Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/123877.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Vampire_Diaries_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Damon_Salvatore/Bonnie_Bennett
  Character:
      Damon_Salvatore, Bonnie_Bennett
  Additional Tags:
      D/s, Action/Adventure, Family_Drama
  Stats:
      Published: 2010-10-04 Chapters: 15/15 Words: 71042
****** It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City ******
by Eatsscissors
Summary
     Bonnie is in this to make certain that Grams didn't die for nothing.
     She's pretty sure that Damon just likes to kill things. AU after
     "Blood Brothers", but still contains elements through the S1 finale.
     Deeply AU for the second season.
Notes
     Special thanks go out to Workinprogress for her fantastic, insightful
     beta job (and very little whip-cracking!), and to Penny for going
     above and beyond as a mod in a sticky situation.
***** Chapter 1 *****
Bonnie chose a time when the sun would be high in the sky for their meeting,
and also a crowded place. She didn't know why; it wasn't as if the sunlight was
going to hurt him unless she could get that ring off (she thought long, hard,
and not without temptation about whether she could use her newly-learned
telekinesis to get that ring off, but then he wouldn't be able to help her, and
that would kind of kill the whole plan right there), and she doubted that he
would attack her where people could see and run him out of town. Maybe it was
so that she wouldn't attack him. Aunt Pamela and cousin Kayla had been fairly
stern about her responsibility not to use her powers where people not already
in the know could see them, when she had been staying with them after the
funeral and alternating between crying until her face hurt and learning all
that she could learn.
Still. She could keep her fantasies.
Bonnie leaned up against her car, arms folded across her chest and fingers
tapping restlessly against her elbow, as Damon finally strolled up to The
Grill's parking lot. She hadn't given him a hard and fast time, knowing that he
would probably delight in skipping past it just to piss her off, but had told
him that it was in both of their interests for him to meet her as soon as
possible. She had also been sure to wait a good five days after the incident at
the Miss Mystic Falls pageant before she made her call. By that time, either
Stefan was on his way back up or he was too gone to bring back, and Damon would
have an entirely different reason for helping her.
"'It's in both of our interests'?" Damon quoted back to her as he paused for
half a second a respectful distance back and then seemed to decide that he
liked the view from way up in her space a lot better. Less than six months
before, Damon had been able to make her run away by trying to loom over her
like that, but that had been six months before. Bonnie continued tapping her
fingers against her elbow and stared him down as he continued, "Did you spend
your little vacation reading spy novels or something?"
Bonnie glowered. "I have a proposition for you," she said before she put her
hand against Damon's chest and bodily pushed him back after he had proven that
he didn't have the good sense to do it on his own.
"Bad spy novels," Damon added. Even with Bonnie's hand against his chest, he
could lean forward and remind her that he was still a lot taller and bigger
than she. She evened the odds by sending the subtlest of warning flares through
his head until he rocked back onto his heels, one corner of his mouth turning
up in a way that did not suggest good thoughts going through his mind. If she
and Stefan had been anywhere near friends, Bonnie would have pulled him to the
side the next time that she saw him and told him that his brother did some of
the weirdest things with his face sometimes. "You might have piqued my interest
enough to get me out here, witch, but spill it. I have places to be."
So Stefan wasn't quite all better, then, and Damon was worried enough about him
to want to get back. Bonnie thought, anyway; her skills in translating the
language of Damon had all come to her second-hand, from listening to Elena and
Caroline. Lucky for Damon, then, that the language of Bonnie was much more
straightforward. "I'm going after the rest of the tomb vampires," she said. "I
want you to help me."
Damon rocked back onto his heels again. "Be sure to leave Elena a nice note
telling her how much she meant to you," he said. Was that...disapproval?
Clearly, Bonnie was speaking the language of Damon at the same level that she
could still remember her eighth-grade Spanish. "And be a dear, let her know
what kind of flowers you want at your funeral."
Bonnie scowled; Damon smiled when he saw that she had started tapping her
fingers the tiniest bit faster. "My grandmother died so that the tomb would be
closed again," she said. "If those vampires are out hurting and killing people,
then her death didn't mean anything. That's not acceptable to me."
Damon was still rocking back and forth and looking at her, head tilted to one
side. Bonnie hated to think that she was amusing him somehow, but she had a
feeling that there was a message on his face that she would be unable to read
until she had reached fluency levels. No, thank you. "And you think I
can...what?" he asked. "Stake them for you? You put Stefan down pretty well at
a distance last week."
Bonnie could have easily killed Stefan then rather than merely stopping him, or
Damon right this moment as he stood in front of her, but that wasn't the point
and they both knew it. "I'm not worried about what I'll do when I find them,"
she said. "It's the finding them. You know what they look like. I don't. You
know where vampires would go if they wanted mostly to get the hell away from
here. I don't." Now it was Bonnie's turn to lean into Damon's personal space.
In spite of the near-foot of height that he had on her, Damon was the one who
moved away. "And I thought that maybe, just maybe you might want to make up for
some of your part in it." Damon started outright grinning at her. Well, it had
been a shot in the dark. "Fair enough. I thought that maybe you might like to
kill something."
"It has been a long time," Damon said in a musing tone that Bonnie didn't like
at all. Even knowing full well that she was being baited, she sent another
warning pulse through his brain. "What, you come back with a brand new battery
and suddenly think that you're town sheriff?"
"If I have to be," Bonnie told Damon darkly, and meant every word of it. There
hadn't been any mysterious animal attacks in months, either, but that didn't
mean that she was putting it past him to start them up again because he didn't
like the way that the sun was shining that day.
Damon tipped an imaginary cowboy hat at her and stepped back. "You have fun
with that," he said. "In the meantime, I have better things to do with my
afterlife than risking my ass chasing down vampires who were old and powerful
when I was turned." He winced as he started past her car and saw that she
already had her bags in the backseat. "Should have known better than to get
cocky like that, kitten. If you're still in the mood to die, there's one
vampire who was in the tomb and one vampire who played a role every bit as big
as mine about ten miles that way." He pointed vaguely in the direction where
town limits and deep woods met. "But be sure to write that note first."
Elena had talked about Damon, pre-tomb, more like she would an annoying sibling
than a murderous animal. She had seemed sincere enough about it to make Bonnie
wonder if maybe their wasn't a flicker in their somewhere that her basic primer
wasn't advanced enough to translate. It was probably a good thing that she and
Elena were standing on shaky footing and not talking much right now, because no
one liked to hear "I told you so."
Bonnie waited for Damon to get several paces away before she brought out the
big gun, because she barely knew Damon and still knew that he was like as not
to zag right off the edge of a cliff (grabbing everyone within reach to come
with him on the way down) as zig in the direction that she wanted. "They hurt
your brother," she said. Damon wheeled around and was back in her face so fast
that Bonnie wondered for a moment if she hadn't jarred him badly enough to make
him throw a little vampire speed into the mix. She lifted her chin and stared
him down, thinking that there was no way those eyes of his could have looked
innocent at any point past the age of six. They just weren't made for it. "So I
thought that maybe you would want to get a little back."
"You..." Damon lifted his finger at her for a moment and then dropped it back
by his side. He was smiling, but Bonnie didn't think that she ought to be
taking that for anything. "Might just be stepping into something too big for
you to handle."
"My risk. Not yours," Bonnie said. She raised her eyebrow and waited for his
answer.
"Give me two hours." Damon turned and started to walk away. "And tell Elena to
stop giving out my phone number."
Bonnie didn't bother telling Damon that she and Elena were strained to the
point where declarative sentences about last night's television were hard.
"It's called 'Google'," she told Damon's retreating back. She settled back
against her car again and let out a breath that she hadn't realized that she
had been holding, only then noticing that Caroline and Matt were standing
quietly under The Grill's awning and in a perfect position to have seen
everything that had just transpired even if they were not quite close enough to
hear. Bonnie rolled her eyes up towards the sky as Caroline raised herself up
to whisper in Matt's ear. He nodded and moseyed a further distance away. Elena
had said over and over again during the last summer that she was going to build
a pillow fort in her room and refuse to come out again until college if one
more person had told her how sorry they were for her loss. Bonnie had thought
that she was being overly dramatic until now.
"Okay, so everyone has to have their one, and then if they're lucky he's like a
vaccination and you don't get the actual disease that turns you into Paris
Hilton or whatever," Caroline said by way of greeting. Bonnie blinked at her
several times and tried to figure out what the hell Caroline was talking about,
and this one was a language in which she was actually fluent. "But, speaking
from really icky experience here, you don't want Damon to be your one. Pick a
better bad boy."
"But the only other one we have in town is Tyler," Bonnie offered up, smiling
faintly.
"So outsource." Caroline leaned up against the car and nudged at Bonnie with
her elbow. "I'm just saying, let my horrible strife and bad personal decisions
stand as a lesson."
Bonnie opened her mouth and for more than a second seriously considered letting
it all spill out, only to finish with, "Your horrible personal decisions were
seriously not that horrible, Caroline, don't worry. And it's not what it looks
like."
"Okay, good," Caroline said with a visible relief that lasted only long enough
for her to glance into the backseat of the Prius and see the bags thrown there.
"Because it what it looks like is that you're going to elope to Atlantic City
or something. Seriously, Bonnie. We have better bad boys."
"No," Bonnie said with great conviction. "Not even close. It's just, um. It's
something that Grams left unfinished that I really, really need to close up for
her, okay?" She couldn't stop the strain from showing in her voice any more
than Caroline could the immediate sympathy from her face, and Bonnie felt like
the worst friend in the world even though she was telling the absolute gospel
truth. "And I need Damon to help me with it. I wish that I could tell you
more."
Caroline shot Matt an alarmed glance that made him automatically start coming
towards them until Bonnie waved at him to stay where he was. "Am I going to see
you on Cops?" she asked.
"You're not going to see me on anything." Bonnie reached out and took both of
Caroline's hands in her own when the other girl still looked dubious. "Look. I
wish I could tell you more, but I can't, and I need you to stay completely
quiet on this one, okay?" Caroline looked even more dubious. "Okay, fine, but
at least give me three hours. Can you do that?" Three hours wasn't much, but
since Bonnie herself didn't know where they were going, yet, it might just be
enough.
Caroline chewed at the edge of her thumbnail before leaning over and hugging
Bonnie hard. "Promise me that you'll be careful, all right?"
Bonnie hugged her back. "Super-duper careful," she promised. "Trust me. I have
this all under control."
*
Three hours and five minutes later, Bonnie very carefully turned off her phone
and tossed it into the backseat. Damon in the passenger seat arched an eyebrow
at her; he was already more than slightly sulky over not being the one driving,
and Bonnie wasn't in the mood for it. They were heading south. Perhaps in
retaliation for the fact that not only was he not driving, but he was also not
driving in Bonnie's Prius and not his car, he wasn't divulging yet why they
were heading south.
"I told Caroline to give me three hours before she told anyone that I was
leaving," Bonnie said.
Damon snorted softly. "You might have been pushing her past her limits by
giving her one," he said. He reached out to fiddle with her radio and Bonnie,
recognizing this as further retaliation for the fact that she was behind the
wheel, did not give him the satisfaction of slapping his hand away. If he
thought that she was going to be driven to the brink by the very best of
seventies disco, then he had already severely underestimated her.
"For you, maybe," Bonnie answered. "For me, no. I'm her best friend." She
sensed rather than saw Damon rolling his eyes. "I'll pick up a pre-paid later,
there is no way that my dad isn't going to call the cops."
"You have been reading spy novels."
"Please. I've seen The Bourne Identity." Bonnie stared straight ahead through
the windshield, flexed her fingers against the steering wheel, and said, "I
think that we need to set a few rules if we're going to work together."
Damon straightened in his seat and was suddenly staring at her very hard, so
that it was impossible not to feel. "And what would those be?" he asked her in
a silky voice. Zig when you wanted him to zag, and grab you around the waist to
take you right over the edge of the cliff with him. Bonnie focused on why she
was doing this, and what she had learned while she had been away, and refused
to let him make her the same girl who had bolted from him on Halloween.
"I know that you have to feed," Bonnie started. That that was the biggest
obstacle to this whole crazy...thing that she had cooked up maybe should have
told her that she was in no mental place to be doing it at all, but there was
important and then there was Important. Grams warranted the capital letter.
"If you are about to suggest that I go vegan for the duration, then I highly
suggest that you turn the car around now." She didn't have to look at him to
know that he was doing that nowhere-near-his-eyes smile. "And I can tell you
about some people I've known who deserved to be taken off of this planet far,
far more than your average bunny."
