The Hunters: Destiny Rising

Warm blood, sweet with desire, filled Damon's mouth and inflamed his senses. He stroked the girl's soft, golden hair with one hand as he pressed his mouth more firmly to her creamy neck. Beneath her skin, he could feel her blood throbbing with the steady beat of her heart. He drew her essence into himself with great, thirst-quenching gulps.

Why had he ever stopped doing this?

He knew why, of course: Elena. Always, for the last year, Elena.

Of course he had still occasionally used his Power to coax victims into willingness. But he'd done it with the uncomfortable awareness that Elena would disapprove, chastened by the image of her blue eyes, serious and knowing, sizing him up and finding him wanting. Not good enough, not in comparison to his squirrel-chewing baby brother.

And when it seemed like Stefan and Elena might be done for good, that he might be the one to end up with his golden princess after all, he had stopped drinking fresh blood. Instead he'd drunk cold, insipid-tasting old blood from hospital donors. He'd even tried the revolting animal blood his brother lived on. Damon's stomach turned at the memory, and he took a deep, refreshing swallow of the girl's glorious blood.

This was what it meant to be a vampire: you had to take in life, human life, to keep your own supernatural life going. Anything else - the dead blood in stored bags or the blood of animals - kept you only a shadow of yourself, your Powers ebbing.

Damon wouldn't forget that again. He had lost himself, but now he was found.

The girl stirred in his arms, making a small questioning noise, and he sent a soothing dose of Power to her, making her pliable and quiescent once more. What was her name? Tonya? Tabby? Tally? He wasn't going to hurt her, anyway. Not permanently. He hadn't hurt anyone he'd fed from - not much, not when he was in his right mind - for a long while. No, the girl would leave the woods and go back to her sorority house with nothing worse than a slight spell of dizziness and a vague memory of spending the evening talking with a fascinating man whose face she couldn't quite recall.

She would be fine.

And if he'd chosen her because her long golden hair, blue eyes, and creamy skin reminded him of Elena? Well, that was no one's business but Damon's own.

At last he released her, gently steadying her on her feet when she tottered. She was delicious - nothing like Elena's blood, though, nowhere near as rich and heady - but taking any more blood tonight would be unwise.

She was a pretty girl, certainly. He arranged her hair carefully over her shoulders, hiding the marks on her neck, and she blinked at him with dazed, wide eyes.

Those eyes were wrong, damn it. They should be darker, a clear lapis lazuli, and fringed with heavy lashes. And the hair was, now that he looked at it closely, obviously dyed.

The girl smiled at him hesitantly, unsure.

"You'd better go back to your room," Damon said. He sent a current of commanding Power into her, and continued. "You won't remember later that you met me. You won't know what happened."

"I'd better get back," she echoed, her voice wrong, the wrong timbre, the wrong tone, not right at all. Her face brightened. "My boyfriend's waiting for me," she added.

Damon felt something inside him snap. In a fraction of a second, he had pulled the girl roughly back to him. With no care or finesse, he ripped back into her throat, gulping her rich, hot blood furiously. He was punishing her, he realized, and taking pleasure in it.

Now that she was no longer under his thrall, she screamed and struggled, beating against his back with her fists. Damon pinned her with one arm and expertly worked his fangs in and out of her neck to widen the bite, drinking more blood, faster. Her blows grew weaker and she swayed in his arms.

When she went limp, he dropped her, and she landed on the forest floor with a heavy thud.

For a moment, he stared into the dark woods around him, listening to the steady chirp of the crickets. The girl lay unmoving at his feet. Although he had not needed to breathe for more than five hundred years, he was gasping, almost dizzy.

He touched his own lips and brought his hand back red and dripping. It had been a long time since he'd lost control of himself like that. Hundreds of years, probably. He stared down at the crumpled body at his feet. The girl looked so small now, her face serene and empty, lashes dark against her pale cheeks.

Damon wasn't sure if she was dead or alive. He realized he didn't want to find out.

He backed away a few steps from the girl, feeling oddly uncertain, and then turned and ran, swift and silent through the darkness of the woods, listening only to the pounding of his own heart.

Damon had always done what he wanted. Feeling bad about what was natural for a vampire, that was for someone like Stefan. But, as he ran, an uncharacteristic sensation in the pit of his stomach nagged at him, something that felt more than a little bit like guilt.

"But you said Ethan was dead," Bonnie said. She felt Meredith flinch beside her and bit her tongue. Of course Meredith would be sensitive about Ethan's possible survival; she'd killed him, or had thought she had. Meredith's face was hard and guarded now, revealing nothing.

