Thanks for meeting me," Cristian said. He grinned up at Meredith from his seat on the weight bench. "I know you don't remember," he added, "but we used to work out together a lot."
"Really?" Meredith said, interested. She could believe it, easily: anyone raised by her father would try hard to excel physically. "Which one of us was better?"
Cristian's smile widened. "That was pretty hotly disputed, as a matter of fact," he said. "You were a little faster than me, and better with the stave and martial arts, but I was stronger and better with knives and bows."
"Huh." Meredith was good with knives, she thought. Of course, in her reality - the real reality, she reminded herself - she'd had a lot more actual battle experience than Cristian. "Maybe we should see if that's still true," she said challengingly. "You know, I've gotten pretty strong."
Cristian chuckled. "Meredith," he said. "I'm a vampire now. I'm pretty sure I've gotten stronger, too."
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, his face fell. "A vampire," he repeated, rubbing one hand across his mouth. "It's hard to believe, you know?" He shook his head. "I've become the thing I'm supposed to hate." He raised his eyes to meet Meredith's, and his face was bleak.
A pang of pity swamped Meredith. She could remember how she'd felt, before the Guardians changed everything, when she'd learned that Klaus had left her wrong, a living girl with kitten vampire teeth and a need for blood.
It had gone away. But now Cristian was changed, and desolate.
"There are good vampires, you know," she told him. "My friends Stefan and Chloe, they fought with us against Klaus. Stefan's saved a lot of people." Cristian nodded, acknowledging her words, but didn't speak.
"Okay," Meredith said, mimicking her father's time-to-train, no-nonsense tone as best she could. It wouldn't help Cristian to dwell on his misery. "Enough flapping of the lips. Show me what you've got."
Cristian grinned, welcoming the change of mood, and stretched back on the weight bench, his hands on the racked barbell overhead. "Load me up," he said. "I want to see how strong I am now."
Part of this achingly reminded her of Samantha, Meredith thought, of how they'd trained together, goading each other to fight harder, longer, better. Maybe, Meredith thought as she added weight plates to the bar above Cristian, he'd want to try sparring later.
Meredith started Cristian at about two hundred pounds, which he pressed easily, his mouth giving a wry twist. "Come on," he said. "I could press this when I was alive."
There was no one else in the weight room, and so Meredith didn't have to be subtle about loading on the weights. Cristian handled as much as she could give him, his muscled but thin arms moving up and down like pistons.
"I'm so strong," he said giddily, smiling up at her.
Meredith recognized his smile. It was the smile she'd seen in the mirror on her own face when she was suddenly, startlingly happy. When she'd gotten her black belt. The night after Alaric had kissed her for the first time.
Maybe they could get past all this, become a team. Meredith let herself picture hunting with Cristian, fighting beside him. He was a vampire - a good vampire, she told herself fiercely, like Stefan - but he was a hunter, too. A Sulez.
"Your turn," Cristian said, clunking the bar back up into its support. It was so heavily loaded with weight plates now that the bar itself was bending.
Meredith laughed. "You know I can't lift that much. You win, okay?"
"Aw, come on," Cristian said. "I'll cut you some slack since you're human. And, you know, a girl." Meredith looked up to snap at him that being a girl had very little to do with how much she'd be able to press, and caught a teasing glint in his eye. Right then, she could believe he was her brother. Cristian started taking the plates off and putting them back in their racks.
"All right," Meredith said, and fastidiously, showily wiped off the bench, although it wasn't actually sweaty: apparently sweating was one of those things vampires didn't do.
Cristian started her off at a hundred and fifty pounds, heavy but manageable, and watched as Meredith began a set of reps.
"So," she said, keeping her voice casual and focusing on raising and lowering the bar. "What's it like?"
"What's what like?" Cristian asked absently. She could just glimpse him out of the corner of her eye, examining the weights, picking what to put on next.
"Being a vampire."
"Oh." Cristian moved across the room, just out of Meredith's sight, but his voice was clear and thoughtful, a little dreamy. "It's a rush, really," he said. "I can hear everything and smell everything. All my senses are heightened, like, a million percent. They say I'll get more Power, I'll be able to turn into animals and birds, make people do whatever I want."
He sounded excited at the prospect, his tone losing the bitterness it had held when he talked about becoming something he hated, and Meredith wished she could see his face.
"More?" he said brightly when he was right above her, extra weight plates in hand. His smile was bland, giving nothing away.