"I know that you're not going to give up human blood just because you like to
kill things," Bonnie continued stubbornly forward. "But while we're doing this,
you don't kill any humans for food, and you don't compel them, either." She
pulled her foot off the gas and let it hover over the brake, sure by the slit-
eyed way that Damon was looking at her that this whole thing was going to die a
premature death and leave her to stalk forward alone.
"You have a very high opinion of my opinion of violence if you think that
you're going to be the one setting all the rules," Damon finally said, which
was not a 'no', not yet. Bonnie glanced over at him, genuinely surprised, and
then nearly swerved off the road when they passed a cop car hiding beneath a
billboard for the World's Greatest Fried Chicken, fifteen miles ahead. She held
her breath, but apparently Caroline was being beyond true to her word.
"Fine," she said when they were sufficiently past the cop for her to take a
full breath again, to Damon's obvious amusement. "What are your terms?"
"So formal," Damon mused before he made a face and finally flipped the radio
station over to one playing the Beatles. Bonnie was made perversely proud by
having been able to outlast him on that one. "Firstly, it's going to make this
whole arrangement just a little bit awkward if you insist on referring to my
species as things."
"It's that or 'murderer'," Bonnie said tightly. Stefan was, well, his brother,
and Damon had apparently managed to work some kind of special charm on Elena,
but if he had it holstered somewhere he wasn't showing it.
"Call me whatever you want, little witch, but I make my choices, not some
mindless instinct." Damon started drumming his fingers against his thigh as the
Beatles ended and Mick Jagger came on and let them know that he wanted to
introduce himself as a man of wealth and taste. "Secondly, if I agree to play
by your rules and don't kill or compel anyone, you have to promise not to go
all--" He made a fluttering motion by the side of his head that Bonnie meant to
take the pain that she had sent through Stefan's brain at the pageant. "On me
if I convince some sweet young thing to donate me a pint or two completely on
her own." Bonnie took her eyes off the road long enough to stare at him in
amazement. "You wanted my expertise, and I'm telling you that my expertise
might take us into areas where there's not a convenient hospital with lax
security nearby every time that I start feeling peckish."
"I was thinking more about someone actually giving their blood to you
willingly," Bonnie said as she turned back before she crashed and killed--well,
at least one of them.
"Oh, it's not that hard, when you get right down to it. Humans will do almost
as much for lust as they will for love." Damon held his hand to her. "Do we
have a deal, or don't we?"
As much as the idea made her queasy, Bonnie didn't see that she could rightly
object to anything that someone wanted to do when it wasn't going to do them or
others permanent harm, not if they were the ones to actually choose it. She
took Damon's hand in her own and was surprised to find him only slightly cooler
to the touch than human flesh. It had been hard to get a good gauge when he had
been trying to rip out her throat out a few months previously.
"Deal," Bonnie said.
Damon slid further down in his seat and braced his knee up against the
dashboard. "In that case, since you insist upon playing chauffeur, we need to
head for South Carolina," he said. "The first vampire that you're looking for
is named Thomas, he was turned down there when it was still just a colony."
"You're certain that's where he would have gone?" Bonnie asked.
Damon smiled, but it wasn't entirely pleasant and was, to her eyes, more for
himself than for her. "Live a couple of centuries," he told her, "and your
routines might get bigger, but they're still your routines. Everyone heads for
home again sooner or later."
Bonnie decided not to mention the stillness that had taken over Damon's face
when he had said that any more than she was going to bring up again that it had
taken a reference to Stefan to get Damon on this ride, in deference to that
cliff that she was still certain that Damon would leap over for not better
reason than to be contrary. "South Carolina it is," she said.
As he made himself comfortable over in his seat and the Stones started asking
Bonnie if she could guess their name, Damon remarked idly, "And who knows?
Before we finish this and turn for home again, you might just be the one who
offers me that pint. Completely willingly, per your terms."
Bonnie gave Damon the biggest and brightest smile that she could conjure. "Oh,
Damon, I wouldn't worry about that," she informed him sweetly. "So far as I'm
concerned, you're really just a useful tool."
Damon chuckled before he could hide it, and on the radio Jagger finally
finished trying to wring out some sympathy so that Springsteen could take over
and start telling her about the streets of Philadelphia.
End Part One
***** Chapter 2 *****
Part Two
Bonnie was certain that they were going to have to pull over at a convenience
store so that she could pick up a map, but Damon directed her to Prosperity,
South Carolina with a nearly bored indifference, more than once not even
bothering to open his eyes as he told her which exit to take and where it was
faster to drive through the small towns rather than handling the highways. The
latter was, Bonnie highly suspected, more of an effort to keep them away from
the possible stares of cops on the lookout for a blue Prius carrying both a
teenage girl and a man much too old for her.
Much, much too old for her, Bonnie thought as Damon shifted for the first time
in nearly an hour, right as they were passing a sign letting them know that
they were only twenty-five miles from their destination. This time they were
promised catfish rather than chicken, though Bonnie was hoping that grease
would still be involved in one form or another. She had remembered to bring
Emily's book of spells along with her, but had neglected the fact that a
package of Oreos and some bottled water would have been a good plan, too.
"How do you know where we're going so easily?" Bonnie asked as Damon took his
knee down from the dash. She doubted that he had really been sleeping; she
wasn't sure that he even did. "You can't tell me that the roads have stayed the
same for the past one-hundred and fifty years."
"No, but I've had a lot of time to wander, and remembering routes is easy for
me," Damon said. He looked out the window as they passed a giant maple tree in
someone's front yard that might have been able to rival even him for age. "You
always want to remember good hunting grounds." Bonnie made a disgusted sound
from the back of her throat and leaned forward to turn the radio up.
*
Prosperity was a small town with white clapboard buildings dominating most of
its center and Main Street, fading into residential homes and then ultimately
mobile parks as it radiated outwards. Bonnie lifted her eyebrow and counted the
number of pickup trucks that they passed from the time that they crossed the
city limits until they reached a motel. It was a high number. She ignored
Damon's smirk as they very pointedly took separate rooms and then walked out
into the late sunset, just giving way into true twilight. It made the white
buildings look dingy and gray, and turned Damon's eyes icy-sharp when he
touched at her arm.
"We both need to eat," he said to her, bending low to speak against her ear
even though the light traffic going down the road wasn't nearly loud enough to
warrant it. Bonnie would have denied it, but her stomach growled at precisely
the wrong moment. Damon's smirk grew even deeper; Bonnie wanted to tell him
that he was going to stick like that if he wasn't careful, if she wasn't fairly
certain that he would have taken it as a compliment.
"It was that obvious?" Bonnie asked. She put her hand against Damon's chest and
pushed him back.
He took the hint with grace and gave the one of them who actually needed to
breathe some breathing room. "I could probably tell you that your leg was going
to cramp up before you knew," he said. "We passed a diner a few blocks back."
Home of the catfish. Bonnie rocked back onto her heels and viewed Damon through
narrowed eyes. "And you?" she asked.
Damon looked pointedly over his shoulder. Bonnie dimly remembered that they had
passed a small hospital on the way in, and also several bars. Damon's smile
only deepened when he turned back and saw her expression. "This plan of yours
is really not going to go far unless you learn to trust me," he said.
"I'm not related to you," Bonnie said. "I don't have to trust you."
Damon put his hands lightly to either side of Bonnie's face and leaned in. "I
keep my word," he told her before turning and walking away without saying
anything else.
"Guess I'm going to have to take that as an answer," Bonnie muttered under her
breath. She stopped by an electronics store on her way to the diner, picked up
an anonymous cellular phone, and then sat in her booth until her food had gone
cold staring at it without turning it on. Elena would keep her secret, if
Bonnie asked her to. She was also the only person who could actually know the
whole truth about what Bonnie was doing other than the person riding shotgun
with her.
In the end, Bonnie pushed the phone into her jacket pocket, quickly ate the
remainder of the dinner that she no longer particularly wanted, and threw down
money for the check. She had barely gone two steps back onto the sidewalk
before running into Damon, almost literally. It was full dark by now, and the
brightest light on the sidewalk came from the sparse street lamps and the
intermittent flash of headlights going past. There were moths large enough to
be mistaken for bats fluttering about the lamps, and Bonnie couldn't help but
think that was a pretty fitting halo for any of the Salvatores, considering.
"Unfortunate phone call?" Damon asked, searching Bonnie's face.
"Anything but." Bonnie shook her head and pushed her bangs out of her eyes.
"So. Thomas. You're sure that he would have come back here?"
"It's what I would have done," Damon said with an easy shrug. His face was
flushed with new blood; since it was too early in the evening for him to have
picked someone sufficiently drunk up at any of the bars, Bonnie was going to
have to take it on faith that he had visited the hospital. It would lose a
certain weight if she kept threatening to explode Damon's head and didn't
actually do it, anyway, and she still needed him. "Home again, home again,
blah-blah-blah."
"Fine." Bonnie brushed her hair back from her forehead again, shoved her hands
into her pockets when she realized that Damon was making extensive note of
every nervous twitch. "Since you're going all Mindhunter on this guy, what does
a newly-returned vampire do once he's finally found his way home again?"
Damon jerked his chin in the direction of one of the bars of which Prosperity
seemed to have no shortage, one to which Bonnie's eye looked to be older than
any of the others. When the door opened to let a patron exit, a snatch of
country music drifted to them both. "He hunts," Damon said simply. "Unless you
have a fake ID tucked into the pages of your spell book--"
"I'll wait outside," Bonnie said. She grabbed for Damon's arm. "Hey. Are you
sure that you'll be able to recognize him right away?"
Damon's smile wasn't pretty, but he removed her hand from his arm with an odd
kind of courtesy, almost as if he were on the verge of kissing the backs of her
fingers. "He helped tie my brother to a ceiling and watched as vervain was
poured into his eyes," he said, silky-smooth and making Bonnie aware of just
how much she was standing next to a very dangerous creature on a very slender
tether. "Yeah, witch. I think I'll remember his face."
Feeling more shaken and like her pre-Grams and pre-tutelage self than she cared
to admit, Bonnie took a step back. "Bring him out to the alley, okay?" she
instructed him. "I want to be a part of this, too."
"Bloodlust," Damon remarked, though his eyes were already fixed onto the bar.
"I never would have guessed it of you." The way that he said it made it sound
like a compliment; not certain that he was a party from which she particularly
wanted to be receiving compliments, Bonnie shivered very slightly.
"Would you have guessed the things that you would be capable of, before you
turned?" she asked Damon as the two of them crossed the street together. He put
his hand against the small of her back until she was on the pavement again. As
fixed and focused as his gaze still was on the bar, Bonnie wasn't even certain
that he realized what he was doing. She could almost picture him in a suit and
cravat, making certain that her hoop skirt didn't drag through the mud, and
almost forgot that during his hey-day she would have been the one washing the
hoop skirts, not wearing them.
Damon pulled his eyes away from the bar just long enough to look into hers.
"Oh, yes," he said as lightly as if they were discussing the weather. "By the
time that Katherine turned me, I was already very aware of what I was capable
of."
No, she was not going to forget how slender a tether she actually had on Damon,
neither soon nor ever. Bonnie grabbed Damon by the arm again hard enough to get
his attention and refused to let go when he threw her a look that was pure ice.
"Bring Thomas out to the alley when you find him," she said. Damon's mouth
started to turn up into that strange half-smile he had that could mean
everything and nothing at all. "I mean it, Damon. You said that you keep your
word."
"And I do." Damon shook her off. "But I never promised how big a slice you were
going to get in taking them down, so you're just going to have to trust me." He
stepped into the bar and left Bonnie making frustrated noises out on the
pavement. It didn't take more than a glance over the establishment to know that
this wasn't The Grill, where toddlers could play under the pool tables just so
long as they didn't venture too close to the bar. The patrons entering and
exiting looked her over as if they could spy at twenty feet what she really
was, a teenaged runaway in way over her head, too; she wouldn't get any further
than the door if she tried it.
Muttering things under her breath that would have gotten her in trouble if her
father had been present, and then in a lot more trouble if she had ever told
him that she learned that kind of language from Grams in the first place,
Bonnie wrapped her arms around herself and stalked towards the alley behind the
bar. She was nearly glad that she had lost her appetite midway through dinner;
whatever kind of bar food that they were serving inside, it suffered greatly
after marinating in the dumpster for awhile and joining with the smells of
alcohol, urine, and just a tinge of vomit.
