Phantom (16 page)

“We’d better pack up all of this and bring it back to the boardinghouse,” she said briskly. “Are there more notebooks?” Stefan nodded. “Then we’d better look through them carefully. If he cast a spell on us—some kind of curse—it could still be active, even though he’s confined to the hospital for now. The spell he used might be in one of the notebooks, or at least we might find some kind of clue as to what it is and exactly what it’s doing. And, hopefully, how to reverse it.”

Stefan was looking a little lost, his green eyes questioning. His arms were held out very slightly, as if he had been expecting her to embrace him and hadn’t remembered to put them down when she hadn’t. But for some reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on, Elena couldn’t bring herself to hug him. Instead, she looked away and said, “Do you have any plastic bags or anything in the car we can use to move it all?”

E
lena hung up her cell phone as they pulled up to the boardinghouse in Stefan’s car. “The nurse at the hospital says Caleb’s still unconscious,” she said.

“Good,” said Stefan. She gave him a reproving glance and he stared back at her in exasperation. “If he’s unconscious,” he explained, “it’ll give us more of a chance to figure out what spell he’s cast on us.”

They’d filled three fat black trash bags with the papers, clippings, and books they’d found in the Smallwoods’ garden shed. Elena had been afraid to disturb the pentagram with the roses and photographs around it on the shed floor, in case that would affect the spell somehow, but she’d taken a couple of pictures of it with her cell phone.

Matt came out and picked up one of the bags. “Bringing over some garbage?”

“Something like that,” Elena said grimly, and filled him in on what they’d discovered at the Smallwood house.

Matt grimaced. “Wow. But maybe now we can finally do something about what’s been happening.”

“How come you’re here so early?” Elena asked, following him toward the house. “I thought you weren’t coming onto guard duty until ten.” Stefan trailed along behind her.

“I spent the night,” Matt told her. “After Bonnie’s name appeared, I didn’t want to let her out of my sight.”

“Bonnie’s name appeared?” Elena whirled accusingly on Stefan. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Stefan shrugged uncomfortably. “I didn’t know,” he confessed hesitantly.

“Stefan, I told you to protect Meredith and Celia,” she snapped. “You were supposed to be
here
. Even before Bonnie’s name showed up, it was Meredith and Celia who were in danger. I was relying on you to watch over them.”

Stefan glared back at her. “I’m not your lapdog, Elena,” he said quietly. “I saw a mysterious threat that I thought bore investigation. I acted to protect you. And I was right. The danger was more immediate to you than the others. And now we have a chance to piece together the spell.”

Elena blinked at his tone but couldn’t deny the truth in his words. “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “You’re right. I’m glad we discovered Caleb’s shed.”

Matt opened the front door. They dumped the bags in the hall and went through to the kitchen, where Mrs. Flowers, Alaric, and Meredith were enjoying a breakfast of croissants, jam, fruit, and sausages.

“Celia’s gone,” Meredith said to Elena as soon as they entered the room. Her tone was casually informative, but her usually cool gray eyes were twinkling, and Elena shared a secret smile with her friend.

“Where’d she go?” Elena asked, equally casually, reaching for a croissant. It had been a long morning, and she was starving.

“University of Virginia,” Alaric answered. “She’s hoping to get some leads by doing research on curses and folk magic.”

“We might have some more information now,” Elena announced around a mouthful of deliciously buttery croissant. She explained what they had found in the shed. “We brought all the papers and Caleb’s notebooks with us. And here’s what he’d laid out on the floor.” She pulled out her phone, loaded the picture, and handed it to Mrs. Flowers.

“My goodness,” said the old woman. “This certainly looks like dark magic. I wonder what that child thought he was doing.”

Stefan snorted. “He’s no child, Mrs. Flowers. I strongly suspect he’s a werewolf as well as a dark magician.”

Mrs. Flowers looked at him sternly. “He’s found the wrong way of going about looking for his cousin, that’s for certain. But this magic looks rather amateurish to me. If it has worked, it will have been more by accident than design.”

“
If
it’s worked?” Meredith asked. “I think the evidence suggests that whatever he’s done worked.”

