“Why should anybody trust her?” she said to Stefan. She sneaked a peek behind her. Elena was definitely going to know Matt anywhere, and Matt looked as if he were fainting. “Caroline’s beautiful, sure, but that’s it. She never has a good word to say about anybody. She plays games all the time — and — and I know we used to do some of that, too…but hers are always meant to make other people look bad. Sure, she can take most guys in”—a sudden anxiety swept over her, and she spoke more loudly to try to push it away—“but if you’re a girl she’s just a pair of long legs and big—” Bonnie stopped because Meredith and Stefan had frozen, with identical. Oh-God-not- again expressions on their faces.
“And she also has very decent hearing,” said a shaking, threatening voice from somewhere behind Bonnie. Bonnie’s heart leaped into her throat.
That was what you got for ignoring premonitions.
“Caroline—” Meredith and Stefan were both trying for damage control, but it was too late. Caroline stalked in on her long legs as if she didn’t want her feet to touch Stefan’s floorboards. Oddly, though, she was carrying her high heels.
“I came back in to get my sunglasses,” she said, still in that trembling voice. “And I heard enough to know now what my so-called ‘friends’ think of me.”
“No, you didn’t,” Meredith said, as rapidly eloquent as Bonnie was stunned mute. “You heard some very angry people letting off steam after you’d just insulted them.”
“Besides,” Bonnie said, suddenly able to speak again, “admit it, Caroline — you hoped you’d hear something. That’s why you took off your shoes. You were right behind the door, listening, weren’t you?”
Stefan shut his eyes. “This is my fault. I should have—”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Meredith said to him, and to Caroline she added, “And if you can tell me one word we said that isn’t true, or was exaggerated — except maybe for what Bonnie said, and Bonnie is…just being Bonnie. Anyway, if you can point to one word of what the rest of us said that isn’t true,I’ll beg your pardon.”
Caroline wasn’t listening. Caroline was twitching. She had a facial tic, and her lovely face was convulsed, dark red, with fury.
“Oh, you’re going to beg my pardon all right,” she said, wheeling to point her long-nailed forefinger at each of them. “You’re all going to be sorry. And if you try that — that witchcraft-vampire type thing on me again,” she said to Stefan, “I have friends — real friends — who’d like to know about it.”
“Caroline, just this afternoon you signed a contract—”
“Oh, who gives a damn?”
Stefan stood up. It was dark now inside the small room with its dusty window, and Stefan’s shadow was thrown before him by the bedside lamp. Bonnie looked at it and then poked Meredith, as the hairs tingled on her arms and neck. The shadow was surprisingly dark and surprisingly tall. Caroline’s shadow was weak, transparent, and short — an imitation shadow beside Stefan’s very real one.
The thunderstorm feeling was back. Bonnie was shaking now; trying not to, but unable to stop the shivering that had come on as if she had been thrown into icy water. It was a cold that had gotten directly into her bones and was ripping layer after layer of heat off them like some greedy giant, and now she was beginning to shake hard ….
Something was happening to Caroline in the darkness — something was coming from her — or coming for her — or maybe both. In any case, it was all around her now, and all around Bonnie, too, and the tension was so thick that Bonnie felt choked, her heart pounding. Beside her, Meredith — practical, level-headed Meredith — stirred uneasily.
“What—?” Meredith began in a whisper.
Suddenly, as if it had all been exquisitely choreographed by the things in the dark — the door to Stefan’s room slammed shut…the lamp, an ordinary electric one, went off…the ancient rolled-up shutter over the window came rattling down, dropping the room into sudden and complete darkness.
And Caroline screamed. It was an awful sound — raw, as if it had been stripped like meat from Caroline’s backbone and yanked out of her throat.
Bonnie screamed, too. She couldn’t help it, although her scream sounded too faint and too breathless, like an echo, not the coloratura job that Caroline had done. Thank God that at least Caroline wasn’t screaming any longer. Bonnie was able to stop the new scream building in her own throat, even though her shaking was worse than ever. Meredith had an arm around her tightly, but then, as the darkness and the silence went on and Bonnie’s shaking only continued, Meredith got up and heartlessly passed her to Matt, who seemed astonished and embarrassed, but tried awkwardly to hold her.
“It’s not as dark once your eyes get used to it,” he said. His voice was creaky, as if he needed a drink of water. But it was the best thing that he could have said, because of all things in the world to fear, Bonnie was most afraid of the dark. There were things in it, things that only she saw. She managed, despite the terrible shaking, to stand with his support — and then she gasped, and heard Matt gasp, too.
Elena was glowing. Not only that, but the glow extended out behind her and far to either side of her in a pair of what were beautifully defined, and undeniably there …wings.
“She h-has wings,” Bonnie whispered, the stutter caused by her shaking rather than by awe or fear. Matt was clinging to her now, like a child; he obviously couldn’t answer.
The wings moved with Elena’s breathing. She was sitting on thin air, steady now, one hand held out with her fingers all spread in a gesture of denial.
Elena spoke. It wasn’t any language that Bonnie had heard before; she doubted it was any language people on Earth used. The words were sharp, thin-edged, like the splintering of myriad shards of crystal that had fallen from somewhere very high and very far away.
The shape of the words almost made sense in Bonnie’s head as her own psychic abilities were sparked by Elena’s tremendous Power. It was a Power that stood tall against the darkness and now was sweeping it aside… making the things in the dark scamper away before it, their claws scritching in all directions. Ice-sharp words followed them all the way, dismissive now….
And Elena…Elena was as heartbreakingly beautiful as when she’d been a vampire, and seemed almost as pale as one.
But Caroline was shouting, too. She was using powerful words of Black Magic, and to Bonnie it was as if the shadows of all sorts of dark and horrible things were coming from her mouth: lizards and snakes and many-legged spiders.
It was a duel, a face-off of magic. Only how had Caroline learned so much dark magic? She wasn’t even a witch by lineage, like Bonnie.
Outside Stefan’s room, surrounding it, was a strange sound, almost like a helicopter.Whip whip whip whip whip… It terrified Bonnie.
But she had to do something. She was Celtic by heritage and psychic because she couldn’t avoid it, and she had to help Elena. Slowly, as if making her way against gale-force winds, Bonnie stumbled to put her hand on Elena’s hand, to offer Elena her power.
When Elena clasped hands with her, Bonnie realized that Meredith was on her other side. The light grew. The scrabbling lizard things ran from it, screaming and tearing at each other to get away.
The next thing Bonnie knew, Elena had slumped over. The wings were gone. The dark scrabbling things were gone, too. Elena had sent them away, using tremendous amounts of energy to overwhelm them with White Power.
“She’ll fall,” Bonnie whispered, looking at Stefan. “She’s been using magic so strong—” Just then, as Stefan started to turn to Elena, several things happened very fast, as if the room was caught in the flashes of a strobe light.
Flash. The window shade rolled back up, rattling furiously.
Flash. The lamp went back on, revealing it was in Stefan’s hands. He must have been trying to fix it.
Flash. The door to Stefan’s room opened slowly, creaking, as if to make up for slamming shut before.
Flash. Caroline was now on the floor, on all fours, groveling, breathing hard. Elena had won….
Elena fell.
Only inhumanly fast reflexes could have caught her, especially from across the room. But Stefan had tossed the lamp to Meredith and was across the distance faster than Bonnie’s eyes could follow. Then he was holding Elena, encircling her protectively.
