Phantom (12 page)

C
aleb’s hand was hot and heavy against her lips, and Elena scrabbled against it with her nails. He gripped her tightly with his other hand, holding her still, his fingers digging into her shoulder.

Elena struggled fiercely, flailing her arms and landing a firm blow in Caleb’s stomach. She bit down hard on the hand he had over her mouth. Caleb jerked backward, quickly letting go of her and pulling his bitten hand to his chest. As soon as her mouth was uncovered, Elena screamed.

Caleb stepped away from her, holding his hands up in surrender. “Elena!” he said. “Elena, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just didn’t want you to scream.”

Elena eyed him warily, breathing hard. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why were you sneaking up behind me if you didn’t want to scare me?”

Caleb shrugged and looked a little embarrassed. “I was worried about you,” he confessed, stuffing his hands in his pockets and hanging his head. “I was hiking up by Hot Springs earlier and I saw you and your friends. They were pulling you out of the water, and it looked like you weren’t breathing.” He peeked up at her through his long golden lashes.

“You were so worried about me you decided to grab me and cover my mouth to keep me from screaming?” Elena asked. Caleb ducked his head further and scrubbed at the back of his neck in an embarrassed way.

“I wasn’t thinking.” Caleb nodded solemnly. “You looked so pale,” he said. “But you opened your eyes and sat up. I was going to come down and see if you were okay, but your friend saw me and started running up the path toward me like he was going to jump me, and I guess I just freaked out.” He grinned suddenly. “I’m not usually such a wuss,” he said. “But he looked
mad
.”

Elena found herself feeling unexpectedly disarmed. Her shoulder still ached where Caleb had grabbed her. But he seemed so sincere, and so apologetic.

“Anyway,” Caleb continued, gazing at her out of candid light blue eyes, “I was driving back to my aunt and uncle’s place, and I recognized your car in the cemetery parking lot. I just came in because I wanted to talk to you and make sure you were okay. And then, when I got close to you, you were sitting down and talking, and I guess I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to interrupt you, and I didn’t want to barge in on something personal, so I just waited.” He ducked his head sheepishly again. “And instead I ended up assaulting you and scaring you to death, which sure wasn’t the better way to go. I’m really sorry, Elena.”

Elena’s heartbeat was returning to normal. Whatever Caleb’s intentions, he obviously wasn’t going to attack her again now. “It’s all right,” she said. “I hit my head on an underwater rock. I’m fine now, though. It must have looked pretty weird to see me just sitting here and muttering. Sometimes I come here to talk to my parents, that’s all. This is where they’re buried.”

“It’s not weird,” he said quietly. “I find myself talking to my parents sometimes, too. When something happens and I wish they were with me, I start telling them about it and it makes me feel like they’re there.” He swallowed hard. “It’s been a few years, but you never stop missing them, do you?”

The last bits of anger and fear drained out of Elena when she saw the sadness in Caleb’s face. “Oh, Caleb,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm.

She caught a sudden motion out of the corner of her eye and then, seemingly out of nowhere, Stefan appeared, running incredibly fast, straight toward them.

“Caleb,” he growled, grabbing him by the shirt and throwing him to the ground. Caleb let out a grunt of surprise and pain.

“Stefan, no!” shouted Elena.

Stefan spun to look at her. His eyes were hard and his fangs were fully extended. “He’s not what he says he is, Elena,” he said in an eerily calm voice. “He’s dangerous.”

Caleb slowly pulled himself to his feet, using a gravestone as a support. He was staring at Stefan’s fangs. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What
are
you?”

Stefan turned toward him and, almost casually, slapped him back down.

“Stefan, stop it!” Elena yelled, unable to contain the note of hysteria in her voice. She reached out for his arm, but missed. “You’re going to hurt him!”

“He
wants
you, Elena,” Stefan growled. “Do you understand that? You can’t trust him.”