"You were never promised glamor," Bonnie muttered to herself as she paced back
and forth. There was technically a stoop connected to the back door, but it
looked as if more than one of the customers inside had barely made it out of
the bar before they felt an overwhelming urge to relieve themselves of
everything that they had drunk inside of it. Bonnie thought that she would
pass. She continued pacing back and forth, touching every now and again at the
new phone in her pocket, and asked herself how long it could really be taking
Damon to figure out whether or not Thomas was hunting that night so that they
could either deal with him or move on. That he hadn't walked right back out
again immediately, that had to mean something, right? Or maybe it just meant
that the bar served a far better scotch than one would have guessed from the
facade.
A drunk couple staggered out the back door, hurling the metal open so hard that
Bonnie had to leap back or else risk a black eye. They were entwined around one
another so deeply that she looked away quickly out of respect, not expecting to
be noticed at all. She nearly startled when the man lifted his head away from
the neck that the woman was so generously offering him--no marks there except
for the normal passion-wounds made by blunt human teeth, Bonnie knew how to
look for these things by now--and slurred at her, "You okay out here, little
girl?"
Bonnie's eyebrows went up before she could stop them. "I'm fine," she said.
"I'm just watching for my dat--my dad. Waiting for my dad." If there anything
approaching a God in the universe, then Bonnie dearly hoped that he, she, or
any of the pit stops in between would not force her to pretend that she and
Damon were romantically involved.
The woman of the pair immediately looked sympathetic, slightly unnerving given
that her eyeliner had smeared and most of her lipstick was on her date's face.
"Aww, sweetie," she said, while the man was clearly doing a mental scan of
everyone in the bar to see who could have had a teenaged daughter. "Do you need
us to give you a ride anywhere?"
Bonnie took stock of the man and then the woman in turn, both of whom were
clearly in no condition to be driving themselves anywhere, let alone anyone
else. "I'm fine," she repeated. "Really, he'll be out in just a minute, and
then I'll drive him home." The sounds of a commotion started within the bar.
Bonnie smiled tightly and would have willed the couple straight out of the
alley and to their eventual horizontal destination if she could have. "Oh,
look, that's probably him now."
The back door flew open for the second time in five minutes, admitting Damon
and a cursing, clawing man who was dressed in flannel and denim, yet Bonnie
could still imagine him in a pair of mutton-chop sideburns without any strain
whatsoever. They were both wearing veins spreading out around their eyes like
lace masks, and their eyes were blacker than death. Damon hurled Thomas against
the far wall, knocking over a garbage pail and two squalling alley cats in the
process, and made a sound that could never be mistaken for human when Thomas
scrambled back up to his feet and hurled himself at Damon as if he hadn't felt
the fall at all. Bonnie held her breath and hoped that her well-meaning drunk
couple was deeply and truly plowed, because there was going to be no mistaking
that something was going on here far, far beyond the ordinary brawls of redneck
bars.
"That's your dad?" the man demanded of Bonnie, shocked.
Even though Thomas wore a face old enough to be Bonnie's father, it was Damon
who whipped his head around with a grin and replied, "Oh, she calls me 'Daddy'
all the time, don't worry about it." Bonnie got her satisfaction when Thomas
got the better of him and hurled Damon into the reeking dumpster with a force
that would have cracked a human's skull.
"We should call the cops," the woman said, and the man began nodding vigorous
agreement as they both started backing off towards the street.
"No, it's okay!" Bonnie called, her voice getting just a touch shrill. "Look,
he's getting up again, he's not really hurt!" As Damon picked himself up,
ignoring the blood running down the side of his face as a deep cut in his scalp
closed itself like it was nothing, and the couple broke and ran. "Oh, fuck."
"Witch, if you wanted to be more than decoration here, this would be a good
time," Damon snarled at her. Thomas grabbed him by his hair and delivered
several rib-crushing and organ-splattering punches into his abdomen.
"Fuck," Bonnie whispered again. She made a headlong rush towards Thomas without
knowing what she was doing other than that she was murmuring a spell under her
breath on instinct and could feel the air growing pregnant and thick, the way
that it did just before the breaking of a thunderstorm, while Damon yelled
something at her that sounded like a garbled version of, "Idiot." Thomas struck
her a blow across her cheek and temple that felt like being hit by a
sledgehammer and sent Bonnie straight off of her feet and into the far wall of
the alley. The brick tore through her blouse, and then her skin, and made the
bones, ligaments, and tendons tremble and consider before they decided to stay
in their proper place. Thomas spit an obscenity at her and then went right back
to punishing Damon, but that was fine. Bonnie hadn't been rushing in as a blind
fool; she had smelled the alcohol on his breath.
"Incendium," Bonnie finished, and then yelled, "Damon, get back!" He was
struggling--Bonnie thought that Thomas might have actually managed to dislocate
his knee with that last kick--but he still managed to scramble back just as
Bonnie took the vapors in the air and turned them into flame.
There was a lot of fluid in a given body, even a long-dead vampire body. Bonnie
had to concentrate hard, and it still took long enough that the police sirens
had started to wail, and as much as she wanted to turn her face away, towards
the wall, she refused. For you, Grams. Grams would not have wanted her to
flinch away from what she was doing here, for good or for ill, so Bonnie kept
looking until it was done. She was breathing hard.
Damon came to her after a long, shocked silence. He was limping until he
reached down and adjusted his knee with a sound that Bonnie wished she hadn't
heard. "You didn't think to bring stakes?" he asked her.
"You didn't think to bring stakes?" Bonnie fired back. She only then realized
that her shoulder was bleeding, and kind of a lot. "Oh, damn." She tried to
smother the flow with her fingers and found them covered in a warm, red mess
within seconds. "We can clean it up, tie it off--"
"No, we can't," Damon said. "You need stitches." He leaned his hand down to her
in order to help her to her feet, carefully looking away as if she was nude
before him rather than merely battered. Bonnie started to refuse, until she
realized that her head was wobbly and her shoulder hurt so much that the pain
was affecting her balance. She put her hand into Damon's even though it was
sticky with blood so that he could pull her to her feet.
"Are you going to be okay?" Bonnie asked as Damon held his fingers very close
to his lips.
He dropped his hand without any particularly hurriedness. "I drank enough
inside," he said. Since he smelled like alcohol, too, Bonnie didn't ask of
what, decided she wasn't certain that she wanted to know.
*
A southern town with that many bars, Bonnie knew that there had to be an after-
hours clinic somewhere for those special moments that weren't quite bad enough
for the ER, and she was not wrong. She and Damon walked in to see an empty
lobby and a no-nonsense woman sitting behind the counter, muttering softly to
herself as she filled out paperwork. When she looked up, her expression didn't
have to shift for Bonnie to know exactly what she saw: a young girl with a
bleeding shoulder and a bruised face being flanked by a man too old for her and
drenched in bad boy sauce who might know how to not loom over somebody if his
life really, really depended on it, but since it didn't right now he wasn't
going to bother.
"Um, hi," Bonnie said, approaching the counter. She didn't bother hissing under
her breath for Damon to at least try not to be creepy, since she was a runaway
and they weren't so far from Mystic Falls that an alert couldn't have gone out.
"I fell."
"Hmm." The woman looked back and forth between Bonnie and Damon and said,
"You'll need to fill out these forms and show ID."
"Oh, um. I don't have any?" The woman behind the counter started to look even
more dubious. "My boyfriend and I were going to a concert, and I tripped over a
curb--"
"She's a complete klutz, but you can't pick the ones you love," Damon
interrupted.
"And hit my head on the car," Bonnie went on, steadfastly ignoring Damon. "And
then cut myself when I hit the ground. Point is, I have cash to pay, but I
didn't want to take my purse in with me, because it's kinda not a good club,
and my grandmother is going to be so pissed at me as it is when I have to
explain to her in the morning, I do not want to call and wake her up now--"
"She doesn't approve of me," Damon interrupted again. Bonnie barely resisted
the urge to stomp on his insole, even though that probably would have helped
convince the receptionist that Damon hadn't abused her.
"Imagine that," the receptionist said. She sighed, seemed to come to some kind
of internal resolution, and pushed the clipboard across the counter. "All
right, the doctor on duty will be able to see you just as soon as you fill
these out. She'll want to see you alone." A delicate stress laid onto the last
syllable, and her eyes were only for Damon. He smiled sweetly.
"Babe, let me get this for you, your hands are all bloody," he said, smoothly
taking both the clipboard and pen before Bonnie could touch it. They went to
the double row of blue plastic chairs broken up only by a few, forlorn copies
of Cosmopolitan and, even sadder to Bonnie's eyes, Highlights. "I could have
just compelled her," Damon muttered to her. "Now we only have a coin-flip
chance that she's not going to call the cops as soon as you go back there."
"No compulsion," Bonnie hissed back just as fiercely. "Not for any reason. Put
down 'Emily Forbes' as my name."
"Oh, very original," Damon said as he moved to do as she had directed and then
went on, "I'm not going to circle back and eat her, it would be harmless."
"Not for any reason. That kind of thing is never harmless." The door to the
clinic swung open again and let in another couple. The woman of this pair had a
black eye, one entire half of her face already starting to go swollen and
bruised, and blood drying on the corner of her mouth. Bonnie wondered if she
was going to try to tell the receptionist that she had fallen into a car door,
too. "She's looking out for stuff like that, okay?" She sighed when Damon
looked over the couple with a blatant lack of interest and then went back to
filling out the forms.
"I'm making you eighteen," Damon announced without making any particular effort
to keep his voice down. Bonnie barely restrained the urge to drop her head into
her hands. She kept an eye on the couple in the corner after Damon had run the
clipboard back up to the counter. The woman's head was slightly bowed, and the
man was whispering into her ear as she nodded. Since her face looked bad, but
not bad enough to require medical attention, Bonnie wasn't sure why they had
come in at all until she saw the way that the woman was cradling her left side,
as if maybe some of the ribs were broken. Bonnie stared hard at them without
bothering to hide her attention until she nearly missed her assumed name being
called.
The doctor on call was a tall woman with close-cropped hair who wasn't wearing
glasses, but nonetheless still gave the impression that she was looking at
Bonnie over the top of a pair as Bonnie took a seat on the exam room table and
pushed up the sleeve of her blouse. There was blood running nearly down to her
elbow, but little to none of it appeared to to fresh.
"Car door, huh?" the doctor asked her as she began cleaning the blood from
Bonnie's arm.
"And the ground," Bonnie said. "There was gravel. We were seeing a band."
"Hmm." The doctor finished cleaning the blood and grit from Bonnie's arm,
applied a cream that made all of the skin it touched start to go first tingly
and then numb, then switched gloves so that she could shine a light into each
of Bonnie's eyes. Bonnie didn't think that Thomas had struck her hard enough to
cause actual trauma, but she still sat very still until the doctor had finished
to her satisfaction and prepared a needle and thread to tend to Bonnie's arm.
"What was the name of the band?"
"The Undead," Bonnie answered without hesitation, having known that such a
question was probably going to be coming. "Can't get enough of that thrash
metal." The doctor stopped in mid-stitch to look at her. "Look, I know what
you're thinking, but Damon didn't do this to me."
"Hmm," the doctor said again. It seemed to be her very favorite word. "If I
issue you a prescription in the name you gave, are you going to be able to pick
it up?" Bonnie looked at her without speaking. "Fair enough. You got lucky,
just five stitches, but you're fooling yourself if you think I believe the
whole tripped into a car story. It looks like someone knocked you into a wall."
Bonnie smiled tightly as the doctor finished tying off the stitches. "Damon
didn't do this to me," she repeated. "And, yes, the man waiting for me out
there is named 'Damon', I'm not pulling any tricks there." She still didn't
breathe easily again until she was paying in the waiting room and cops weren't
ringed out front to bring her in. Damon put his hand in the small of her back
again as he led them out the door, but he was leaning further away from her
than he had been before.
"What is it?" Bonnie asked.
"You still smell like blood," Damon replied tautly. "It's distracting."
"Oh." Bonnie looked down at her blouse, the sleeve of which was splattered and
obviously ruined, but the skin beneath which was entirely cleaned up. So it was
a doubly good thing that she had gotten them separate rooms for the night,
then.
There was a battered Ford sitting outside the clinic that Bonnie was willing to
bet if anything belonged to the couple inside. She stood still for a long, long
moment, wondering if a sudden engine fire would be worth it, until Damon said,
"You've already made yourself memorable, how wide a trail do you actually want
to leave?"
