The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation: Unspoken (12 page)

He was glad to see Jasmine’s lips tilt up again into a smile. And it was true. He had to believe that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his vampires would bring them closer to killing him.

Raccoon
, Damon thought, scraping his tongue against his teeth,
is even more disgusting than rabbit.
That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing. He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up through
branches at the stars, so clear and distant. The night forest was quiet around him.

He should just discreetly find a girl who would let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but somehow he couldn’t with Elena around. Even though he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seem right to find another companion. Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées.

How had Stefan managed it, decade after decade, resigning himself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Damon bit his lip and then consciously relaxed, lounging against the tree, pushing the thought away. He wasn’t going to think about Stefan.

Instead, he reached for his connection with Elena. It was better to think of her, of her soft skin and shining eyes, of her proud spirit and sharp, fierce mind, than to poke again and again at the painful scars left by Stefan’s loss.

Her grief was still there, haunting the bond between them. It would never leave her, he supposed, never leave either of them completely.
But there was something else there,
he thought,
something gentler and warmer creeping into her emotions.
He thought—
hoped
—that perhaps it was the way she felt about him.

Licking his lips, Damon let the blood flowing inside him—disgusting, but full of the energy of life—warm him and quicken his Power. Elena thought Siobhan might be in
one of the hunting cabins up here in the hills. So Damon was looking.

It probably wasn’t what the Guardians wanted, as they’d assigned
Elena
the task of finding and killing the old vampire, but who cared what they wanted? Dead was dead, and he didn’t like the idea of Elena following auras by herself, finding corpses in the night. She was strong, he knew, but she was still so young.

And he was ready to take someone down. His experiments in killing the synthetic vampires were at a standstill. Nothing worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Damon with dull, resentful eyes instead of fighting back. Restlessly, Damon touched his tongue to his sharp canines. He needed to
do
something.

He pushed his Power outward, searching, categorizing what he found. There was life all around him. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth, an owl swooped overhead. He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a family of black bears searching for food. Humans down in the town below, sleeping or indoors. One walking a dog at the edge of the forest.

Nothing
other.
No vampire consciousness stirring. If Siobhan was in a cabin in the woods, it wasn’t one of the ones up here in the hills past the edge of town.

Damon looked up at the stars again and thought about whether he should call another animal to him before he
went home. He hadn’t tried bear yet; maybe it would be less vile. All that fur seemed like it would be a pain to bite through, though, which might be even worse than the raccoon.

Or maybe he should head down into town, find a game of pool or a fight, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power.

He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when something stopped him short. Tensed, he held his breath and listened.

There was the lightest crackle, as if someone were carefully stepping across dry leaves. Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness,
wrongness
crept up on him, the faint chemical wrongness that was now all around.

Jack’s vampires. Now that Jack knew Damon was in Dalcrest, they had been tracking him. The little vampire outside his and Elena’s home hadn’t been there by coincidence. He had been scouting, and only the fact that Damon had captured him had stopped more from coming there. And now they’d found him here, in the forest. If they were able to track him, they would pursue Damon the same way their kind had chased him and Katherine across Europe. Only now he was alone.

Pushing away a flare of panic, Damon stepped backward so that the birch tree was at his back once more. They wouldn’t be able to come at him from behind. He stretched
his Power, feeling for the shape of their minds. Even using his Power to its fullest extent, he could barely sense them. It was lucky he had just fed, or he might not have sensed them coming at all. There was more than one—maybe as many as eight or nine, the feel of them quiet but, once he’d found them, distinct from one another.

Jack wasn’t among them,
he thought,
nor was Meredith.
He knew the feel of those two minds now, and these felt like strangers. Just how many minions had the mad scientist created?

They were coming closer, almost close enough for him to see them. He peered into the darkness, watching for movement. There was a crackle of dry leaves somewhere to his right, but he couldn’t spot them, couldn’t find exactly where they were coming from. Growling low in his throat with frustration, Damon took one step to the right, glaring off into the tangle of trees.

The first vampire slammed into him from the left, unexpected, knocking him sideways. She was a young blond girl, no taller than Bonnie and probably a few years younger. She took advantage of his surprise, going straight for Damon’s throat, her white teeth flashing in the starlight.

Damon caught his balance and grabbed a fistful of her thick hair, yanking her head back and away from his throat. With a quick motion, he managed to snap her neck. She fell limply at his feet, her face empty and innocent. It
wouldn’t keep her down for long, but she’d be out of the fight for the moment.

“Come on then, children,” he said to the dark shapes he knew were just out of his field of vision, taunting them. “Are you monsters or cowards?” He hesitated and stared out into the darkness, feeling with his Power. Could he feel something now? The faintest shine of a rust-red aura in the night? “Dilly, dilly, ducks, come and be killed,” he shouted wildly, an old nursery song popping into his head as he strained to pinpoint just what it was he was on the verge of sensing.

