that fell around her face in waves. And then there was her mind. Naturally skewed, vengeful, spiteful. Delicious. For instance, if he wasn’t mistaken, she was working with little voodoo dolls on her desk in there.
Terrific.
Damon liked to see the creative arts at work.
The alien Power still buzzed, and still he couldn’t get a fix on it. Was it inside — in the girl? Surely not.
Caroline was hastily grabbing for what looked like a handful of silken green cobwebs. She stripped her T-shirt off and — almost too fast for the vampire eye to see — had herself dressed in lingerie that made her look like a jungle princess. She stared intently at her own reflection in a stand-alone full-length mirror.
Now, what can you be waiting for, little girl? Damon wondered.
Well — he might as well keep a low profile. There was a dark flutter, one ebony feather fell to the ground, and then there was nothing but an exceptionally large crow sitting in the tree.
Damon watched intently from one bright bird-eye as Caroline moved forward suddenly as if she’d gotten an electric jolt, lips parted, her gaze on what seemed to be her own reflection.
Then she smiled at it in greeting.
Damon could pinpoint the source of Power now. It was inside the mirror. Not in the same dimension as the mirror, certainly, but contained inside it.
Caroline was behaving — oddly. She tossed back her long bronze hair so that it fell in magnificent disarray down her back; she wet her lips and smiled as if at a lover. When she spoke, Damon could hear her quite clearly.
“Thank you. But you’re late today.”
There was still no one but her in the bedroom, and Damon could hear no answer. But the lips of the Caroline in the mirror were not moving in synch with the real girl’s lips.
Bravo! he thought, always willing to appreciate a new trick on humans. Well done, whoever you are!
Lip-reading the mirror girl’s words, he caught something about sorry. And lovely.
Damon cocked his head.
Caroline’s reflection was saying, “…you don’t have to…after today.”
The real Caroline answered huskily. “But what if I can’t fool them?”
And the reflection: “…have help. Don’t worry, rest easy…”
“Okay. And nobody will get, like,fatally hurt, right? I mean, we’re not talking about death — for humans.”
The reflection: “Why should we…?”
Damon smiled inwardly. How many times had he heard exchanges like that before? As a spider himself, he knew: First you got your fly into the parlor; then you reassured her; and before she knew it, you could have anything from her, until you didn’t need her any longer.
And then — his black eyes glittered — it was time for a new fly.
Now Caroline’s hands were writhing in her lap. “Just as long as you really — you know. What you promised. You really mean it about loving me?”
“…trust me. I’ll take care of you — and your enemies, too. I’ve already begun…”
Suddenly Caroline stretched, and it was a stretch that boys at Robert E. Lee High School would have paid to watch. “That’s what I want to see,” she said. “I’m just so sick of hearing about Elena this, Stefan that…and now it’s going to start all over.”
Caroline broke off abruptly, as if someone had hung up on her on the phone and she’d only just realized it. For a moment her eyes narrowed and her lips thinned. Then, slowly, she relaxed. Her eyes remained on the mirror, and one hand lifted until it was resting lightly on her stomach. She stared at it and slowly her features seemed to soften, to melt into an expression of apprehension and anxiety.
But Damon hadn’t taken his eyes off the mirror for an instant. Normal mirror, normal mirror, normal mirror — la era! Just at the last moment, as Caroline turned away, a flash of red.
Flames?
Now, what could be going on? he thought lazily, fluttering as he transformed from a sleek crow back into a drop-dead gorgeous young man lounging in a high branch of the tree. Certainly the mirror-creature wasn’t from around Fell’s Church. But it sounded as if it meant to make trouble for his brother, and a fragile, beautiful smile touched Damon’s lips for a second.
There was nothing he loved more than to watch self-righteous, sanctimonious,I’m-better-than-you-cos-I- don’t-drink-human-blood Stefan get in trouble.
The teenagers of Fell’s Church — and some of the adults — regarded the tale of Stefan Salvatore and their local beauty Elena Gilbert as a modern Romeo-and-Juliet story. She had given her life to save his when they’d both been captured by a maniac, and afterward he had died of a broken heart. There were even whispers that Stefan had been not quite human…but something else. A demon lover that Elena had died to redeem.
Damon knew the truth. Stefan was dead all right — but he had been dead for hundreds of years. And it was true that he was a vampire, but calling him a demon was like calling Tinkerbell armed and dangerous.
Meanwhile Caroline couldn’t seem to stop talking to an empty room.
“Just you wait,” she whispered, walking over to the piles of untidy papers and books that littered her desk.
She rummaged through the papers until she found a miniature video camera that had a green light shining at her like a single unblinking eye. Delicately, she connected the camera to her computer and began typing a password.
Damon’s eyesight was much better than a human’s, and he could clearly see the tanned fingers with the long shining bronze nails: CFRULES. Caroline Forbes rules, he thought. Pitiful.
Then she turned around, and Damon saw tears well up in her eyes. The next moment, unexpectedly, she was sobbing.
She sat heavily on the bed, weeping and rocking herself back and forth, occasionally striking the mattress with a clenched fist. But mainly she just sobbed and sobbed.
Damon was startled. But then custom took over and he murmured, “Caroline? Caroline, may I come in?”
“What? Who?” She looked around frantically.
“It’s Damon. May I come in?” he asked, his voice dripping with mock sympathy, simultaneously using mind control on her.
All vampires had such powers of control over mortals. How great the Power was depended on many things: the vampire’s diet (human blood was by far the most potent), the strength of the victim’s will, the relationship between the vampire and the victim, the fluctuation of day and night — and so many other things that even Damon didn’t begin to understand. He only knew when he felt his own Power quicken, as it was quickening now.
And Caroline was waiting.
“I can come in?” he said in his most musical, most beguiling voice, at the same time crushing Caroline’s strong will under one much stronger.
“Yes,” she answered, wiping her eyes quickly, apparently seeing nothing unusual in his entrance by a third- story window. Their eyes locked. “Come in, Damon.”
She had issued the necessary invitation for a vampire. With one graceful motion he swung himself over the sill. The interior of her room smelled like perfumes — and not subtle ones. He felt really quite savage now — it was surprising the way the blood fever had come on so suddenly, so irresistibly. His upper canines had extended to about half again their size, and their edges were razor-sharp.
This was no time for conversation, for loitering around as he usually did. For a gourmet, half the pleasure was in the anticipation, sure, but right now he was in need. He drew strongly on his Power to control the human brain and gave Caroline a dazzling smile.
That was all it took.
Caroline had been moving toward him; now she stopped. Her lips, partly open to ask a question, remained parted; and her pupils suddenly widened as if she were in a dark room, and then contracted and remained contracted.
“I…I…” she managed. “Ohhh…”
There. She was his. And so easily, too.
His fangs were throbbing with a kind of pleasurable pain, a tender soreness beckoning him to strike as quickly