“Surely it would be too much of a coincidence for Caleb to be trying to cast spells on us
and
for an unexplained curse to be affecting us as well,” Alaric noted.

“Where’s Caleb now?” Matt asked, frowning. “Does he know you found all this? Do we need to track him down and keep an eye on him?”

Stefan crossed his arms. “He’s in the hospital.”

There was a little pause as the others looked at one another and decided, based on Stefan’s stony demeanor, not to delve deeper. Meredith glanced questioningly at Elena, and Elena nodded slightly to say,
I’ll explain later.

She turned to Mrs. Flowers. “Can you tell what spell Caleb was using? What was he trying to do?”

Mrs. Flowers stared thoughtfully at the picture. “It’s an interesting question,” she said. “Roses are typically used in love spells, but the pentagram and multiple pictures around it suggest a darker intent here. The roses’ unusual crimson color would probably make them more effective. They might be used to evoke other passions as well. My best guess would be that Caleb was trying to control your emotions in some way.”

Elena cast a sudden glance at Stefan, taking in his guarded expression and tense shoulders.

“But that’s as much as I can tell you for now,” Mrs. Flowers continued. “If the rest of you want to look through Caleb’s notebooks for clues, Bonnie and I can research the magical properties of roses and what spells they could be used in.”

“Where is Bonnie?” Elena asked. Although she’d had the sense that something was missing, she’d only just consciously realized that the petite redhead wasn’t among the group in the kitchen.

“Still sleeping,” Meredith said. “You know how she loves to sleep in.” She grinned. “Bonnie was definitely enjoying being the damsel in peril and having everybody fussing over her last night.”

“I thought she was being really brave,” Matt said unexpectedly. Elena eyed him. Was he beginning to feel something romantic for Bonnie? They’d be good together, she thought, and was surprised to feel a tiny twinge of possessive anger mixed in with her speculative matchmaking.
Matt has always been yours, after all,
a hard voice whispered to her.

“I’ll go up and wake her,” Meredith said cheerfully. “No rest for the witches.” She swung to her feet and headed for the stairs, limping only slightly.

“How’s your ankle?” Elena asked. “You look a lot better.”

“I heal fast,” Meredith said. “I guess it’s part of the vampire-hunter thing. I didn’t need the cane by the time I went to bed last night, and this morning it feels almost back to normal.”

“Lucky you,” said Elena.

“Lucky me,” Meredith agreed, grinning at Alaric, who smiled back admiringly. Showing off, she ran lightly up the stairs, leaning only a little on the banister for support.

Elena took another croissant and spread jam on it. “The rest of us should start going through all the papers and things we took from Caleb’s shed. Alaric, as you’re the only one other than Mrs. Flowers and Bonnie who knows much about magic, you can take his notebooks and I’ll—”

She broke off as a scream came from overhead.

“Meredith!” shouted Alaric.

Later, Elena didn’t really remember getting upstairs. There was just a flash of shoving limbs and pandemonium as everyone tried to get up the narrow staircase as quickly as possible. At the door of the little cream-and-rose bedroom at the end of the hall, Meredith stood, white-faced and stricken. She turned large panicked gray eyes toward them and whispered, “Bonnie.”

Inside, Bonnie’s small figure lay motionless facedown on the floor, one pajamaed arm flung out toward the door. Unlit black and white candles were in a ring behind her, one black candle knocked over. There was a smudge of what looked like mostly dried blood inside the candle ring, and a weathered book lay open beside it.

Elena pushed past Meredith and knelt beside the still figure, feeling at her neck for a pulse. She let out the breath she’d been holding as she felt Bonnie’s heartbeat, steady and strong, beneath her fingers.

“Bonnie,” she said, shaking her by the shoulder, then gently rolling her over. Bonnie flopped without resistance onto her back. She was breathing regularly, but her eyes stayed closed, her long lashes dark against her freckled cheeks.

“Somebody call an ambulance,” Elena said quickly.

“I’ll do it,” Meredith said, breaking out of her frozen stance.

“We don’t need an ambulance,” Mrs. Flowers said quietly, gazing down at Bonnie with an expression of sorrow on her face.

