Dark Reunion

don't really think Sue threw herself off that balcony!'

'People are saying—' Deanna's boyfriend started and then shrugged defensively. 'Well—you told the police Vickie Bennett was in the room, right? And now she's off her head again. And just a little bit earlier you'd heard Sue shouting, 'No, Vickie, no!'?'

Bonnie felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her. 'You think that Vickie—oh, God, you're out of your mind! Listen to me. Something grabbed my hand in that house, and it wasn't Vickie. And Vickie had nothing to do with throwing Sue off that balcony.'

'She's hardly strong enough, for one thing,' Meredith said pointedly. 'She weighs about ninety-five pounds soaking wet.'

Somebody from the back of the crowd muttered about insane people having superhuman strength. 'Vickie has a psychiatric record—'

'Elena told us it was a guy!' Bonnie almost shouted, losing her battle with self-control. The faces tilted toward her were shuttered, unyielding. Then she saw one that made her chest loosen. 'Matt! Tell them you believe us.'

Matt Honeycutt was standing on the fringe with his hands in his pockets and his blond head bowed. Now he looked up, and what Bonnie saw in his blue eyes made her draw in her breath. They weren't hard and shuttered like everyone else's, but they were full of a flat despair that was just as bad. He shrugged without taking his hands from his pockets.

'For what it's worth, I believe you,' he said. 'But what difference does it make? It's all going to turn out the same anyway.'

Bonnie, for one of the first times in her life, was speechless. Matt had been upset ever since Elena died, but this…

'He does believe it, though,' Meredith was saying quickly, capitalizing on the moment. 'Now what have we got to do to convince the rest of you?'

'Channel Elvis for us, maybe,' said a voice that immediately set Bonnie's blood boiling. Tyler. Tyler Smallwood. Grinning like an ape in his overexpensive Perry Ellis sweater, showing a mouthful of strong white teeth.

'It's not as good as psychic e-mail from a dead Homecoming Queen, but it's a start,' Tyler added.

Matt always said that grin was asking for a punch in the nose. But Matt, the only guy in the crowd with close to Tyler's physique, was staring dully at the ground.

'Shut up, Tyler! You don't know what happened in that house,' Bonnie said.

'Well, neither do you, apparently. Maybe if you hadn't been hiding in the living room, you'd have seen what happened. Then somebody might believe you.'

Bonnie's retort died on her tongue. She stared at Tyler, opened her mouth, and then closed it. Tyler waited. When she didn't speak, he showed his teeth again.

'For my money, Vickie did it,' he said, winking at Dick Carter, Vickie's ex-boyfriend. 'She's a strong little babe, right, Dick? She could have done it.' He turned and added deliberately over his shoulder, 'Or else that Salvatore guy is back in town.'

'You creep!' shouted Bonnie. Even Meredith cried out in frustration. Because of course at the very mention of Stefan pandemonium ensued, as Tyler must have known it would. Everyone was turning to the person next to them and exclaiming in alarm, horror, excitement. It was primarily the girls who were excited.

Effectively, it put an end to the gathering. People had been edging away surreptitiously before, and now they broke up into twos and threes, arguing and hastening off.

Bonnie gazed after them angrily.

'Supposing they did believe you. What did you want them to do, anyway?' Matt said. She hadn't noticed him beside her.

'I don't know. Something besides just standing around waiting to be picked off.' She tried to look him in the face. 'Matt, are you all right?'

'I don't know. Are you?'

Bonnie thought. 'No. I mean, in one way I'm surprised I'm doing as well as I am, because when Elena died, I just couldn't deal. At all. But then I wasn't as close to Sue, and besides… I don't know!' She wanted to hit something again. 'It's just all too much!'

'You're mad.'

'Yes, I'm mad.' Suddenly Bonnie understood the feelings she'd been having all day. 'Killing Sue wasn't just wrong, it was evil. Truly evil. And whoever did it isn't going to get away with it. That would be—if the world is like that, a place where that can happen and go unpunished… if that's the truth…' She found she didn't have a way to finish.

'Then what? You don't want to live here anymore? What if the world is like that?'

His eyes were so lost, so bitter. Bonnie was shaken. But she said staunchly, 'I won't let it be that way. And you won't either.'

He simply looked at her as if she were a kid insisting there was so a Santa Claus.

Meredith spoke up. 'If we expect other people to take us seriously, we'd better take ourselves seriously. Elena did communicate with us. She wanted us to do something. Now if we really believe that, we'd better figure out what it is.'

Matt's face had flexed at the mention of Elena. You poor guy, you're still as much in love with her as ever, thought Bonnie. I wonder if anything could make you forget her? She said, 'Are you going to help us, Matt?'

'I'll help,' Matt said quietly. 'But I still don't know what it is you're doing.'

'We're going to stop that murdering creep before he kills anybody else,' said Bonnie. It was the first time she'd fully realized herself that this was what she meant to do.

'Alone? Because you are alone, you know.'

'We are alone,' Meredith corrected. 'But that's what Elena was trying to tell us. She said we had to do a summoning spell to call for help.'

'An easy spell with only two ingredients,' Bonnie remembered from her dream. She was getting excited. 'And she said she'd already told me the ingredients—but she hadn't.'

'Last night she said there were corrupting influences distorting her communication,' Meredith said. 'Now to me that sounds like what was happening in the dream. Do you think it really was Elena you were drinking tea with?'

'Yes,' Bonnie said positively. 'I mean, I know we weren't really having a mad tea party at Warm Springs, but I think Elena was sending that message into my brain. And then partway through something else took over and pushed her out. But she fought, and for a minute at the end she got back control.'

'Okay. Then that means we have to concentrate on the beginning of the dream, when it was still Elena communicating with you. But if what she was saying was already being distorted by other influences, then maybe it came out weird. Maybe it wasn't something she actually said, maybe it was something she did…'

Bonnie's hand flew up to touch her curls. 'Hair!' she cried.

'What?'

'Hair! I asked her who did hers, and we talked about it, and she said, 'Hair is very important.' And Meredith —when she was trying to tell us the ingredients last night, the first letter of one of them was H!'

'That's it!' Meredith's dark eyes were flashing. 'Now we just have to think of the other one.'

'But I know that too!' Bonnie's laughter bubbled up exuberantly. 'She told me right after we talked about hair, and I thought she was just being strange. She said, 'Blood is important too.' '

Meredith shut her eyes in realization. 'And last night, the Ouija board said 'Bloodblood-blood.' I thought it was the other thing threatening us, but it wasn't,' she said. She opened her eyes. 'Bonnie, do you think that's really it? Are those the ingredients, or do we have to start worrying about mud and sandwiches and mice and tea?'

'Those are the ingredients,' Bonnie said firmly. 'They're the kind of ingredients that make sense for a summoning spell. I'm sure I can find a ritual to do with them in one of my Celtic magic books. We just have to figure out the person we're supposed to summon…' Something struck her, and her voice trailed off in dismay.

'I was wondering when you'd notice,' Matt said, speaking for the first time in a long while. 'You don't know who it is, do you?'