"I should have cut off his head to make sure," Meredith said, sweeping her flashlight from side to side to illuminate the stone walls of the tunnel. Bonnie nodded to herself, realizing something she should have guessed: Meredith was angry.

Meredith's call alerting Bonnie to Ethan's disappearance had come while Bonnie and Zander were having a late dinner at the student union. It had been a sweet, easy date: burgers and Cokes and Zander gently trapping her foot between his two bigger ones under the table as he sneakily stole her fries.

And now, here she and Zander were, looking for vampires in the secret underground tunnels beneath the campus with Meredith and Matt. Elena and Stefan were doing the same thing in the woods around the campus overhead. Not the most romantic we-just-got-back-together date, Bonnie thought with a resigned shrug. But they do say couples should share their hobbies.

Matt, striding along on Meredith's other side, seemed grimly determined, his jaw clenched and his eyes fixed straight ahead down the long, dark tunnel. Bonnie felt sorry for him. All the strain the rest of them felt had to be a hundred times worse for Matt right now.

"You with us, Matt?" Meredith asked, apparently reading Bonnie's mind.

Matt sighed and kneaded at the back of his neck with one hand as if his muscles were strained and stiff. "Yeah, I'm with you." He paused and took a breath. "Except . . ." He trailed off and then started again. "Except maybe some of them we can help, right? Stefan could teach them how to be vampires who don't hurt people. Even Damon changed, didn't he? And Chloe . . ." His cheeks were flushed with emotion. "None of them deserved this. They didn't know what they were getting into."

"No," Meredith answered, touching Matt's elbow lightly with one hand. "They didn't."

Bonnie'd known that Matt was friends with the sweet-faced junior Chloe, but she was beginning to understand that he'd felt much more than that. How terrible to know that Meredith might have to thrust a stave through the chest of someone he was falling in love with, and how much worse to know that it was the right thing to do.

Zander had a soft expression in his eyes, and Bonnie realized he was thinking the same thing. He took her hand, his long strong fingers wrapping around hers, and Bonnie snuggled a little closer to him.

But as they rounded a dark bend in the tunnel, Zander suddenly let go of Bonnie and stepped protectively in front of her as Meredith raised her stave. Bonnie, a beat behind the others, didn't see the two figures entwined against the wall until they were already breaking apart. No, not entwined like lovers, she realized, but a vampire clinging to its victim. Matt stiffened, staring at them, and let out a soft involuntary sound of surprise. There was a sudden snarl and a flash of white teeth in the darkness as the vampire, a girl no taller than Bonnie herself, pushed her victim violently away. He fell to the ground at her feet.

Bonnie stepped around Zander, keeping a careful eye on the vampire, who was now huddled against the wall. She flinched involuntarily at the vampire's stare, the feral, fierce look in the dark eyes fixing on her, but kept going until she could kneel down next to the victim and reach to check his pulse. It was steady, but he was bleeding pretty badly, and she took off her jacket and pressed it against his throat to staunch the blood. Her hands were shaking and she concentrated on stilling them, on doing what needed to be done. Beneath the young man's eyelids, she could see his eyes moving rapidly back and forth, as if he was caught in a bad dream, but he stayed unconscious.

The girl - the vampire, Bonnie reminded herself - was watching Meredith now, her body tensed to fight or run away. She cringed back as Meredith stepped closer, blocking her in. Meredith raised her stave higher, aiming it at the middle of the girl's chest.

"Wait," the girl said hoarsely, holding out her hands. She looked past Meredith and seemed to see Matt for the first time. "Matt," she said. "Help me. Please." She was staring hard at him, visibly concentrating, and Bonnie realized with a start that the vampire was trying to use Power to make Matt do what she wanted. It wasn't working, though - she must not be strong enough yet - and after a moment her eyes rolled back and she sagged against the wall.

"Beth, we want to give you a chance," Matt said to the vampire. "Do you know what happened to Ethan?"

The girl shook her head emphatically, her long hair flying around her. Her eyes were flicking back and forth between Meredith and the tunnel behind her, and she edged sideways. Meredith followed her, moving closer, the stave pressed against the vampire's chest.

"We can't just kill her," Matt said to Meredith, a slightly desperate note in his voice. "Not if there's another option." Meredith snorted in disbelief and angled even closer to the vampire - Beth, Matt had called her - who bared her teeth in a silent snarl.