“What are you talking about?” Meredith snapped. “She’s unconscious! We have to get her help.”

Mrs. Flowers’s eyes were grave. “The doctors and nurses at the hospital won’t be able to help Bonnie,” she said. “They might even hurt her by interfering with ineffective medical solutions to a nonmedical problem. Bonnie’s not sick; she’s under a spell. I can feel the magic thick in the air. The best thing we can do is to make her as comfortable as we can here while we look for a cure.”

Matt stepped forward into the room. His face was aghast, but he wasn’t looking at Bonnie’s motionless form on the floor. He raised one hand and pointed. “Look,” he said.

Near the bed, a tray containing a small teapot, a cup, and a plate had been knocked over onto the floor. The cup had smashed and the teapot lay on its side, tea leaves spilling out in a long, dark curve across the floor.

A curve that spelled out a name.

elena

M
att swung his gaze in horror between Bonnie’s prone figure, the name on the floor, and Elena’s pale face. After a few shocked minutes, Elena spun and left the room. Stefan and Matt followed her as Meredith and the others moved to Bonnie’s side. Out in the hallway, Elena pounced on Stefan. “You were supposed to look after them. If you had been here, Bonnie would have had some protection.”

Matt, trailing Stefan out of Bonnie’s bedroom, balked. Elena’s teeth were bared, her dark blue eyes flashed, and she and Stefan both looked furious.

“It wasn’t Stefan’s fault, Elena,” Matt protested gently. “Alaric and Mrs. Flowers had set magical protections. Nothing ought to have been able to get in. Even if Stefan had been here, he wouldn’t have been in Bonnie’s room with her all night.”

“He should have been, if that’s what it took to protect her,” Elena said bitterly. Her face was tight with anger as she looked at Stefan.

Even as Matt stood up for Stefan, he couldn’t suppress a glow of satisfaction at seeing trouble between Elena and Stefan at last.
It’s about time Elena realized Stefan isn’t perfect
, the worst part of him said gleefully.

Mrs. Flowers and Alaric hurried out of the room, breaking the tension between Elena and Stefan. Mrs. Flowers shook her head. “It seems that Bonnie was very foolishly trying to contact the dead, but I don’t see how she could have done this to herself. This must be the result of whatever has been endangering you. Meredith is going to stay by Bonnie’s bedside for the time being while we investigate.”

Matt glanced at Elena and Stefan. “I thought you said that Caleb was out of the picture.”

“I thought he was!” Stefan said as they all headed downstairs. “Maybe this is something he started before we fought.”

Alaric frowned. “If that’s true and it’s still going, Caleb himself might not be able to stop it. Even if he died, that wouldn’t interrupt a self-perpetuating curse.”

Elena strode out to the hall and ripped into the first of the trash bags, her jaw set. “We need to figure out what he did.” She dug out a stack of notebooks and shoved them into the others’ hands. “Look for the actual steps of a spell. If we know
how
he did it, maybe Alaric or Mrs. Flowers can figure out how to reverse it.”

“The spell book Bonnie was using is one of mine,” Mrs. Flowers said. “Nothing in it should have had this effect on her, but I’ll examine it just in case.”

They each took a notebook and a pile of papers and spread out around the kitchen table.

“There are diagrams in mine,” Stefan said after a minute. “There’s a pentagram, but I don’t think it’s the same as the one we saw on the floor.”

Alaric took the notebook and peered at it, then shook his head. “I’m not an expert, but that looks like part of a standard protection spell.”

The notebook in front of Matt was mostly scribbled notes.
Tanner first death?
it asked.
Halloween? Elena, Bonnie, Meredith, Matt, Tyler, Stefan all present.
He could hear Meredith’s feet upstairs, restlessly pacing by Bonnie’s bedside, and the words blurred before him. He scrubbed the back of his fist against his eyes before he could embarrass himself by crying. This was useless. And even if there was something helpful in here, he would never recognize it.

“Does it strike you guys as weird,” Elena asked, “that Celia was the first one affected by whatever this evil is? There wasn’t anything about her in the shed. And she never met Tyler, let alone Caleb. If Caleb was trying to get revenge on us for Tyler’s disappearance, why would he attack Celia first? Or at all, really.”