“Stefan,” Elena pleaded. “Listen to me. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. You
know
that. He’s a human.” She could feel hot tears gathering in her eyes and she blinked them away. Now was not the time to weep and wail. Now was the time to be cool and rational and to keep Stefan from losing control.

Caleb staggered to his feet, grimacing with pain, and this time charged clumsily at Stefan, his face flushed. He got one arm around Stefan’s neck and yanked him to the side, but then Stefan, with an easy strength, tossed Caleb to the ground once more.

Stefan loomed over him threateningly as he stared up at him from the grass. “You can’t fight me,” Stefan growled. “I’m stronger than you. I can drive you out of this town, or kill you just as easily. And I will do either if you make me think it’s necessary. I won’t hesitate.”

Elena grabbed Stefan’s arm. “Stop it! Stop it!” she shouted. She pulled him toward her, trying to turn him so she could look into his eyes, so she could get through to him.

Breathe
, she thought desperately. She had to calm things down here, and she tried to steady her voice, to sound logical. “Stefan, I don’t know what you think is going on with Caleb, but just stop for a minute and think.”

“Elena, look at me,” Stefan said. His eyes were dark with emotion. “I
know
, I’m absolutely sure, that Caleb is evil. He’s dangerous to us. We have to get rid of him before he gets a chance to destroy us. We can’t give him the opportunity to get the better of us by waiting for him to make his move.”

“Stefan . . .” Elena said. Her voice was shaking, and an oddly rational, detached part of her noted that this must be what it felt like when the person you loved most lost his mind.

She didn’t know what she was going to say next, but before she could even open her mouth, Caleb had risen again. There was a long scratch down the side of his face, and his blond hair was tangled and full of dirt.

“Back off,” Caleb said grimly, coming toward Stefan. He was limping a little bit, and clutched a fist-size rock in his right hand. “You can’t just . . .” He raised the rock threateningly.

“Stop it, both of you,” Elena yelled, trying for a fierce general’s voice that would command their attention.

But Caleb just hoisted the rock and threw it straight at Stefan’s face.

Stefan dodged the rock, moving almost too quickly for Elena to see, grabbed Caleb by the waist, and, in one graceful motion, flung him into the air. For a moment, Caleb was suspended, seemingly as light and boneless as a scarecrow tossed from the back of a pickup truck, and then he hit the side of the marble Civil War monument with a sickening crunch. With a thud, he fell to the ground at the foot of the statue and was still.

“Caleb!” Elena screamed in horror. She ran toward him, shoving her way between the bushes and clumps of grass that encircled the monument.

His eyes were closed and his face was pale. Elena could see the light blue veins in his eyelids. There was a spreading pool of blood on the ground beneath his head. A streak of dirt ran across his face, and that dirt and the long red scratch on his cheek suddenly seemed like some of the most heartbreaking things she had ever seen. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t tell whether he was breathing.

Elena dropped to her knees and felt for Caleb’s pulse, fumbling at his neck. As she found the steady thrum of a heartbeat beneath her fingers, she gasped in relief.

“Elena.” Stefan had followed her to Caleb’s side. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Please, Elena.”

Elena shook her head, refusing to look at him, and shrugged his hand away. She felt in her pocket for her phone. “My god, Stefan,” she said, her words clipped and tight, “you could have killed him. You have to get out of here. I can tell the police I found him like this, but if they see you, they’re going to know you two were fighting.” She swallowed hard as she realized the streak of dirt staining Caleb’s shirt was Stefan’s handprint.

“Elena,” Stefan pleaded. At the anguish in his tone, she finally turned toward him. “Elena, you don’t understand. I had to stop him. He was a threat to you.” Stefan’s leaf green eyes beseeched her, and Elena had to steel herself to keep from crying.

“You have to leave,” she said. “Go home. I’ll talk to you later.”
Don’t hurt anyone else,
she thought, and bit her lip.

Stefan stared at her for a long moment, then finally backed away. “I love you, Elena.” He turned and disappeared into the trees, through the older and wilder part of the cemetery.