"Your hearing's good enough to hear what they were saying in there," Bonnie
answered. "Did he hit her?"
Damon answered by saying, "You can be the hero, or you can kill some vampires.
Take your pick."
Bonnie swore under her breath inventively enough to make Damon's eyebrow lift,
still torn, but in the end she turned back towards the motel.
End Part Two
***** Chapter 3 *****
Part Three
Bonnie woke up in her motel room with a headache, and could not stop herself
from blurting out, "Nice," as she took a peek at the side of her face in the
bathroom mirror. The swelling wasn't that bad, at least, and concealer could
cover the bruise. Beyond that, Bonnie resigned herself to wearing sunglasses
for the next few days and getting a few looks from people who didn't understand
that as far as brute force was concerned, she and Damon were pretty much on
equal footing. She smeared antibiotic ointment over her stitches per the
doctor's orders, applied a fresh bandage, and then stepped out onto the
sidewalk that ran in front of the rooms. She was expecting to have to pound on
Damon's door to get him up, as late as they had gotten in and with him being,
well, what he was. What she was not expecting to find was Damon already leaning
up against the driver's door of her car. "Not expecting" became "and not
pleased, either" when she saw that he was twirling her key ring idly around his
finger.
"Did you come into my room last night?" Bonnie demanded. She paused. "Could you
have come into my room last night?" The idea of Damon being able to creep up on
her without knowing that he was there threw the whole enterprise into an
entirely different light, even if he did say that he was a man of his word.
Damon regarded the door to her room for a long moment. "Probably," he said
finally. "Hotels and motels are gray areas, but since you were only planning on
staying for one night..." He shrugged and then smiled when he saw her face.
"Relax. I didn't go looming over you in the middle of the night like Bela
Lugosi. I took your keys from your pocket before you went inside."
"A pick-pocket. That's a twist." Bonnie held out her hand for Damon to give her
the keys. Instead, he gave her a bottle of orange juice and a small bottle of
aspirin before he opened the driver's door to get inside. "Oh, hell no."
"Compelling people all the time gets boring, and I've had a long time to learn
how to keep myself entertained." Bonnie sent a warning flare at Damon, and he
shook his finger at her. "Ah-ah-ah, I've held to both the letter and the spirit
of my agreement. You hold to yours."
Bonnie stubbornly stayed on the sidewalk, hands on her hips, and ignored the
fact that the bottle was condensing over and that she was very, very thirsty
and had Satan's baby of a headache. "I didn't think that I really needed to
point out that stealing my car was going to be a no-no," she said.
"Don't ever do any spellwork that involves summoning, then, you'll get eaten
alive for leaving holes like that open." Damon folded his arms over the top of
the car door and looked her up and down, face suddenly serious. "Thomas might
have spilled a few secrets to me once he knew I was another vampire and before
he realized which vampire," he said. Bonnie knew that she must have looked
dubious, because Damon added, "And that's where overindulging gets you. He was
fat as a tick and not paying attention. Point being, there's a second tomb
vampire settled in about three hours further south, and he thinks that the rest
are hunkering in Miami."
"Miami?" Bonnie tilted her head to one side. "Um, isn't that a little bright?
How many vampires have jewelry like you and Stefan?"
"Not that many, or else you humans would be in a lot more trouble. Miami's a
tourist city, and its boom season is only a few weeks away. That means a lot of
people, a lot of alcohol, and not many reasons to think much of it when the
person you were talking to the night before doesn't show up again the next day.
It's a good hunting ground. Besides." Damon twirled the keys around his finger
again and still did not give them back to her. "When those vampires went into
the tomb, Florida was still mostly a godforsaken swamp with a lot of
plantations, a whole lot of pissed-off Seminoles who were not taking the idea
of relocation well, and a good chance of winning the malaria lottery. Cars,
corn syrup, and sexting they can all adapt to, but the idea that anyone would
go down to Florida for actual fun is something that they have to see to
believe."
The sun wasn't making her head feel any better, her sunglasses were in the
glove compartment, and the less time that they spent standing there arguing
about the driving arrangements was more time that they could spend not being
caught with their rears hanging out like the night before once they did get to
this second vampire. Bonnie huffed and stomped around to the passenger door
while Damon smiled sweetly at her and slid behind the wheel. She recovered her
sunglasses and slid them onto her face before she used the orange juice to
swallow a palmful of aspirin.
"Just for the record," she told Damon, "you touch anything of mine again
without permission, we're going to have a problem. And thank you for the orange
juice." She didn't have to look Damon's way to know that he was doing that
half-smile thing; he practically made the air move with it.
"I like you when you're cranky," Damon said. "It makes you more fun." Bonnie
turned her head just far enough so that she could give Damon a dubious look
through her hair. "When you're a very special, very particular kind of cranky
that doesn't end in you impaling me on trees or making my brain explode."
And thus, he attempted to bribe her with juice. "I never tried to make your
brain explode," Bonnie pointed out.
"Fond memories of your grandmother, then." Bonnie scowled at him and turned her
face towards the window, but not before she reached forward and flipped through
radio stations until she found a disco channel. Damon made a disgusted noise at
her. "A very particular kind of cranky," he repeated.
*
Damon took great pleasure in leaning up against the counter, not quite touching
her but implying a hell of a lot, as Bonnie pointedly ordered them two rooms
again in Hardeeville. It was still early, scarcely noon, but they weren't going
to be able to hunt until night fell. Bonnie shifted her shoulders around to
feel the residual ache and wondered if Damon would even have been able to stand
if he hadn't had a vampire's healing abilities and a way-too-familiar touch in
putting a dislocated knee back together. They needed to plan, get their shit
together.
"You can come in," Bonnie called over her shoulder to Damon as she entered the
room assigned to her and threw her bag down on her bed.
"Could have, anyway," Damon said as he went directly to the cheap, cigarette-
pocked dresser and began running his hands over the top, the drawers. Bonnie
took a seat on the end of the bed and watched him from behind; his face was
different when he wasn't trying to put on a show. Not softer, not harder, not
even more or less human, just...different.
"I was being polite," Bonnie said. Damon turned and smiled at her. "Have you
called anyone from home to let them know where you are?"
"Have you?" Damon raised his eyes to look at her through the mirror, making
Bonnie wonder if he hadn't been aware of her gaze the entire time and putting
on a show even then. "Did you give them your real name when you checked in?"
"Of course not." She tallied the chances that the doctor from Prosperity was
going to do any digging on Emily Forbes after she had walked away and actually
manage to trace her all the way down to a cash-only motel three hours to the
south and wasn't terribly impressed by them.
"Good." Damon rattled the dresser back and forth a little bit, smacking his
palm back against the wall when the next room over pounded on the plaster in
irritation. "I would really hate for you to get in trouble for this." He made a
fist and drove it straight down through the top of the dresser, throwing
splinters everywhere and making Bonnie yelp reflexively. The person on the
other side of the wall was quiet; Bonnie really hoped that it was not because
he was running for the manager to deal with the crazy people housed next door.
Damon pried up several pieces of the dresser and tossed them to Bonnie.
"Nice," she said, laying them to the side.
"Can't afford to be checking into any more after-hours clinics to patch you up
again," Damon said over his shoulder. "Maybe that doc last night was fooled,
but someone's going to check a missing person's report sooner or later." He
looked at her through the mirror again. "So if you can't control your powers--"
Bonnie focused and wrenched up several pieces from the dresser herself and got
a certain satisfaction as Damon was the one who moved back quickly. His mirror-
self had dark eyes and spidery lines etched over his skin, just for a moment.
"I can handle my powers," Bonnie said. "Though, speaking of attracting too much
attention--" She didn't remember that he had slipped off to feed again after
being hurt, and it hadn't been long from the time that they had made it back to
the motel to being on the road again; did vampires even need to sleep? Bonnie
threw the keys to her car at the back of Damon's head, and he twisted easily to
snatch them out of the air.
"Eat," Bonnie told him grudgingly. "If you need to." Damon jingled her keys in
his hand and gave her that head-tilt look again. "One or both of us is going to
get hurt tonight if we're not at full strength, and even if you can heal
yourself really quickly--" Bonnie finally made a huffing noise. "Look, just go
eat, okay?"
"Wow, I must have made it out of the 'thing' category." Damon dug into the back
pocket of his jeans, produced a small object of his own, and tossed it to
Bonnie. She caught it between her hands and discovered that it was a pocket-
knife, obviously very old. The handle was made of some kind of antler or bone
and was worn even smoother than its polish in the places where fingers would
fit, and the blade when she opened it up bore the marks of many sharpenings.
"You didn't really think that we were going to do this without stakes, did
you?" He disappeared out the door, leaving Bonnie alone in the room with the
shattered dresser and a whole lot of pointed wood that was about to become
pointier. Before she got started, she pulled the pre-paid phone out of her
pocket and stared at it for a long moment. Bonnie ultimately put it back into
her pocket without bringing herself to dial a number.
*
When she and Damon had four stakes apiece, Bonnie took the room key and went
out. It was early afternoon by then, summer heat just starting to curl in and
make sweat prickle on the back of her neck. Hardeeville was smaller than
Prosperity and reminded her a lot of Mystic Falls, old store fronts painted
with shoe-polish to support the basketball and gymnastics teams and school
colors wrapped around the light poles. Bonnie meandered down the main street in
the same general direction that most of the people seemed to be going and
didn't have to wander long before she found herself in a neatly groomed park,
complete with shady trees and a sand-filled playground. She could smell burgers
and hot dogs cooking; there were children selling cans of pop out of ice
chests. Everything that would stand still long enough had been wrapped with
white and red streamers, and, though it took her a bit to work her way through
what appeared to be every person living within the town limits, Bonnie
eventually found herself standing before a picturesque white gazebo. There were
about half a dozen gurneys clustered inside, and on each one lay a person with
tubing running from their arm and to a collection bag.
Hardeeville 22nd Annual Blood Drive and Charity Carnival Bonnie read off a
neatly lettered sign affixed to the gazebo. She dropped her eyes a little
lower, down to the hours of operation, and felt her stomach drop with them. The
festivities were going to continue until eleven that night, a good two hours
after sunset. The vampire in this town wouldn't need to troll a bar, they were
going to have all the blood that they could drink ambling about right here in
the open.
"Almost makes you think that they want to be killed, doesn't it?" Bonnie jumped
and swore, placing her hand over her heart when she recognized Damon's voice.
She turned to find him directly behind her, the sunlight filtering down through
the leaves making his face belong to entirely different people from one moment
to the next.
"What?" Damon asked when Bonnie glared at him. "You told me to eat, I came and
ate. It was a lot easier to follow the smell of blood than it would have been
to hope for a gullible alcoholic at two in the afternoon."
Bonnie turned back to stare bleakly at the gazebo. There was a teenaged boy a
few years younger than her lying down on one of the gurneys to donate. An older
man that Bonnie assumed to be his father had to fill out the paperwork for him.
"What are the odds that this town's vampire is going to be happy with a few
bags of stolen blood, too?" she asked. She could feel Damon's expression
without needing to actually twist around and see it.
"I hate the vast majority of humanity, and I didn't spend one hundred and fifty
years locked up to starve and brood about it," Damon said. "Besides, what do
you care? I thought that this was about revenge, not..." She didn't need to
turn around to here the air quotes, either. "'Doing the right thing.'"
She shouldn't have brought out the cell phone at all, it was rattling her and
making her forget why she was doing this. "Killing vampires is doing the right
thing," Bonnie said shortly. She dug the key to her room from her pocket and
passed it over to Damon without asking herself too closely why, exactly, she
was becoming so easygoing with him passing in and out of her space. "Here. You
can go back if you want. I'm going to buy a burger and get the lay of the
place."
Damon kept in step with her as she turned to walk away, and Bonnie wasn't
surprised by that, either. "What kind of gentleman would I be if I let you
wander around in a strange place by yourself?" he asked her.
"Exactly the kind of gentleman that you pretend to be." Bonnie passed over two
quarters to a little boy manning one of the ice chests in exchange for a can of
Coke and directions to the grill. Damon caught her by the elbow, and that was
not okay. Bonnie grabbed his wrist, hard, and let her skin turn warm. Damon
relaxed his hold on her elbow and smiled a little when Bonnie let the threat of
fire fade away but still did not release him immediately.
"I'll tell you the same thing that you told me last night," Damon leaned down
to say to her without seeming to care that the little boy was now staring at
them, gape-mouthed. "I'm not here as your sidekick. I have a claim to this
fight, too, and I'm not going to walk away without my fair share."