There. There and there. All around.
They were dropping their shields now, he realized; he could feel them coming from all sides, pressing in eagerly. They weren’t intimidated by how quickly he’d put down the little blonde. She’d only been an experiment, like poking a snake with a stick to see how fast it moved. A sense of grim satisfaction rose from them.

They weren’t afraid of him, and, deep inside, this shook Damon. He’d fought monsters stronger than he was, demons and ancient vampires. But they’d always been cautious, a little wary, respecting him even if they didn’t think he was a true threat.

But he didn’t know how to kill these vampires, didn’t even know how to hurt them properly, not for long. And they knew it.

There were too many of them, and he was alone. So Damon did the only thing he could. Between one blink and another, he pulled his Power fiercely around him, feeling his body violently compact. It was almost too much to manage with only animal blood in his veins, but he was determined. There was
no way
he was going to be ripped apart in the woods with the taste of raccoon still in his mouth.

Just before Jack’s vampires burst through the trees at him, Damon leaped into the air, completing the transition as he jumped. In crow form, he flapped his way above the forest.

They had gotten too close to him that time, he realized, tilting his wings to catch the night breeze. And they would never stop coming after him, now that they’d found him again.

He needed to figure out how to kill them for good.

“I
wish Damon was here for this,” Elena said, staring at her own reflection in the dark window.

There are a lot of people I wish were here for this
, Bonnie thought. Alaric had invited everyone to his apartment, saying he had new information to share. But “everyone” felt like a lot fewer people now than it ever had.

Bonnie pulled two more chairs into place around the table. Doing this made it so clear to her how many people they were missing. They only needed six chairs, maybe five: Bonnie, Elena, Alaric, Matt, and Jasmine. And Damon,
if
he showed up. Stefan was gone. Meredith was away, and Bonnie hadn’t heard from her for quite a while.

Zander and his Pack should have been here, but he was still acting distant, and Bonnie hadn’t seen the rest of
the Pack for days. She’d texted Zander to come to Elena’s, but she hadn’t been surprised when he’d given an evasive reply. She didn’t know when he’d be home, where he was.

Six chairs. And it looked like the sixth one would be empty.

“Can’t you just do your whole soul-bond thing and call Damon here?” Bonnie asked.

Elena finally turned around and looked at her, shrugging. “He tunes me out most of the time unless it feels like something’s wrong.”

“Really?” Bonnie asked, distracted from her angst. She’d always figured that the bond between Elena and Damon made them perfectly attuned to each other at all times, an open connection of love and longing. Which was totally romantic. And just slightly creepy.

“I tune him out, too,” Elena said. “We’d drive each other crazy otherwise.” She looked a little wistful as she said it.

Alaric came in from the kitchen and handed them each a cup of coffee. “You won’t believe how much I’ve found,” he said.

Before Bonnie or Elena could say anything, they heard feet clomping up the stairs outside, and Alaric hurried over to open the door. Matt and Jasmine came in, hand in hand. Bonnie’s heart gave a twinge of longing. Where was Zander?

“Sorry we’re a little late,” Matt said, “but we have some interesting news for you.”

Jasmine tipped her head up as Alaric kissed her on the cheek in greeting. “Have you heard anything from Meredith lately?”

“I just talked to her. She’s with the hunters, tracking Jack. No leads yet. She’ll let us know right away if they find him.” Alaric smiled, still looking excited about his news, but he seemed tired, too. Bonnie wondered if he was having trouble sleeping without Meredith. Zander had been coming to bed later and later, and she found herself tossing and turning until he came. She wasn’t used to sleeping alone.

“Where’s Zander?” Jasmine asked, as Alaric herded them all toward the table.

“He couldn’t come,” Bonnie said, keeping her voice light. Jasmine just nodded, but there must have been something in Bonnie’s tone, because Matt glanced up at her sharply.

“So I’ve been doing some digging into Jack’s background,” Alaric said, handing around photocopies of a newspaper article. The article was in English, but from a Swiss paper, dated five years before. The headline read
WOMAN
’
S DEATH RULED ANIMAL ATTACK
.

“You think this is Jack killing someone?” Matt asked thoughtfully. “Look at how they describe it. Her throat
was torn open, she was almost completely drained of blood. Definitely a vampire.”

Alaric shook his head. “Based on the journal Damon found, Jack’s only been a vampire for three years,” he told them. “But look—at the end.” He tapped the last line of the article with one finger.
Lucia di Russo is survived by two sisters and her fiancé, Henrik Goetsch.

“Okay…” Bonnie said. “Is this supposed to mean something? Because I don’t get it.”

“Henrik is Jack,” Alaric said, grinning. “Once I managed to ferret out his real name through missing persons reports, I was able to find out why he turned from scientist to vampire.”

“Pretty impressive detective work,” Matt said.

“So was Jack—Henrik—
experimenting
on this woman? His own fiancée?” Elena asked, looking horrified.

“I don’t think so,” Alaric said. “We don’t have any record of him having interest in vampires before Lucia was killed. I think this is when he discovered they were real.”