Elena took a steadying breath, wiped her eyes, and dialed 911. “There’s been an accident,” she said, her voice panicky, when the operator picked up. “I’m in the Fell’s Church Cemetery off Route Twenty-three, over by the Civil War monument near the edge of the newer section. I’ve found someone. . . . It looks like he was knocked unconscious somehow. . . .”

“H
onestly, Elena,” Aunt Judith said, shaking her head as she adjusted the car’s rearview mirror. “I don’t know why these kinds of things always seem to happen to you, but you find yourself in the strangest situations.”

“Tell me about it,” Elena said, slumping down in the passenger seat of her aunt’s car and resting her head in her hands. “Thank you for picking me up, Aunt Judith. I just felt too shaky to drive after being at the hospital with Caleb and everything.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry I missed Margaret’s dance recital after all.”

Aunt Judith patted Elena’s knee with one cool hand without taking her eyes off the road. “I told Margaret that Caleb got hurt and you had to take care of him. She understood. Right now I’m worried about you. It must have been a shock to find him like that, especially when you realized it was someone you knew. What exactly happened?”

Elena shrugged and repeated the lie she’d told the police. “I just found him lying there when I went to visit Mom and Dad.” Elena cleared her throat before continuing. “The hospital’s keeping him for a couple of days. They think he’s got a bad concussion and they want to watch and make sure his brain doesn’t swell. He woke up a little bit in the ambulance but was really groggy and didn’t remember what had happened.” Which was lucky, Elena thought. What if he’d said he was attacked by Elena Gilbert’s boyfriend, who had something weird going on with his teeth? What if he’d said her boyfriend was a monster? It would be last fall all over again.

Aunt Judith frowned sympathetically and shook her head. “Well, Caleb’s lucky you came along. He could have been lying there for days before anyone went looking for him.”

“Yeah, lucky,” said Elena hollowly. She rolled the bottom of her T-shirt between her fingers and was startled to realize she still had her bathing suit on under her clothes. The picnic that afternoon seemed like it had taken place a million years ago.

Then something Aunt Judith said struck her. “What do you mean, he could have been lying there for days before anyone looked for him? What about his aunt and uncle?”

“I tried calling them after you called me, but it seems that Caleb’s been fending for himself for quite a while. When I reached them, they were out of town on vacation, and frankly they didn’t seem like they were too concerned about their nephew, even when I told them what had happened.” She sighed heavily. “I’ll go visit him tomorrow and bring him some of the flowers from our garden he’s been working so hard on. He’ll like that.”

“Huh,” said Elena slowly. “I thought he told me he came here to stay with his aunt and uncle because they were so upset about Tyler being missing.”

“Maybe so,” Aunt Judith said dryly, “but the Smallwoods seem to be doing pretty well now. They said that in their opinion, Tyler will come home when he’s good and ready. That boy was always a little out of control. It sounds like Caleb is more worried about Tyler than they are.”

She pulled into the driveway of their house, and Elena followed her inside to where Robert was reading his newspaper at the kitchen table.

“Elena, you look exhausted,” he said, folding the paper and looking up at her in concern. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” she said numbly. “It’s just been a long day.” She thought she had never made more of an understatement in her life.

“Well, Margaret’s gone to bed, but we saved you some dinner,” Aunt Judith said, making a move toward the refrigerator. “It’s a chicken casserole, and there’s some salad. You must be starving.”

But suddenly Elena felt sick. She’d been suppressing all her feelings about Stefan and his attack on Caleb, keeping the images tamped down so she could get on with the business of dealing with the police and the staff at the hospital and her own family. But she was tired and her hands were shaking. She knew that she couldn’t keep everything under control for much longer.

“I don’t want anything,” she said, backing away. “I can’t . . . I’m not hungry, Aunt Judith. Thank you, though. I just want to take a bath and go to bed.” She turned and hurried out of the kitchen.

“Elena! You have to eat something,” she heard Aunt Judith cry exasperatedly behind her as she hurried up the stairs.