"Didn't you also tell me that we didn't negotiate the portions?" Bonnie
reminded him before she let go of his wrist and walked away.
*
By nine p.m. Bonnie was tired and figured that she knew every square inch of
the park as well as she knew her own bedroom. She and Damon both could have
gone back to their respective rooms and caught a few more hours of sleep before
the sun went down and it was go time, but by some mutual, unspoken game of
chicken they had both refused and had continued circling the park throughout
the afternoon, long after they had learned the outline of it. These people have
to think that we are so, so creepy, Bonnie caught herself thinking as she sat
down for a moment on a bench with a clear view of the gazebo. She had watched
her third shift of nurses moving about by now, and too many people donating to
count. None of them had leaned down to rip anyone's throat out yet. Bonnie
didn't guess that she had any reason to expect that finding the vampire would
be that easy, but with Damon still in a snit she had certainly hoped.
Bonnie rose from the bench and watched the last edge of the sun falling below
the gazebo roof. By her calculations, she had just enough time to race back to
the motel and get the stakes that she had made before it turned into hunting
season in earnest. She made it to the outermost fringes of the crowd before
Damon was suddenly in front of her, his face taut and intent as he looked at
something far off and over her head. Bonnie twisted, but could see nothing but
people.
"Too late," Damon said, though Bonnie had not told him where she was going.
"Seriously?" Bonnie twisted again. "But it's not sundown yet."
"It's close enough to fudge it. Short redhead, wearing a black hoodie."
"Shit." Bonnie raised herself onto her toes and was slightly mollified to
discover that Damon had been using an advantage of height, not super-sleuth
vampire abilities or whatever. She found the girl in question within seconds,
sitting on the same bench that Bonnie had vacated moments before. The tendrils
of hair creeping out from under a hoodie that would have made the vampire look
like a serial killer if she hadn't been so petite and been wearing a face only
slightly older than Bonnie's own were the color of sun giving way at the
horizon. She was angling her body away from it so that the hoodie protected her
skin, and Bonnie could see a pair of sunglasses dangling loosely from one hand.
The vampire was staring at the gazebo as if she were debating between eating
its occupants and simply burning it down.
"That's a lot of hate," Bonnie said softly. She was very aware of the irony,
when she couldn't seem to stop herself from rocking from the balls of her feet
to the heels and back again. Whether Damon had picked it up or not, he was too
focused on the task at hand to point it out.
"It's what makes the world go 'round," he said simply as he started forward.
"Her name is Josephine."
"Josephine," Bonnie repeated to herself as she followed. She threw a
speculative look up at the tree branches as she passed under them, but none of
them were anywhere near low-hanging enough for her to reach up and grab one,
and with street lights and strung lanterns coming on people were going to
notice if a couple of them just happened to snap off and fly into Bonnie's
hands.
As the last rays of the sun disappeared down behind the buildings and it was
safe for her to move about without guarding her flesh, Josephine rose to her
feet and started walking forward, towards a boy--man, but barely--who had just
exited the gazebo. He was rubbing at the Band-aid taped into the elbow of his
arm, his expression distracted. Bonnie took a deep breath and tried to walk
faster. She couldn't get there before Josephine took the young man by the arm
and spoke a few quiet words to him, looking deeply into his eyes all the while.
The man's expression became even more vacant for a moment or two before he
nodded once and reached up to push Josephine's hoodie back from her head,
exposing her wild mass of curls. The tenderness with which he caressed her hair
and then the side of her face was better suited to a lover than to a meal,
nearly making Bonnie break into a run. She couldn't get to the gazebo before
Josephine took the young man by the arm and led him away without fuss through
the crowd, but Damon could have. Probably without even using his vampire
powers. Had she one of their home-made stakes in her hand, Bonnie thought that
she might have been able to kill him.
"Why didn't you do something?" Bonnie demanded when she reached his side.
"We can't do anything out in the open like this," Damon said shortly. He had
what Bonnie was rapidly coming to recognize as his hunter's look on, sharp and
focused and making it absolutely clear that he hadn't been human for a long,
long time. Bonnie grabbed for his arm and squeezed hard; it softened very
slightly as he looked towards her. "We'll get there in time."
In time for what? Bonnie wanted to ask, before she remembered that that was not
the important question to be asking, not at this point.
They followed a discreet distance while Josephine led her snack out of the pack
and far away from the interference of the crowd. A few people who apparently
knew the young man reached out to speak to him or attempt to touch his arm, and
Josephine waited patiently at his side as he made the appropriate smiles and
excuses to move on his way again. It was no more than ten minutes before the
four of them, spaced far apart in their two groups, were the only people on the
street. Bonnie listened to the music from the park fading behind them and
whispered to Damon, "Now?"
"Now," Damon agreed. He started to leap forward, and Josephine whirled around
abruptly with her hand about the young man's throat, keeping his body in front
of hers as a shield. His expression didn't register any alarm. Josephine was
barely tall enough to peek over his shoulder, but Bonnie could still see that
her eyes were black and the map of dark veins were leaping up from her skin.
"Hello, Damon," she said calmly, eyes barely flicking over Bonnie before she
dismissed her. "Did you really think that I haven't been watching you all
afternoon?"
"Do you really think that I give a damn if you kill a human in front of me?"
Damon asked, eyebrows lifting.
"No, I thought that your human might," Josephine said. "She's not compelled."
Josephine put her hand up against the young man's throat, peeking over his
shoulder at Bonnie. Bonnie rocked her weight from one foot to the other.
"She has a strong stomach," Damon said smoothly. He lunged. Josephine jerked
back, fingers tightening about the man's throat, and Bonnie ran forward
muttering under her breath. She thought that Josephine would throw her
compelled snack at Bonnie, trusting that Bonnie would make an actual attempt to
catch him whereas Damon would just let him make an entertaining splat. She, and
apparently Damon, didn't plan for the equation to shake down as a human and a
vampire on either side. Damon snatched the young man out of the air as easily
as if he were catching a stray fly ball, and then tossed him to the side with
about as much concern. The boy hit the sidewalk and rolled, didn't rise again.
Bonnie stared down the vampire coming at her for approximately half a second
before she started mouthing the words of the spell--
Josephine slammed into her, hard, and took them both down to the pavement.
Bonnie couldn't stop herself from yelping as her tender shoulder took most of
the impact and wishing, just for a moment and in the farthest back of her mind,
that she could heal her injuries as quickly and as easily as Damon could shrug
off his. Josephine was rendered gray in the shadowy light, and her sunset hair
turned into the color of clotting blood.
She hadn't said any magic words when she had been driving Stefan away from his
victim. She hadn't had a ritual when she had set a Jetta on fire in a fit of
pique. Grams, and then Kayla and Aunt Pamela, had told her over and over again
that the words weren't the important part, they were akin to a mnemonic device
to focus what was already inside of her. Bonnie concentrated hard and felt
Josephine lifting off of her at the same time that Damon appeared and grabbed
the redhead by the scruff of the neck. Josephine squealed and flew through the
air to land, hard, against the wooden door of an antiques store that was
closed, presumably so that its owner could donate a pint or two to charity and
enjoy the festivities. She flipped end over end and disappeared into the
darkness of the store. Bonnie dimly caught view of her breaking her fall--in a
manner of speaking--with her spine against the corner of an end table that
looked old, and expensive. Josephine went rigid with pain for less than the
time it took Bonnie to draw a breath, while Bonnie was still trying to push
herself up to her elbows and hissing through her teeth as her shoulder exploded
all over again. Josephine snatched up a shattered piece of the door and leapt
towards Bonnie. Bonnie felt the air go still and would swear at herself for
being such a freaking cliche later, but she swore that everything slowed down
and Josephine was moving in micrometers per second. The makeshift stake that
Josephine was holding in her hand would be more than deep enough to puncture
any organ on Bonnie's body and force a hell of a lot more than a few stitches
in an overnight clinic by way of repair, if Bonnie were to survive at all.
Damon leapt between the two of them, shadow-blur of gray and black in the
twilight. Bonnie swore that she saw the tip of the stake piercing Damon's shirt
before they again hurled Josephine with a combination of physical and
telekinetic power. She went this time through the plate glass window that made
up the storefront, and Damon twisted briefly about to look at Bonnie with a
face full of--something. Maybe Stefan could have read it, or even Elena, but
Bonnie was still professing only a novice's understanding of his particular
language and was not certain that she wanted to know more. He followed
Josephine through the window, seizing up a piece of glass in his hand as he
went. Bonnie picked herself up painfully from the pavement and watched. It
turned out that cutting the head off did just as well as staking or fire, and
Bonnie made certain that she didn't look away from this one, either.
Damon hopped back out of the antiques store through the window when he was
done, his hands covered with blood. Bonnie scrutinized it hard as she pushed
herself back up to her feet, but in the scant light she couldn't tell if it
looked any different from human. "You want to handle that?" he asked, gesturing
back over his shoulder, and Bonnie assumed that he meant by fire. She checked
her scraped elbows, saw that the damage was minimal, and stepped up to the
window. There was a lot of blood inside. It would be difficult to hide even if
she and Damon just moved the body. Still, Bonnie felt a twinge a she murmured
the spell and watched a lick of flame start up from a rose-colored ottoman that
might even be older than Damon and then leapt down to Josephine's hair. That's
what insurance is for, did equal battle against, Really, you think that Grams
would be okay with what you're doing right now? The second voice didn't grow
any quieter when Bonnie turned and saw that the young man who had been
compelled was just starting to twist and stir.
"He'll be fine," Damon said. "Come on." He started to slide his hand beneath
Bonnie's elbow, but she pulled away.
Bonnie huffed out an uneasy breath and, unable to make the warring voices stop,
turned on a physical target instead. "Why did you do that?" she demanded. When
he looked at her with raised eyebrow and confused expression, she stomped
forward and pointedly slipped her finger through the hole in the front of his
shirt. The flesh underneath was smooth, unharmed, still slightly cooler than it
ought to have been if he were human. Maybe he hadn't been punctured at all, but
Bonnie thought that that was a long shot.
Damon took Bonnie by the wrist and held on for longer than he needed to before
he pushed her away. "We need to be elsewhere," he said, as the fire was already
throwing an orange glow across the sidewalk and someone was bound to drive by
before too much longer. Bonnie obliged, but still stared at Damon hard as they
slipped off down the sidewalk, until he sighed in what sounded like genuine
exasperation. "I'm hard to kill, Bonnie. When you know how much you can
survive, you play a lot harder than a human does. Don't worry so hard, it'll
only give you wrinkles and confuse the hell out of both of us."
Bonnie looked back over her shoulder, where a pickup truck was slamming on the
brakes in front of the antique store. They were too far away to be seen, but
her skin still prickled. "Do you ever think about what will happen when you do
finally die?" she asked. "With everything that you've done?"
Damon made a short barking noise that sounded as if he didn't know whether it
was a snort of derision or actual laughter. "Heaven, hell, those are just fairy
tales people tell so that they can feel good about not pulling their neighbors'
throats out," he snapped. Bonnie shivered and felt her mouth start to twist,
but she could still remember what it had been like to set Thomas on fire and
how she had disliked the mess without coming anywhere near to regretting the
actual doing. "The worst thing that's going to happen to me is that maybe I'll
become a ghost and will spend the rest of eternity fucking with Stefan's head
without being able to actually hide his stuff." Damon turned his head, gave
Bonnie a glittering, wicked smile. "It doesn't seem to bother Emily that much.
Who knows, your own grandmother might get bored enough to drop by and rattle
some chains before it's all over."
Sirens were starting to wail from down the street. Bonnie still lashed out hard
before she knew what she was doing, slamming Damon against the pristine brick
facade of an ice cream shop without laying a hand on him. She did it with
enough power to make Damon wince and grunt, and send a first twinge of
overexertion rolling through Bonnie's body. That had absolutely nothing to do
with the other sudden, warm flash that Bonnie felt, or the heat in the way that
Damon raised his head and looked at her. His tongue moved out and swiped slowly
at his lower lip, while Bonnie knew that her eyes were wide. Though her rage
faded nearly as quickly as it had come over her, Bonnie kept Damon pinned
against the wall for a moment longer, stepping close and looking at him
closely. She could hurt him, regardless of the deal that they had made with one
another at the onset of this road trip. She could, and probably wouldn't have
been able to do anything about it, and Bonnie really, really thought that they
were both liking this detail. She put her hand against the side of Damon's
face, never mind that they were outsiders in a small town and she could hear
the police coming close, to feel how cool and inhuman he still was. He turned
his head slowly to press his lips against her palm, never breaking eye contact
with her. In the dim half-light, they were the color of dimes. Bonnie sucked in
a deep breath and stepped back, physically as well as magically. Damon stumbled
a little as she released him, but still said, "Well, isn't that something."