That was a really good point, Matt thought, and he was about to say so when he spotted Mrs. Flowers. She was standing stick-straight, staring off past his left ear and nodding slightly. “Do you really think so?” she said softly. “Oh, that does make a difference. Yes, I see. Thank you.”

By the time she had finished and her eyes snapped back to focus on them, the others had also noticed her one-sided conversation and grown silent, watching her.

“Does your mother know what happened to Bonnie?” Matt asked her eagerly. He had stayed in Fell’s Church fighting the kitsune with Mrs. Flowers when his friends had traveled to the Dark Dimension, and their time as comrades in arms had made him familiar with Mrs. Flowers’s casual exchanges with the spirit realm. If Mrs. Flowers’s mother had interrupted their conversation, she probably had something useful and important to say.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Flowers, smiling at him. “Yes, indeed, Ma
ma
was very helpful.” Her face grew serious as she glanced around. “Ma
ma
was able to sense the thing that took Bonnie’s spirit. Once it had entered the house, she could observe it, although she was powerless to fight it herself. She’s upset that she wasn’t able to save Bonnie. She’s quite fond of her.”

“Is Bonnie going to be okay?” Matt asked, over the others’ questions of, “So what
is
it?” and “It’s a demon or something, then, not a curse?”

Mrs. Flowers looked at Matt first. “We
may
be able to save Bonnie. We will certainly try. But we will have to defeat the thing that took her. And the rest of you are still very much in danger.”

She looked around at them all. “It’s a phantom.”

There was a little pause.

“What’s a phantom?” Elena asked. “Do you mean a ghost?”

“A phantom, of course,” Stefan said quietly, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe the idea hadn’t occurred to him earlier. “There was a town I heard of once back in Italy many years ago, where they said a phantom stalked the streets of Umbria. It wasn’t a ghost, but a being created by strong emotions. The story was that a man became so enraged at his unfaithful lover that he killed her and her paramour, and then himself. And these actions released something, a being made out of their emotions. One by one people living nearby went mad. They did terrible things.” Stefan looked shaken to his core.

“Is that what we’re facing? Some kind of demon created out of anger that will drive people mad?” Elena turned to Mrs. Flowers imploringly. “Because frankly I think this town has had enough of that.”

“It can’t happen again,” Matt said. He was also looking at Mrs. Flowers. She was the only one who had seen the near-destruction of Fell’s Church with him. The others had been there for the beginning, sure, but when things got really awful, when they were at their worst, the girls and the vampires had been off in the Dark Dimension, fighting their own battles to fix it.

Mrs. Flowers met his eyes and nodded firmly, like she was making a pledge. “It won’t,” she said. “Stefan, what you’re describing probably was a rage phantom, but it sounds like the popular explanation of what was going on wasn’t quite accurate. According to Ma
ma
, phantoms feed on emotions like vampires do on blood. The stronger an emotion is, the better fed and more active they are. They’re attracted to people or communities that already have these strong emotions, and they create almost a feedback loop, encouraging and nurturing thoughts that will make the emotion stronger so that they can continue to feed. They’re quite psychically powerful, but they can survive only as long as their victims keep feeding them.”

Elena was listening carefully. “But what about Bonnie?” She looked at Stefan. “In this town in Umbria, did people fall into comas because of the phantom?”

Stefan shook his head. “Not that I ever heard of,” he said. “Maybe that’s where Caleb comes in.”

“I’ll call Celia,” said Alaric. “This will help focus her research. If anyone has any material at all on this, it’ll be Dr. Beltram.”

“Could your mother tell what kind of phantom it was?” Stefan asked Mrs. Flowers. “If we know what emotion it feeds on, we could cut off its supply.”

“She didn’t know,” she said. “And she doesn’t know how to defeat a phantom either. And there’s one more thing we should take into consideration: Bonnie’s got a lot of innate psychic power of her own. If the phantom has taken her, it’s probably tapped into that.”

Matt nodded, following her train of thought. “And if that’s so,” he finished grimly, “then this thing is only going to get stronger and more dangerous.”