The solid-sounding murmur of Robert’s voice broke in: “Judith, let her go.”

Elena ducked into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.

She and Margaret shared the hall bathroom, and she busied herself with emptying Margaret’s bath toys from the tub, keeping her mind carefully blank: a pink rubber ducky, a pirate ship, a stack of gaily colored plastic cups. A goofily smiling purple seahorse looked up at her with painted blue eyes.

Once the tub was empty, Elena ran the water as hot as she could stand and poured in a generous dollop of apricot-scented bubble bath from a bottle that promised to soothe her spirit while rejuvenating her skin. Soothing and rejuvenating sounded good, although Elena had her doubts about how much she could reasonably expect from a bottle of bubble bath.

When the tub was full and frothy with a thick layer of bubbles, Elena quickly undressed and stepped into the steaming water. It stung at first, but she eased herself in bit by bit, gradually getting accustomed to the temperature.

Once she was comfortable, she lay back in the water, her hair floating out like a mermaid’s, the sounds of the house muffled by the water over her ears, and let the thoughts she’d been avoiding come at last.

Tears overflowed her eyes and trickled down her cheeks to join the bathwater. She had believed that everything was going to be normal now that they were back home, that things were going to be good again. When she and her friends had gotten the Guardians to send them back and to change things, to reverse the deaths, to fix the broken, to make everything the way it would have been if nothing dangerous had touched the little town of Fell’s Church, she had thought that it would make her life simple and easy. She would have her family, her friends, her Stefan.

But it wasn’t going to work, was it? It wasn’t ever going to be that way, not for Elena.

As soon as she’d come back to town, the very first day she’d stepped outside into the sunshine of a Fell’s Church summer, something dark and evil and supernatural had started stalking her and her friends.

And as for Stefan . . . God . . . Stefan. What was happening to him?

When she closed her eyes, she saw Caleb flying through the air and heard that horrible, final-sounding crack that Caleb’s head had made as it connected with the marble of the mausoleum. What if Caleb never fully recovered? What if this cute, innocent guy, this guy whose parents had died and left him like hers had died and left her, was broken forever because of Stefan?

Stefan. How had he become the kind of person who could do something like that? Stefan, who felt guilty about the animals he took blood from, the doves and rabbits and deer of the forest. The Stefan who she knew at the deepest level of her soul, who she thought kept nothing from her—that Stefan would never have harmed a human being like that.

Elena lay in the bathtub until the water got cold and her tears had stopped. Then she got out, drained the tub, dried her hair, brushed her teeth, put on a nightgown, called good night to Aunt Judith and Robert, and climbed into bed. She did not want to write in her diary. Not tonight.

She switched off the light and lay flat on her back, staring into the darkness—the same blackness, she thought, as Damon’s eyes.

Damon had been a monster, she knew—he had killed, although not as blithely as he pretended; he had manipulated people and enjoyed it; he had haunted and hated Stefan for hundreds of years—but she had also seen the lost little boy he kept locked inside him. He had loved her, she had loved him, and he had died.

And she loved Stefan. Desperately, devotedly, undeniably. She loved the sincerity in his eyes, his pride, his courtly manners, his honor, and his intelligence. She loved that he had rejected the monster that lurked inside him, the one that had driven so many vampires to terrible acts. She loved the sorrow he held—for his past, for his hatred and jealousy of Damon, for the terrible things he had seen. And she loved the hope that always sprang up in him, the strength of will Stefan possessed that allowed him to keep fighting back the darkness.

Beyond all that, she loved Stefan. But she was afraid.

She had thought she knew him inside and out, that she could see clear through to the innermost reaches of his soul. That wasn’t true, not anymore. Not since the Guardians had stripped her powers, severing their psychic connection and reverting her back to a normal, human girl.

Elena rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. She knew the truth now. No matter what the Guardians had done for her, she would never be a normal girl. Her life would never be simple. Tragedy and horror would follow her forever.

In the end, there was nothing Elena could do to change her destiny.