He was right. It was something...it was something a hell of a lot bigger than
setting a shop on fire, and Bonnie dealt with it appropriately.
"Oh, my God," she said, and fled.
End Part Three
***** Chapter 4 *****
Part Four
Her hands were shaking. She couldn't seem to make them stop. Bonnie shoved them
into the pockets of her jeans and walked faster, certain that everyone on the
street could take one look at her and know exactly what she had done, and she
didn't mean that little spot of felony arson and justified homicide, either.
The streets were a lot more crowded now as news of the fire at the antique
store spread, and a fire engine wailed past her. Hardeeville was smaller than
Mystic Falls, even, and an unfamiliar face was going to stick out, especially
after she and Damon had been lurking around the carnival all afternoon waiting
for something to happen. She needed to get back to the motel room and get their
stuff together, she needed to find Damon and get them out of town--
She really needed to calm down enough so that she could look Damon in the eye
again without setting him on fire or having a panic attack. Or having--she had
held him up against the wall, she could have hurt him a lot, and she liked that
idea. He wasn't human, he could handle a lot and deserved a lot. Bonnie thought
that she should maybe be calling this whole thing off before she wound up
dangling any further over the edge than she already was.
"Easier said than done," Bonnie said out loud, earning her a look from an older
woman holding the hand of a small boy who had obviously been halfway through
having his face painted when the ruckus had started. She smiled in what she
hoped was a disarming way and continued down the sidewalk.
Okay. So she had thrown Damon up against a wall. No big deal; she had been
present in her body while Emily had impaled him on a tree before, she had only
promised that she wouldn't go all mind-zappy without provocation, and he had
done plenty over the course of his not-life to deserve a lot worse than that.
But then she had held him there and had, um, liked it. Liked it a lot, even
knowing that she was holding up one of the people directly responsible for her
grandmother's death. Especially knowing that. Damon hadn't been trying
particularly hard to hide the fact that he had liked it, too, and that took
them straight past the sane bounds of their working relationship into a whole
new realm of fucked-up. Bonnie put her hand over her mouth and bit down hard on
the edge of her thumb, but it didn't work. She still felt all-over hot and
tingly, filled with way too much adrenaline and, and...wanting. Wanting sex or
wanting to hurt someone, she wasn't sure which. These were instincts that
shouldn't be mixed, probably, but she didn't seem to have any more control over
that than she had over anything else that had been happening in her life for
the past several months.
Bonnie made it all the way back to the motel and even laid her hand upon the
door to her room before she exclaimed, "Damn it!" and spun around to walk back
in the direction that she had come. Hardeeville wasn't Prosperity, didn't have
a bar for every occasion on every corner, but they had to have something.
Bonnie had walked about four blocks down the still-picturesque, if by now more
than slightly crowded, main street until she found a store front that had given
up the hand-painted signs in favor of green and blue neon. She ducked inside,
found it mostly deserted save for a few people sitting at the bar or playing
pool. Bonnie slid into a bar stool and put her head into her hands. It wasn't a
bonfire or even Tyler Lockwood's basement, but beggars couldn't be choosers.
"Are you sure that you're old enough to be in here, miss?"
Bonnie raised her head and looked at a bartender old enough to be her father,
who was raising his eyebrow slightly as he looked her over. Her hesitation
before answering made the eyebrow go up even higher before she finally said,
"Twenty-two."
"You don't mind if I see some ID, then?" The bartender, if anything, looked
even more skeptical than before. Bonnie fished her driver's license from her
pocket and, masking what she was doing under a pretense of fumbling with it,
tapped her nail against the lacquered surface in a very precise pattern and
concentrated. Kayla had been the one to teach Bonnie this particular spell, not
Aunt Pamela. She had also implied heavily that Aunt Pamela would have no
problem killing them both if she found out that Bonnie had been taught it, but
that sometimes teenagers needed to be adults when they were dealing with adult
things. The illusion only lasted for a moment or two, but that moment was just
long enough; when Bonnie slid her ID across the counter to the bartender, she
was aged five years and fully legal to be there.
"Huh," the bartender said after scrutinizing the license hard and giving it
back to her.
"My mother was carded until she was thirty-five," Bonnie lied easily, tucking
her license back into her pocket. It turned faintly warm in her fingers as the
trick faded away, and she couldn't help letting out a small breath of relief
that it had lasted that long. She was very certain that Grams would not have
approved, but the faint smell clinging to her grandmother's things from her
college years wasn't patchouli, either, so they were just going to have to call
this one a draw. "I'll have a shot of tequila, please." She put her head back
into her hands and didn't raise it again until the shot was in front of her,
and then she downed it quickly and ordered another. Okay, so maybe drinking
hard liquor in an actual bar was just a few steps farther than drinking illicit
beer at a field party, but it had been a night for many, many more reasons than
the fact that she had watched a vampire being beheaded by her own maybe-pet
vampire at her behest immediately before committing a fairly serious act of
vandalism.
Yeah, when viewed in a long line like that, Bonnie was sure that Grams would
have a lot more to disapprove of than the fact that Bonnie was in a bar when
she should have been at home and getting ready for finals.
But I'm doing it for you, Bonnie thought, nearly wishing that Damon was right
and Grams would pop up again, even as a ghost, so that Bonnie wouldn't be left
floundering so alone.
She was enough shots in to feel warm and a little crazy, in a good way and not
like she was about to skitter to pieces, by the time that she sensed someone
sliding into the empty stool beside her. Bonnie turned her head; Damon had lost
the heat that Bonnie had been able to feel even through her barrier of magic
and was chill and wry again. He signaled to the bartender and was not asked for
ID before he ordered a scotch. Bonnie looked him up and down and thought that
he would carry his age throughout eternity as a signal that even the blind
could read.
"Funny thing about humans," Damon said easily as he took in Bonnie's flushed
face and the shot glasses that she had arrayed in front of her. "When they
drink like vampires, they usually suffer consequences for it." He downed his
drink in a gulp like he was proving a point.
"I came in here alone for a reason," Bonnie said. Even though it was probably
the height of stupidity, she ordered another drink, just to prove to Damon that
she could.
"Yeah, but I'll have a whole lot of people pouting at me if I go back to Mystic
Falls with you in a box," Damon answered. He grimaced. "And one of them can
actually pull it off for an eternity, so no thanks."
"Turn Elena and I'm kicking your ass, and not in the way that apparently gets
you off."
"I was referring to Stefan, actually." Damon ordered another drink while Bonnie
swiveled so that she could put her elbows back against the bar, crossing one
leg over the other and kicking her foot slowly back and forth as she stared at
him. Since he was obviously enjoying the attention, and Bonnie was fairly
certain that she hadn't given him a come-hither look since, um, ever, then that
clearly meant that they were both broken in ways that Bonnie didn't want to
think about until she was a lot drunker than she was right now.
"Has anyone ever told you that there is something seriously wrong with you?"
Bonnie demanded. The bartender brought her another drink without needing to be
asked, which probably ought to have told her something, but did his very best
not to acknowledge what was happening right in front of him. The whole bar
could probably tell that it was either going to be a fight or a seduction. Just
as soon as Bonnie knew which one it was going to be, she would know whether
running or standing her ground was going to be the best course of action.
Or the third option. Bonnie didn't know why the hell she had come into the bar
at all, it was obviously the worst idea that she had had excepting the whole
road-trip-with-a-killer thing in the first place.
"Virtually everyone who has ever known me save for this fine gentleman here,
and the night's still young. He might catch up." Damon waggled his fingers at
the bartender as he left before he leaned in close, right up against Bonnie's
personal space the way that he seemed to like best. Bonnie put her hand against
his chest, just her hand and no magic for now, but she didn't push him back
even after he leaned up against her palm to test how far she would let him go.
She hadn't been wrong, two days before, when she had told herself that Damon
could not have possibly looked innocent any time past the age of six, but she
hadn't been covering the full degree of it, not even close. With his pupils
dilated and the alcohol flushing his cheeks enough to make him look like a real
boy again and not just an impossibly attractive wolf in designer clothing...how
every single person in this bar didn't know that she was sitting with a
predator, Bonnie would never know.
"And what about you, Bonnie?" Damon kept going. He leaned just enough of his
weight against Bonnie's hand to remind her that she was allowing him to stay
there, but didn't push any further than she was giving permission. Bonnie could
count on one hand the number of times that she remembered him addressing her by
her actual name, and never in a tone that...never in a tone like that. "I
wasn't the only one who got a case of the heaving bosoms out there." He
inclined his head just a little, presumably so that he could look into her eyes
better, and maybe Bonnie even would have bought it if she had suffered some
kind of severe head injury that had rendered her incapable of reading every
other signal that he was sending out. Damon's weight was heavy against her
palm, but he wasn't coming any closer than Bonnie was allowing as surely as if
she were holding a literal leash. They both knew that Bonnie was more than
powerful enough to stop him if he decided to slip it. She dipped her chin
slightly and thought of how powerfully angry she had been when she had been
pinning Damon up against the wall, how that had transformed. She had been angry
every day since they had put Grams in the ground, it seemed like. The only
bonus to it was that angry was still better than scared and helpless.
"Fine," Bonnie said, and put her hand against the back of Damon's neck to pull
him in.
She expected Damon to kiss her like he was going to war, but he started so
softly that she wasn't aware of him closing the distance between them at first
until he put one hand into her hair, thumb just barely grazing her throat. The
scotch had made his lips warm, more like a human's, and he kissed exactly like
Bonnie would have expected from someone with a century and a half of hedonism
in which to practice. Damon didn't startle when Bonnie took the lead, either;
she kind of thought that he had been waiting for that all along. She put one
hand against the bar and the other on his thigh in order to steady herself and
swirled her tongue through his mouth, not tasting blood or death like she had
been half-fearing, just male and faint smokiness of the liquor. Bonnie drew
back with her lips tingling of scotch.
"I am about two drinks away from not being able to feel my face," she informed
Damon by way of commentary when they parted. "If I'm going to be an idiot,
now's a good time." One corner of Damon's mouth curved up, and he held two
fingers up to the bartender before Bonnie grabbed his hand and pushed it back
down to the counter. She grabbed the side of his face and pulled him back down
for another, listening/feeling him making a satisfied noise against her mouth.
"Stop that, and come on before I have a chance to come to my senses." She threw
down money for her share of the drinks while Damon did the same with his own.
Outside, Bonnie lifted her hair off of the back of her neck so that the night
breeze could whisk away the sweat collecting there and asked, "Why did you step
in for me, earlier?"
Damon rolled his eyes. He hadn't had as much to drink as she had, for one
thing, but even what he had consumed didn't seem to be affecting him more than
the slight additional color in his cheeks. "I already told you. You're fun when
you're cranky." He leaned close when she frowned at him, as if that was going
to get him another kiss. "And you can't do that if you're dead." When Bonnie
didn't put her hand against his chest to keep him at a distance, she found his
own around her waist and his mouth at her ear. "I can also respect a good
obsession. I don't have any nefarious plans afoot, Bonnie, take it for what
it's worth."
Bonnie shivered, thought hard for a long moment about what she was doing here,
and then decided that she had done more thinking and worrying since discovering
that she was a witch than she had ever wanted to do in her entire life. She
turned her lips to the skin beneath Damon's ear. He didn't jump, but she could
feel his throat move up and down all the same as she put her hand on the back
of his neck to keep him from pulling away, her hand against his jaw so that he
couldn't kiss her on the mouth again just yet. Bonnie thought that he was going
to make an attempt to woo her, show her some of that supposedly irresistible
Damon charm. He said, "What do you want to do about the two other vampires?"
Bonnie jerked hard and looked around to see two figures at the far end of the
street having a conversation that had started out intense and was only going to
get more so, if the way that they were waving their hands about was any
indication. Friends of Josephine's, maybe. "Are they from the tomb?" she asked.
Does it matter?
Damon squinted. "Nope," he said. "Innocent bystanders." Her hand on the back of
his neck flexed before she could stop herself. "So to speak. So what do you
want me to do about them?" He dipped his head, touched his lips for the barest
of moments to Bonnie's jaw, and pulled back before she could stiffen. "Unless
you want to handle them yourself?"