"Hang on a second," Zander said, and stepped over Beth's victim's unconscious body, brushing past Bonnie. Before Bonnie really understood what was happening, Zander had pulled Beth away from Meredith and pressed her against the wall of the tunnel.

"Hey!" Meredith said indignantly, and then frowned in confusion. Zander was gazing intently into Beth's eyes, his face serious and calm. She was staring back at him, her restless eyes still now, her breathing hard.

"Do you know where Ethan is?" Zander asked in a low, calm voice, and it felt to Bonnie as if something, some invisible blast of Power, flew between them.

In a second, Beth's wary face emptied of all expression. "He's hiding in the safe house at the end of the tunnels," she said. Her voice sounded half-asleep, disconnected from her thoughts.

"Are there other vampires with him?" Zander asked, his eyes steady on hers.

"Yes," Beth said. "Everyone's staying there until the equinox, when all Ethan's hopes will be fulfilled."

Two days, Bonnie thought. The others had told her that Ethan had planned to resurrect Klaus, the Original vampire. She shivered at the thought. Klaus had been scary, one of the scariest things she'd ever seen. But could they really do it? Ethan hadn't gotten Stefan's and Damon's blood, and he couldn't do the resurrection spell without it. Could he?

"Ask her what their defenses are like," Meredith said, getting with the program.

"Is he well defended?" Zander asked.

Beth's head jerked into a stiff nod, as if an invisible puppeteer had pulled her strings. "No one can get to him," she said in that same sleepy monotone. "He's hidden, and every one of us would give our lives to protect him."

Meredith nodded, clearly weighing the words of her next question, but Matt broke in. "Can we save her?" he asked, and the pain in his voice made Bonnie flinch. "Maybe if she wasn't so hungry . . ."

Zander focused in even more strongly on Beth, and Bonnie again felt a wave of Power emanating from him. "Do you want to hurt people, Beth?" he asked quietly.

Beth chuckled, a rich, dark sound, although her face stayed blandly expressionless. That laugh was the first emotion she had shown since Zander had somehow charmed her into blankness and truth. "I don't want to hurt - I want to kill," she said, with a hard amusement in her tone. "I've never felt so alive."

Zander stepped back with a quick animal grace. At the same moment Meredith smoothly shot forward, shoving her stave through Beth's heart.

After the tearing noise of wood through flesh, Beth fell without a sound. Matt's gasp broke the silence, a startled, pained little noise. At Bonnie's knees, Beth's victim stirred, his head turning from one side to the other. Bonnie automatically patted him soothingly with the hand that wasn't keeping pressure on his neck wounds. "It's okay," she said quietly.

Meredith turned to Matt defiantly. "I had to," she said.

Matt bowed his head, his shoulders sagging. "I know," he answered. "Believe me, I know. It's just . . ." He shifted from one foot to the other. "She was a nice girl, before this happened to her."

"I'm sorry," Meredith said quietly, and Matt nodded, still looking at the ground. Then Meredith turned to Zander. "What was that?" she asked. "How did you get her to talk?"

Zander blushed a little. "Um. Well," he said, and shrugged one shoulder self-consciously. "There's this thing some of us Original werewolves can do, if we've practiced. We can make people tell the truth. It doesn't work on everyone, but I thought it was worth a try."

Bonnie stared up at him quizzically. "You didn't tell me that," she said.

Zander lowered himself down onto his knees and faced her across Beth's unconscious victim. His eyes were wide and sincere. "I'm sorry," he said. "I honestly didn't think about it. It's just one of the weird little things we can do."

The unconscious guy's bleeding seemed to have slowed, and Bonnie sat back on her heels. Zander raised his eyebrows at her, looking hopeful, and she smiled back at him. She'd have to find out what these other "little things" were, she guessed.

"Seems like that's something that could be pretty useful," she said, and watched Zander's face relax into a sunny, joyful grin.

Meredith cleared her throat. She was still watching Matt, her eyes full of sympathy, but her voice was dry. "We should get everyone together as soon as possible. If Ethan's still trying to resurrect Klaus, we need to come up with a plan now."

Klaus. The stone of the tunnel floor beneath Bonnie's knees was suddenly freezing. Klaus was darkness, violence, and fear. They had only defeated him back in Fell's Church by an extraordinary intervention, by Fell's Church's ghosts rising against him. That wasn't something they'd be able to recreate. What could they do now? Bonnie closed her eyes for a second, dizzy. She could picture, vividly, darkness rising up from below them, thick and choking, eager to consume them. Something evil was coming.