that she’d hit him with all of the feelings full force, because he suddenly turned concerned and gentle. I will, love, he said simply.
While the female police officer was searching the kitchen and the male the living room, Stefan stepped into the small first-floor guest room, with its single rumpled bed. The lamps were turned off but with his night vision he could see Elena and Meredith perfectly well by the curtains. Meredith was holding herself as stiffly as an acrophobic bungee jumper.
Take all you need without permanently harming her — and try to put her to sleep, too. And don’t invade her mind too deeplyI’ll take care of it. You’d better get out in the hallway, let them see at least one of us, love, Stefan replied soundlessly. Elena was obviously simultaneously frightened for and defensive about her friend and had sped right into micromanagement mode. While this was usually a good thing, if there was one thing Stefan knew about — even if it was the only thing he knew — it was taking blood.
“I want to ask for peace between our families,” he said, reaching one hand toward Meredith. She hesitated and Stefan, even trying his hardest, could not help but hearing her thoughts, like small, scuttling creatures at the base of her mind.
What was she committing herself to? In what sense did he mean family?
It’s really just a formality, he told her, trying to gain ground on another front: her acceptance of the touch of his thoughts to hers. Never mind it.
“No,” Meredith said. “It’s important. I want to trust you, Stefan. Only you, but…I didn’t get the stave until after Klaus was dead.”
He thought swiftly. “Then you didn’t know what you were—”
“No. I knew. But my parents were never active. It was Grandpa who told me about the stave.”
Stefan felt a surge of unexpected pleasure. “So your grandfather’s better now?”
“No…sort of.” Meredith’s thoughts were confusing. His voice changed, she was thinking. Stefan was truly happy that Grandpa’s better. Even most humans wouldn’t care — not really.
“Of course I care,” Stefan said. “For one thing, he helped save all our lives — and the town. For another, he’s a very brave man — he must have been — to survive an attack by an Old One.”
Suddenly, Meredith’s cold hand was around his wrist and words were tumbling from her lips in a rush that Stefan could barely understand. But her thoughts stood bright and clear under those words, and through them he got the meaning.
“All I can know about what happened when I was very young is what I’ve been told. My parents told me things. My parents changed my birthday — they actually changed the day we celebrate my birthday on — because a vampire attacked my grandpa, and then my grandpa tried to kill me. They’ve always said that. But how do they know? They weren’t there — that’s part of what they say. And what’s more likely, that my grandpa attacked me or that the vampire did?” She stopped, panting, trembling all over like a white-tailed doe caught in the forest. Caught, and thinking she was doomed, and unable to run.
Stefan put out a hand that he deliberately made warm around Meredith’s cold one. “I won’t attack you,” he said simply. “And I won’t disturb any old memories.
Good enough?”
Meredith nodded. After her cathartic story Stefan knew she wanted as few words as possible.
“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured, just as he had thought the soothing phrase into the mind of many an animal he’d chased through the Old Wood. It’s all right.
There’s no reason to fear me.
She couldn’t help being afraid, but Stefan soothed her as he soothed the forest animals, drawing her into the darkest shadow of the room, calming her with soft words even as his canines screamed at him to bite. He had to fold down the side of her blouse to expose her long, olive-skinned column of neck, and as he did the calming words turned into soft endearments and the kind of reassuring noises he would use to comfort a baby.
And at last, when Meredith’s breathing had slowed and evened and her eyes had drifted shut, he used the greatest of care to slide his aching fangs into her artery.
Meredith barely quivered. Everything was softness as he easily skimmed over the surface of her mind, too, seeing only what he already knew about her: her life with Elena and Bonnie and Caroline. Parties and school, plans and ambitions. Picnics.
A swimming hole. Laughter. Tranquility that spread out like a great pool. The need for calm, for control. All this stretching back as far as she could remember…
The farthest depths that she could remember were here at the center…where there was a sudden plunging dip. Stefan had promised himself he would not go deeply into her mind, but he was being pulled, helpless, being dragged down by the whirlpool. The waters closed over his head and he was drawn at tremendous speed to the very depths of a second pool, this one not composed of tranquility, but of rage and fear.
And then he saw what had happened, what was happening, what would forever be happening — there at Meredith’s still center.
When M. le Princess Jessalyn D’Aubigne had drunk her fill of Damon’s blood — and she was thirsty for such a fragile thing — it was Damon’s turn. He forced himself to remain patient when Jessalyn flinched and frowned at the sight of his ironwood knife. But Damon teased her and joked with her and played chasing games up and down the enormous bed, and when he finally caught her, she scarcely felt the knife’s sting at her throat.
Damon, though, had his mouth on the dark red blood that welled out immediately.
Everything he’d done, from pouring Black Magic for Bonnie to pouring out the star ball’s liquid at the four corners of the Gate to making his way through the defenses of this tiny gem of a castle had been for this. For this moment, when his human palate could savor the nectar that was vampire blood.
And it was…heavenly!
This was only the second time in his life that he’d tasted it as a human. Katerina — Katherine, as he thought of her in English — had been the first, of course. And how she could have crept off after that and gone, wearing just her short muslin shift, to the wide-eyed, inexperienced little boy who was his brother, he would never understand.
His disquiet was spreading to Jessalyn. That mustn’t happen. She had to stay calm and tranquil as he took as much as he could of her blood. It wouldn’t hurt her at all, and it meant all the difference to him.
Forcing his consciousness away from the sheer elemental pleasure of what he was doing, he began, very carefully, very delicately, to infiltrate her mind.
It wasn’t difficult to get to the nub of it. Whoever had wrenched this delicate, fragile-boned girl from the human world and had endowed her with a vampire’s nature hadn’t done her any favors. It wasn’t that she had any moral objections to vampirism. She’d taken to the life easily, enjoying it. She would have made a good huntress in the wild. But in this castle? With these servants? It was like having a hundred snooty waiters and two hundred condescending sommeliers staring her down as soon as she opened her mouth to give an order.
This room, for instance. She had wanted some color in it — just a splash of violet here, a little mauve there — naturally, she realized, a vampire princess’s bedchamber had to be mostly black. But when she’d timidly mentioned the subject of colors to one of the parlor maids, the girl had sniffed and looked down her nostrils at Jessalyn as if she’d asked for an elephant to be installed just beside her bed. The princess had not had the courage to bring up the matter with the housekeeper, but within a week three baskets full of black-and-off-black throw pillows had arrived. There was her “color.” And in the future would her highness be so good as to consult her housekeeper before querying the staff as to her household whims?
She actually said that about my “whims,” Jessalyn thought as she arched her neck back and ran sharp fingernails through Damon’s thick soft hair. And — oh, it’s no good. I’m no good. I’m a vampire princess, and I can look the part, but I can’t play it.
You’re every bit a princess, your highness, Damon soothed. You just need someone to enforce your orders. Someone who has no doubts about your superiority. Are your servants slaves?
No, they’re all free.
Well, that makes it a little trickier, but you can always yell louder at them.
Damon felt swollen with vampire blood. Two more days of this and he would be, if not his old self, then at least almost his old self: a full vampire, free to walk about the city as he liked. And with the Power and status of a