Bonnie watched one of the vampires glance up at them and then away again,
disinterested. If they even realized that Damon was a vampire, then he had his
hands around the waist of a human girl who was peeking out from beneath his
chin, looking to all appearances to be every inch the damsel just waiting for
the prince to find her before the dragon bit down. Nothing worth bothering
over. She wasn't even aware that she was tightening and loosening her fingers
against the back of Damon's neck until he took her hand in his own and pulled
it away.
"No, I want you to do it," Bonnie said, an edge to her voice. Damon glanced
down at her. She thought that she had even startled him, but he glided off as
the vampires disappeared around the corner together, one hand going to the back
of his jacket and producing one of the handmade stakes from the motel room. Her
head spinning slightly, Bonnie leaned back against the building and waited. It
was just occurring to her that she ought to be getting worried when Damon
reappeared, twirling the stake idly in his hand. There was a tear in his shirt
and a long wound on his ribcage that closed itself up as Bonnie watched.
"Wow," Bonnie said.
Damon pointed the stake at her. "One of us had to remember to carry them sooner
or later," he said.
"No, I meant 'wow, you really liked doing that,'" Bonnie went on.
Damon's face twitched before he answered, "I never pretended to be Superman,
don't go making doe eyes at me like you're disappointed."
"Because I told you to do it," Bonnie continued as if Damon hadn't spoken. The
street lamps weren't much, his face was more shadow and faint, reflected neon
glow from the bar sign than it was anything else, but Bonnie still thought that
she saw his eyes get darker. "Pot and really twisted kettle, I know."
They made it back to the motel, and if Damon saw any other vampires then he
didn't feel the need to point them out to her. Inside Bonnie's room by some
kind of mutual, unspoken agreement, Damon tossed the stake in the general
direction of the dresser it had been made from before he leaned back up against
the remains, folding his arms over his chest. "What?" Bonnie asked when he
seemed content to remain still like that and looking at her for the rest of the
night.
"I thought that we had already established that you were the one who liked
being in control here," Damon said. He still said it like a challenge, though,
and so Bonnie answered with one of her own: "Get on the bed."
Damon slid away from the dresser and onto the bed with a deceptive, lazy
slowness, toeing his boots off as he went. His nearly anthropomorphic eyebrow
went up as he did so, "Unless you want to stay dressed?"
"For now," Bonnie answered shortly, and gave Damon her very sweetest smile when
he looked surprised for the barest of seconds before managing to cover it up
again. Someone was calling someone's bluff here, but hell if Bonnie was quite
certain who, quite yet. She climbed onto the bed herself and straddled Damon
easily, taking up the lapels of his shirt in either hand. He gripped her waist,
then her hips, to hold her against him, but didn't try to venture any further
north or south into dangerous territory. Because like she had told him to go
after the vampires in the alley, she hadn't told him that he could go any
further yet, and fuck. Bonnie's mouth tasted strange and then stranger still
when she kissed Damon again, a lot harder than she had in the bar. He opened
himself to her with an eager little noise from the back of his throat and then
a disappointed one when Bonnie broke their mouths apart, but continued to let
their foreheads rest against one another. His eyes were dark; he dipped his
chin up for another kiss that Bonnie wasn't willing to let him have just yet.
"This doesn't change anything," Bonnie told him. She put her hands against
Damon's on her hips and squeezed a bit, making certain that he was paying
attention to her, even though she was sitting in his lap and could tell that if
there was one thing in this world she had under her full control, it was Damon
Salvatore's attention. "No biting, no compulsion."
"I don't have to compel sex," Damon said with a little lift at one corner of
his mouth. "Everything else is another story. So you don't have to worry, in
case you think that I'm backdoor whammying you or something."
Bonnie sank back onto her haunches and considered without feeling particularly
sorry for the fact that she was visibly making him uncomfortable as she did so.
"You are the very last person I would expect to make sure you weren't going to
be taking advantage of me."
"I'm more worried that you're going to decide being hammered was a backdoor way
of breaking the compulsion clause," Damon said, though he still seemed to be
having zero problem with the location of Bonnie's hands. "If I'm going to need
to run in the morning, it's only ladylike to give me a head start."
"Trust me, Damon, I know that this is a bad idea," Bonnie said. "But it
wouldn't be my first." She pulled her shirt over her head and threw it in the
vague direction of her bags while Damon did the same. He was long and lean and
pale, shadows dipping into the curve of his hipbones and along his collar.
Bonnie took a deep breath and asked herself for the last time if she wanted to
do this, because alcohol, trauma, and the tinge of mescaline were going to make
horrible excuses in the morning if she wasn't. She remembered how it had felt
when she had chucked Damon back against the wall and when she had sent him off
after the vampires outside the bar and for better or worse had her answer, not
to mention a whole new ache between her thighs. Damon picked her up by her hips
and slid her beneath his body, their pelvises aligned.
"No biting," Bonnie reminded Damon as he returned his hands to her waist,
rubbing his thumb in a circle near her navel and leaning down as though he were
smelling of her neck. She wrapped her fingers through Damon's hair when his
answer was a low chuckle and tugged back hard. His eyes were all pupil as she
did and, God help her, she wanted him even more that way. She and Caroline had
flicked through entirely the wrong kind of porn, that one time at Tina Fell's
when they had all been giggling to themselves and hurrying to clear the browser
history and hide the wine coolers before Tina's mom came back.
"Don't you know how good I am at following directions?" Damon murmured against
the side of her neck. He tugged against the grip that Bonnie was maintaining on
him to see how far she would let him go and then smirked when she relaxed her
fingers--man of his word, right--licked at the place where her pulse ran
closest to the surface as if he were making a point. When Bonnie sighed, he
nipped her, hard, just this side of breaking the flesh and making it clear that
he knew how closely he was flirting with the rules when she grabbed his chin
and made him look at her. "Come on, now, Bonnie." He damn sure hadn't said her
name like that even in the bar, like he was turning it into some dirty new sex
act in and of itself. "It's not fair to make up the rules all by yourself."
"Damon? Shut up." Bonnie gripped Damon by the back of the neck and tested her
hold over the driver's seat by urging him lower; he went willingly, lips
suddenly so light against her skin that Bonnie hardly knew he was there, over
the line of the bra that she still had on and down her navel, pausing at the
hem of her jeans. It was strange to feel his breath fanning across her skin
while he unbuttoned her pants and slid them down her legs, thumb just brushing
against the dip of her navel. He rose up again and traced a circle there with
his tongue that cooled rapidly and raised goose pimples on he flesh while
Bonnie made an irritable sound, and even then teased her through her panties
until the stupid things were virtually useless before he finally slid his
fingers beneath the elastic, testing her. "You are such a dick, oh, my God,"
Bonnie finally snapped, grabbing his hand and shoving it where it needed to be,
gasping when she found it. Wasn't like she hadn't warned him that she thought
of him as a tool, after all. Damon laughed and sounded genuine for the first
time since Bonnie had known him, probably, and started to hook her panties off
of her hips and down her legs. "What?" Bonnie snapped when he paused at her
knees.
Damon did that eye-thing of his, where he pretended to be innocent and only
wound up looking more guilty than ever. "I thought that you would have been
more..." He stopped and made a vague gesture. "Maidenly than this, somehow."
Fire would have to rain down from the sky before Bonnie told him that that
little issue had been handled by Tyler Lockwood during the Great Bodyshot
Debacle of '08, since no else knew about it other than Elena and, well, Tyler
himself, and he had been pretty effectively threatened into silence. "That is
so not your fetish and we both know it," she finally answered, earning Damon's
real smile from him again. He kissed the inside of her knee, more gentlemanly
than she would have expected, and finished sliding her panties down her legs
before he crawled up the length of her body, stopped at the juncture of her
thighs.
Bonnie looked up towards the ceiling and still jumped when Damon's mouth
touched her, on the sensitive inner skin of her thigh rather than where she
wanted it most, because if there was one thing that she needed to keep in mind
here it was that she was still in bed with a son of a bitch. He nipped at her
there, too, the hell of it being that the heat and ache at the juncture of her
thighs grew even deeper, before he leaned back and blew a cool stream of air
against the slight hurt that still made Bonnie jump.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Bonnie finally gasped, and grabbed the side of Damon's
face to urge him where he should have been in the first place. He had a dimple
when he smiled, she could feel it against her palm. He pressed his lips to the
very juncture of her sex and inner thigh before he began, and it wasn't more
than a few minutes before Bonnie's breath was coming faster and she had a whole
new reason to forget why this was, no, really, a supremely bad idea. One
hundred and fifty years of practice. Might have known that it would apply to
more than kissing. Bonnie arched her hips off of the bed and gripped Damon's
hair hard when he found just the right place and went to it with a dedication,
still saying, "There, there, right there." Damon put one of her legs over his
shoulder and had his hand upon her other hip while Bonnie shuddered. She swore
that she felt him start to lean back when she was getting close and tightened
the grip that she had in his hair. "Don't you fucking dare." Damon's eyes
lifted, gleaming; they were still making eye contact when she finally came,
hard and hearing a keen rising from her throat, and this time made the neighbor
on the other side of the room smack the wall in protest.
"I did not think that you had that kind of mouth on you," Damon said as he
leaned back on his heels, as gracefully as a cat and clearly every bit as
satisfied with himself.
"Bad time to point out the obvious, but." Bonnie made a vague gesture and then
let her hand flop down to the bedspread. She sat up and grabbed Damon by his
belt, dragged him up the length of her body and delighted in the small,
surprised noise that Damon made even as he moved to obey. He was right, he did
take direction well, and it was if anything even hotter here than it had been
out on the street. "Come here." She started unbuttoning the front of Damon's
pants without preamble while he braced himself up on his arms above her.
"Does Elena know that you're this bossy?" he asked, sounding bemused but not
unappreciative. Well, since Bonnie was helping to get his pants off and then
putting her hand on his cock, she would certainly hope not,
"Get the pillow-fight sleepover fantasies out of your head, ew," Bonnie said.
She stroked Damon a few more times and guided him into her, wrapping her legs
around his waist and making an involuntary sound from the back of her throat
when Damon grabbed her ass, hard, to pull her even more fully against him,
turned on more than she was certain that she wanted to admit by the faint
hesitancy in Damon's actions. He wasn't quite certain of what was happening
here? Neither was Bonnie, but she liked it. She was barely even coming down,
but already she could feel her belly and lower tightening, sweet and fluttery.
The Great Bodyshot Debacle was hazy with the ill-advised combo of orange jello
and cheap vodka, but Bonnie remembered that it had been awkward and a little
painful, not least because she highly suspected that Tyler hadn't had any more
of an idea of what he was doing than Bonnie had. Discovering that Damon had
been screwing his time away since he had been turned was...no, Bonnie couldn't
say that that was an unexpected revelation, so she guessed that she might as
well just enjoy the results. She braced herself with one hand on the back of
Damon's neck, flexing her fingers when he hit something just right and
listening to his breathing get deeper every time, and grabbed his ass hard
enough to bruise, probably, if he had been human to urge him deeper into her.
"Like you mean it," Bonnie ordered into his ear.
"I really wish that I had figured this out about you sooner," Damon said in an
appreciative tone, only letting go of Bonnie's rear so that he could touch at
her face, her throat, the lace trimming on the bra that she had still not taken
off, rocking into her at an increasingly fast and erratic pace. It was good,
but it wasn't quite there, and Bonnie could feel herself getting frustrated
until something flipped them both over without warning and put her on top, and
Bonnie didn't even realize at first that it had been her. Damon started up at
her, startled in the same way that Bonnie was, and then he tightened his grip
upon her even harder. Damon had his hands on her hips to guide the rhythm while
Bonnie splayed her hand out against his abdomen and discovered that vampires
could sweat as well as breathe, when their motivation was right. She dug her
nails into his abdomen until half-moons rose up under the pressure, dragged her
nails down his sides and watched the red marks fade away within seconds while
Damon made a short, sharp sound. It was good to be around someone who couldn't
die, couldn't even really be hurt, and it helped so much.
"Keep going," she growled down to Damon, and he nodded jerkily as she shifted
herself up and down onto his cock. The change in angle was perfect, and she
hardly noticed that Damon was pulling her taut against him, tasting the fine
beads of sweat that were collecting on her neck and chest, because the black
hole of tension in her belly was reversing all of the rules of creation and
exploding outward into stars that Bonnie felt in the tips of her fingers and
behind her eyes, so many and so exquisitely that she could nearly forget, for
the moment, who had brought them about.