"Okay," she said, and instead of helping her get the bar back onto its support, he simply steadied it with one hand and slid more weight onto each side. Meredith grunted as he let go: it was heavier than she usually made it now, but still manageable. Almost too much, but she didn't want to let Cristian know that. In a funny way they were still competing despite his vampire strength, and she was going to take as much as she could.
Cristian was still really close, spotting her as she lifted, and Meredith's arms shook and strained after a couple of reps.
"The details are sharper, you know?" Cristian said suddenly. "I can even hear the blood rushing through your veins from here."
Meredith went cold and breathless. There had been something almost hungry about the way he spoke about her blood. "Take the bar," she ordered. "This is too much." She needed to get up.
Cristian reached for the bar, but instead of guiding it back into its support, he carefully added still more weight to each side.
"Stop it," Meredith croaked. It was far too heavy now, and Cristian must know that. She was in trouble here, real trouble, but she needed to stay calm, needed Cristian not to realize that she was scared.
"You forgot something about vampires," Cristian said, and smiled down at her, that same teasing, brotherly smile. "Dad would be so disappointed." He let go of the bar and it crashed down toward Meredith's chest; she was unable to support its weight.
She grunted as it fell, managing to slow it enough to keep it from cracking her rib cage, but with no breath or energy to focus on anything except protecting her chest from the dead weight of the bar. She couldn't breathe, couldn't speak, and she turned her head to look at him, her heart beating hard, and made a muffled, breathless moan. No one would hear her. She could die right here, at the hands of her brother.
Cristian went on. "A vampire, as you should know from our training, Meredith, is completely focused on his or her sire when they're first turned."
Maybe she could shift it, this weight pressing down on her, driving all the breath from her lungs. She couldn't breathe. Black spots swam in front of her eyes.
"All that matters to me is Klaus, what Klaus wants," Cristian told her. "If you were a good hunter, you would have remembered that bond trumps everything else. I don't know how you could have imagined my human family" - his voice curdled on the word, like there was something disgusting in it - "would matter to me more than that."
Meredith pushed at the bar helplessly, dizzy now with pain. She tried to signal Cristian with her eyes, desperately: fine, whatever, be Klaus's if you must, but don't kill me like this. Let me up so we can fight as we've been trained.
Cristian was kneeling beside her now, his face so close to hers. "Klaus wants you dead," he whispered, "you and all your friends. And I'll do whatever I can to make him happy." His gray eyes, just like her mother's eyes, held hers as he took hold of the bar she was clutching and pushed it down onto her chest.
Everything went black for a moment. Red flowers bloomed and burst in the darkness, and Meredith realized muzzily that it was her brain sending out random signals as it began to shut down from lack of oxygen.
She was beginning to float, as if she was suspended in a black sea. It would be good to rest. She was so tired.
Then a voice snapped through the darkness in Meredith's mind, her father's voice. Meredith! it said. It was impatient, firm but not unkind, the exact tone that had gotten her out of bed to run laps before school, encouraged her to practice a tae kwon do form when all she wanted to do was go out with her friends. You're a Sulez, the voice said. You must fight!
With a nearly superhuman effort, Meredith opened her eyes. Everything was blurry and she felt so slow, as if she was trying to move underwater.
Cristian's hand had relaxed on the bar. He must have thought all the fight in her was gone.
Meredith took every bit of strength she had gathered and pushed the bar up and away from her, tumbling her unwary vampire brother over with the bar on top of him. She had one glimpse of Cristian's startled, infuriated face before she ran as fast as she could, legs weak, heart pounding, gasping for breath, straight out of the weight room, out of the gym, and onto the paths of campus.
She had to slow as she approached her dorm, her legs sore and her lungs burning now that that original surge of adrenaline had worn off. Meredith tried to push herself onward, but she was stumbling now. At any moment, Cristian might grab her. He could have caught her by now, of course.
Just outside the dorm, she gathered her courage and spun around. No one was there. He had intended to kill her alone and in secret, and he would no doubt try again. Meredith unlocked the door and staggered in, flopping down to sit on the bottom step of the staircase.
She was still gasping for breath, and she choked on a sob. Meredith had wanted to know her brother, but he was already gone; he was Klaus's family now.
As she rubbed at her strained muscles, Meredith realized dully what she was going to have to do. She was going to have to kill Cristian.
