationship. She taught me what I needed to know about hygiene and left everything else up to my father, who was only interested in books. So…" Alaric trailed off, letting the unspoken theories fall into place.
"So in other words she didn't get to know you and didn't leave the door open for you to know her. Got it." Damon blew out a breath. Did anyone in his circle have a good relationship with their mother? Caroline might be leading the pack, but they weren't close, and he sure as hell wasn't going to pick her brain on what a healthy parental relationship should look like. What did any of it matter? He was grown, thrice over. He had no need of a mother at this stage in life.
"I think we forget that our parents are people, too," Alaric said mildly. "They have issues, don't have all the answers, and they're not infallible."
"Liars. I haven't met a woman that's not a liar."
"Bonnie included in that?"
Damon looked at Alaric sharply. Bonnie withheld when the situation called for it, but a lot of the time at the detriment of herself. "I lie all the time."
"You might want to do something about that."
"And that's why I tell the truth when no one wants to hear it. They much rather hear the lie than be confronted with their limitations and faults. Hell, I'm the same way. Bonnie, she might not be a hundred percent honest a hundred percent of the time, but she's never not been forthcoming with me. Even when she didn't want to."
Alaric pondered that. "It wasn't until recently I realized that you had always shared something different with her." He walked the five steps necessary to reach his file cabinet, and extracted a bottle of whiskey and two rock glasses. "I wouldn't have called it respect, maybe a special brand of Damon respect where you wouldn't turn a serious moment into a joke, but you listened to her."
"Not always." Damon accepted the drink and tossed it back.
Alaric followed suit. "A majority of the time."
"Shit was always getting real. Who else was I going to listen to?"
The college professor shrugged and refilled both glasses. For the next hour he and Damon talked and unloaded, until they were seated in their respective chairs, silently brooding, and letting Alaric's playlist do the talking.
Just as he was about to start the next round of conversation, Damon's phone began vibrating. The vampire retrieved it and answered.
"Gotta hit the road. My ride's here." He rose from the chair, stretching the kinks out of his body.
"Before you go." Alaric was up and on his feet, this time digging into another drawer of his file cabinet. He retrieved a small, moleskin book and handed it over to Damon. "That's for Bonnie. I reached out to an old friend from college who works for a private firm that investigates gravitational singularities and centrifugal force."
"What the fuck does that mean?" Damon frowned.
Alaric snorted. "In other words, physics, specifically gravity, but there's a section about interdimensional planes she might find interesting."
Damon palmed the book, fingers tracing the design on the front. "Really?"
"Yeah. Let me ask you something. Do you want Bonnie to be involved in rebuilding the other side?"
That was a question that was easy for Damon to answer. "No, simply because of who came to her with the idea in the first place."
"Exactly what's been bothering me about this whole thing. We can't say that Esther is full of shit about revenants. You've had an encounter with one, so has Bonnie. People are missing who we suspect have traveler blood, and a police officer who was killed by one left a glass husk behind. I have two questions, the first: How did Esther know about the revenants?"
"And the second?"
"What is she really after?"
Damon's mind raced to the only available conclusion. "That bitch only makes an appearance when she's trying to kill her kids."
Alaric nodded, folded his arms. "I don't think she's forgotten that goal. You spend a thousand years ensuring the parameters you put in place so that your son doesn't become a hybrid is never broken, it happens, and everything unravels. You brainwash your oldest child to play a part in murdering his siblings and when that fails…"
"You turn a teacher-cum-amateur hunter into an Original to finish the job."
"Bonnie is powerful, but her power leaves her vulnerable."
A cool expression washed over Damon's face and Alaric would swear he felt the temperature in the room drop.
The vampire declared, "I'm not going to let anything happen to her. Never again."
The teacher was assured Damon would give it his best shot.
Alaric rejoined, "Well, if we had more to go on like a name for this group of revenants who've been trapped in their own special prison, we could find a weakness."
"I'll leave that up to you since you've had your humanness reinstated. See if you can capture one and get them to talk."
Alaric's jaw dropped. He should have seen that ridiculous request coming. "Oh, c'mon, Damon. You can't be serious."
"Happy hunting, Giles." Damon tossed a cheeky smile and a lazy wave before shooting out of the door.
He jaunted across campus, feet moving swiftly over the pavement, and hopped into the passenger seat of his idling car. He leaned over the console and kissed Bonnie's puckered lips. She put the car in drive and peeled off from the curb.
Damon's nostrils twitched. He scented Mexican food in the air. "You went to Urbano?" he asked.
A nervous pang went through Bonnie as she drove down the tree lined streets of Whitmore. Now would be the perfect time to tell her boyfriend she had lunch with her ex, but she knew Damon would read too much into it, and go nuclear, so for now she would keep Jeremy's name out of it. "I did. I had a craving earlier. Don't worry. I picked something up for you. If you're hungry."
"You know I'm always down to eat." Damon waggled his brows suggestively. "But thanks for thinking of my stomach."
"Always. So how did things go with Alaric?"
"Peachy. We talked about life goals, the condition of the world and if it'll ever get better, oh and he's human again."
"What?!"
"That's what I said."
"I thought you were trying to be funny—"
"I was."
"—but you're being deadass serious about Alaric being human again?"
"I am."
"How?"
Damon gave Bonnie the rundown, observing her for any and every little twitch or lift of the brow. When he finished his spiel he could see she was amazed, yet a vein of skepticism lingered.
"Are you having the same thought I had?" Damon questioned.
Bonnie hit the turn signal and made a left. "About you crossing over the border, and someone being armed with a defibrillator to restart your heart? No, never crossed my mind."
Damon picked up her hand, and kissed the back of it. "It probably wouldn't work anyways. I was reminded I did have a second, more violent death, on top of how long I've been dead I might turn into fairy dust."
"Oh." Shooting him a glance, it was easy to tell he was perturbed. Yet it brought a reality crashing into mind. The possibility of Damon becoming human was summarily off the table, and she would never turn…"What will the future look like for us?"
It was a question they would need to tackle and answer at some point, Damon realized.
"Let's just be here in the moment. Let tomorrow worry about itself," he dodged giving a definitive answer.
Bonnie sighed and let it go. "So are Alaric and Jo still together?"
Damon cocked his head to the side, appearing reflective, "He…now that I think about it, he never said if they were over or not. I'm going to assume they hit pause for now."
"If they want to be together I'm sure they'll find a way to make it work." His love life is certainly as messy as mine, Bonnie mused. Equally as tragic.
"Yeah, so..." Damon glanced at the shopping bags cluttering the backseat. "I see you kept yourself busy while I gossiped and gabbed. What exactly did you buy? Lingerie I hope."
Bonnie gnawed gently on her lower lip and merged on the highway. "I mostly bought supplies and maybe an item or two that has lace."
For that she got a thigh squeeze.
"Well, you're not the only one bearing gifts." He held up the book Alaric had given him. "Homework from the underpaid educator."
"I can add it to my growing collection of books I may never get around to actually reading. Did he say what it was about? Marked any section I should pay attention to?"
Absently, Damon thumbed through a few pages. "He said there's something about interdimensional, gravitational singularities or whatever."
"What the hell am I supposed to do with that?" Bonnie shrieked.
Damon laughed at her incredulity. "That's why you should read the book."
"Will I even understand it?" the young witch muttered.
Damon found her petulant tone cute. "Maybe it'll have something useful. Science used to be, once upon a time, considered magic, a work of Satan in more religious circles. Maybe now you can use science to help with your magic."
Bonnie supposed she could. It would be useful to know how certain aspects of her abilities worked on a scientific level.
She conceded, "I might crack it open tonight."
"I certainly hope so."
A tiny fist went flying into Damon's chest. He laughed again.
"Did you two talk about anything else?"
"Esther and what she may actually want."
"I haven't heard anything from her," Bonnie informed. "I'm getting worried."
"Now would be an excellent time to back out. That woman brings nothing but death and destruction."
Damon really didn't need to spell that out.
"As much as I would love to…don't you miss Mystic Falls? Don't you want to be able to go to the boardinghouse whenever you feel like it?"
"Trying to get rid of me, witchy?"
"No, but…I want to visit Dad and Grams' graves. I can't. The barrier, at the very least has to come down. We were stuck in hell for four months, reliving the same day. No place should be off limits to us, Damon."
He couldn't help but grin. "You know, you're right, and you're very sexy when you're right."
A girlish giggle escaped Bonnie's mouth when Damon leaned over and peppered kisses along her cheek and neck. The taste of her salty skin on his tongue made him hungry for more.
Worming away so she could focus on driving, Bonnie announced, "We have a stop to make before going home."
Traveling west to Spotsylvania to the U-Store Bonnie opened up the storage unit that contained Grams's belongings. Any box containing books she strapped to a dolly and Damon wheeled them to the car. When they made it home, Damon wolfed down his dinner capping it off with a blood bag while Bonnie organized Grams books by order of usefulness. A bulk of them were reference books on the occult and ancient civilizations.
Bonnie's vision blurred and she felt the room move although she was sitting completely still.
:::
Invasions could be silent. Towns destabilized, an epidemic of unchecked viral growth. The endgame, nevertheless, remained the same.
Nightfall was upon Mystic Falls. Deep in the woods, away from prying eyes, Cherise sat lotus style in front of the oldest tree in the town, her finger stenciling a sigil on the ground, over and over again, to the point she was knuckle deep in dirt. Her dry lips moved, speaking a language completely forgotten by time: ancient Greek.
Words ebbed and flowed and gained speed as her swirling mercury eyes rolled into the back of her head. Cherise writhed as ripples of power stabbed through her, bolting her to the ground, making dead leaves of the tree shake. The tendons in her neck protruded grotesquely through her skin while the fervor of her words fell faster and faster. Movement absently caught her ear. Her companions were drawing near, the stench of their decomposed flesh making her bloodstained lips creep into a smile.
A whine escaped the young, possessed woman the second a crack appeared out of thin air. Miniscule, but the heat released made her hiss in joy. The others undulated and began to pant. Mud and maggots dropped from their bodies.
:::
Damon was talking but his voice was muffled like her head was submerged underwater. Water. Bonnie heard it rushing like she was standing next to a waterfall.
:::
Jayson Fell, who had been missing just as long as Cherise, fell to his knees beside her. Mercury irises darkened to black. He picked up a nearby rock, testing the sharpness of its jagged edge, and once satisfied it would do the job, he pressed the rock to his forearm and carved into it.
The others inhaled deeply at the scent of coppery spice.
Jayson held his bleeding arm over the sigil, and filled it with his warm blood.
The fissure right in front of the tree grew bigger like a crack in a frozen lake, splintering.
:::
"Bon? Bonnie, you okay?"
She sat frozen on the floor, head tilted at a seemingly impossible angle. Her stare was blank like she had left her body.
Concerned, Damon approached, glancing around, heightening his senses, searching for an invisible enemy. He kneeled down in front of Bonnie, cupping her tiny shoulder. "Bonnie? Talk to me. What's going on? What do you see?"
:::
Figures silhouetted in a prism of light began to appear one by one throughout the woods.