End Part Four
***** Chapter 5 *****
Part Five
She hadn't packed aspirin. Enough clothes for two weeks, easily, Emily's spell
book, an iPod for crucial Damon-ignoring times, and a picture of Grams, but no
aspirin. She was an idiot.
Bonnie kept her eyes carefully closed and focused on taking long, slow breaths
through her nose for several minutes before she attempted to move, counting
herself lucky that she hadn't bothered opening up the curtains while she had
been settling in the day before. She was pretty sure that she could make up a
spell to pull the sun right out of the sky, if she tried hard enough.
They. As in plural. As in, Bonnie had gotten extremely ill-advisedly trashed
the night before and decided that having sex with Damon Salvatore, who so far
as she knew was only cutting out the regular murderous rampages because he was
playing some kind of extended practical joke on his brother, was a good plan.
The near-constant rage hangover that she had been running around with, and the
actual hangover with which she was dealing right now, both seemed tame by
comparison. Bonnie started breathing a little faster, though she determinedly
kept her eyes shut and refused to stretch out her limbs and explore the rest of
the bed to see if Damon had gone back to his own room after she had passed out.
"I can hear you, you know."
That answered that question. Bonnie rolled over, wincing as her head and
stomach were two seconds too slow to keep up with the rest of her body and all-
over just not happy besides, and found Damon lying on his back, head turned to
look at her. If the rest of him was as naked as his chest, then it looked as if
he had been there all night. Bonnie put her hand against her head and wondered
if her skills were refined enough to telekinetically bring a glass of water to
her from the bathroom before even the wondering became too painful and she had
to stop.
"I should have stuck with Grams' pot," Bonnie muttered. She sat up in the bed,
pooling the bedclothes around her waist. Damon remained on his back and looking
at her, the movement of her yanking the sheets up to keep herself decent just
nearly making it impossible for him to stay so. Bonnie stared at the long, pale
line of his thigh and hip and asked herself if it was really too early to be
having another drink. She tried to pull her eyes up and to Damon's face, but
that meant eyeballing the abs that she had been too hazy to pay nearly enough
attention to the night before. Damon was warring between smirking and raising
his eyebrows by the time that Bonnie actually reached his face.
"I really would not have expected that of her," he mused, making the catch-all
fluttering gesture beside his head again. And just like that, Bonnie was back
down on earth, and the thigh was just a thigh again.
"You didn't know her," Bonnie said shortly. Damon rolled his eyes and shifted,
clearly about to get out of the bed, before Bonnie grabbed his shoulder and
pulled him back. She managed to throw her leg over his body without entirely
disentangling herself from the bedclothes and pinned both of Damon's hands down
by his sides, just hard enough to let him know that she meant business even
though he was always going to have the drop on her when it came to brute
strength. First observation: vampires were capable of morning wood just as much
as they were capable of sweating and recreational breathing. Second
observation: when Bonnie leaned just a little bit more of her weight down onto
Damon's wrists, he really, really liked it, and more to the point, he was not
the only one.
Bonnie told herself to focus now and panic about the fact that she very well
might have a future of being called Mistress ahead of her later, and asked
Damon, "Are you screwing with me?" If he was--if this was a trick--she was
learning all kinds of things that she was capable of.
"It's not fair if you only lob the easy balls at me," Damon complained, moving
within her grip so that he was holding her wrists, too. Bonnie glanced down at
her hips and saw the marks of fingers there; his skin was as unblemished as if
he had never been a real boy at all.
She leaned close, until they were nearly nose to nose, and didn't crack a
smile. "I am not kidding," she said. "If this is some kind of game, or master
plan, our little deal is over."
Even though she swore that his face didn't move, something shut down all the
same. Damon took her by the hips and lifted her off of him before he rolled
from the bed and reached for his pants. "Got it in one," he said, rolling his
eyes. "I got you drunk and kinky so that I could get laid--no, wait. Pretty
sure you handled both of those things without my help at all. And if you're
going to take it back and go all--" The gesture. "Then you owe me a head
start."
"I didn't do anything that I didn't want to do," Bonnie said flatly. "And not
anything that we're going to do again, either."
Damon didn't have to be facing her for Bonnie to know that he was rolling his
eyes. "You might have a sharper mouth than Stefan," he said. "But I really do
not know why the two of you aren't better friends." When he was still
shirtless, but at least a little more decent, Damon leaned in close and braced
himself with one hand to either side of her thighs. Bonnie put her hand against
the dip where his collarbones and throat came together, not pushing just yet in
any of the ways that she could push. "One night stand, I'm an evil creature of
the night, you can't believe that you let yourself become so impure, blah-blah-
blah."
"Careful," Bonnie said dryly. "You're starting to sound like women have said
this to you before."
Damon was close enough that she thought he was about to kiss her, and she
wasn't leaning back. Because she was fucked in the head. And he had bought her
orange juice. Yeah, the math of it wasn't adding up to her, either. "If you're
not nice to me, I won't let you hold me down again next time."
Sure you would, Bonnie thought. She folded her legs under her and watched the
line of Damon's back as he bent to look for his boots. Bonnie concentrated, and
one of them flew from beneath the bed into Damon's hand; he raised his eyebrows
at her.
"That your version of an apology?" he asked.
"For thinking that you might be doing exactly what you have a long history of
doing? Please." Bonnie started to get from the bed herself, ignoring the flash
of self-consciousness as she she could feel Damon's eyes on her. "I get the
first shower."
"Says who?" Damon knelt to see if his other boot was beneath the bed, too, and
made a frustrated noise when Bonnie didn't make any move to help him with that
one.
"The one paying for the room, that's who. You do have one, you know." Bonnie
reached the bathroom and unhooked her bra before she leaned back out to throw
it in the general direction of her bag. She used the door as a shield around
which to peek in the meanwhile so that she could continue talking with Damon,
remembering the way that he had put his hand against her back two nights before
when he hadn't had time to realize that he was doing it. "Besides, aren't
southern gentleman supposed to be all chivalrous or something?" Damon lifted
himself up from his digging under the bed so that he could smile at her. "I'm
just saying, you have no excuse for not knowing better."
"You know where chivalry comes from?" Damon gave up on the bed and came towards
her in his pants only, putting his hand up against the door and smirking when
Bonnie kept it between them. "The idea in the Middle Ages that women were these
beautiful flowers to be put up on pedestals and worshipped, but only from afar.
You weren't ever supposed to actually touch them." He tapped his finger against
the door. "So I only got part of the lesson. Tell me that I still get credit
for at least learning it really well."
Bonnie tilted her head to the side and regarded Damon for a long moment. "I'm
pretty sure your other shoe is under the dresser," she said, and shut the door.
*
One hour and two cups of coffee later, Bonnie felt slightly more human, though
she was still fairly certain that eating anything more substantial than a Tic-
Tac was going to be a grave mistake. She made an unhappy noise as soon as she
left the motel room to throw her bag in the backseat, even with her sunglasses
already on, and fished for her keys so that she could throw them at Damon.
"Unless you want vampire-hunting to be cut short while I throw up on you."
"Beautiful flowers to be worshipped from afar," Damon repeated, doing his eye-
thing at her. The next time that Bonnie talked to Elena, she was going to ask
her if she had noticed that there were subtleties in it like a mood ring.
Bonnie made a face at him and settled down into the passenger seat. Next stop,
Miami. She fiddled with the rims of her sunglasses, trying to settle them more
firmly onto her face. The sun was angry, it was the only explanation. "Funny
you should say that."
"Hmm?" Damon backed the car out of the space and turned them south, making a
series of highly entertaining unhappy noises as he went. "Why the hell you
drive this thing is beyond me, it's the vehicular equivalent of a Morkie."
"I like Morkies. I would think that you would be more environmentally-
conscious, given how long you're going to be around." Damon made a dismissive
gesture. "No. Back to the pedestal thing."
"It's been roundly agreed by you and just about every other person I've ever
met that I'm not exactly stable, don't go getting a swelled head."
"You like being bossed around. I--" Bonnie took a deep breath. "Kinda like
bossing you around. Let's unpack all of that when we're back in Mystic Falls
and won't be fighting for our lives on a nightly basis, okay? I want to talk
about something serious." Damon slid her a sidelong look, frowning even though
she had just knocked any and all discussions of what last night had "meant" or
whatever right off of the table. She had a pheromone that attracted vampires.
At least this one was proving useful and seemed to be committed to stabbing her
in the front. She would deal with what that meant on a large scale, when she
didn't have him committed not eating people on pain of brain-explosion any
longer, when they were back home. "That whole courtly love thing you were
spewing earlier." Bonnie straightened and slid her sunglasses down so that she
could make eye contact with Damon over the top of them. "By all accounts, the
last woman that you put up like that was the same woman who owned my ancestor,
that doesn't raise any red flags with you?"
Damon sighed as if he couldn't believe that they were even stooping to have
this conversation, and Bonnie reminded herself hard that she had promised to
bring back the brain explosions only in the event of murder, compulsion, or
uninvited people-snacking. "Bonnie, I hate nearly everyone for exactly the same
reasons." She kept looking at him over the top of her glasses. "Seriously. You
can't flip through cable news without hearing at least one heartwarming human
interest story a week about the attention-whoring bastard who overcame his
bigotry in the name of the greater good." Somehow, when Damon said words like
"greater good", he made it sound like a venereal disease. "And that's in one
human lifetime. I'm rounding into my third." Damon glanced over, noticed that
Bonnie was still watching him, and reached out to push her sunglasses back up
her face. "You probably should have asked me that before you slept with me."
"Probably," Bonnie agreed. "But if that turns out to be the least-wrong thing
that I did last night, I'm going to suck it up and call it good." She rummaged
about in the glove compartment for the aspirin of the previous morning and dry-
swallowed three, grimacing a little at the bitter aftertaste. The grimace
deepened as she fingered the phone in her pocket, but since they were rounding
into their third day here, she didn't guess that she could put it off any
longer. Especially not when she wasn't sure what they were going to be facing
down in Miami. She turned on the phone and punched in a number, warning Damon
as she did so, "No color commentary," and not realizing until it was too late
that she had essentially guaranteed it.
Her father answered on the first ring even though it had to be showing up as an
unfamiliar number on the caller ID. "Bonnie?"
Bonnie cringed further down into her seat, picturing his face perfectly well
without needing to see it. "Hi, Daddy."
"Bonnie Bennett, what the hell are you thinking, do you have any idea what
you've put me through?" Her father sounded much more scared than he did angry,
and Bonnie cringed harder still.
"I know, I know," she said. "I'm sorry, it's just--it's something that I
really, really have to do, and then I'll come home. I promise." She could feel
Damon cutting his eyes towards her, but ignored him. She kept her word every
bit as much as he did, and she if she didn't see this thing to the end, it
would only be because burning the whole world down to make it happen wasn't an
option.
"Bonnie, sweetheart, I'm not--I promise I'm not mad." He sounded like he meant
it, too. Bonnie put her hand over her face while Damon studiously kept his eyes
on the road. "I'm worried about you, you've been so angry since your
grandmother passed, and it's not healthy to be carrying that around inside of
you."
Four dead vampires total, one of them by her hand and two more than she ought
to get at least half-credit for using Damon's kink to aim him like a weapon.
"I'm...I'm finding an outlet," Bonnie said. One that couldn't exactly be billed
on anyone's insurance, but whatever. "Daddy, I have to go, I just wanted to let
you know that I'm safe, I'm coming home soon, and I already know that I won't
see daylight again until graduation. This is just--you have to trust me, this
is really important."
"Is that boy--"
Bonnie hung up the phone hurriedly and then turned it off for good measure.
"Crap," she said.
"I told you that you shouldn't have trusted Caroline," Damon said, eyes still
on the road. Bonnie waited warily for him to bring up the other parts of the
conversation that he clearly must have heard, but he went on, "Been a long time
since anyone called me a 'boy', though."
"Your ego can take it." Bonnie looked out the passenger window for a long
moment, chewing on the edge of her thumbnail, before ultimately deciding that
there was nothing else to do other than bite the bullet. "Do Elena and Stefan
know where you are?"
"Stefan's used to me taking off without warning," Damon said. "It'll be fine."
That wasn't exactly an answer. "What about Elena?"
"What about her?" Damon caught her rolled eyes and said, "Pot and kettle,
little witch. And Elena at least knows that I can take care of myself. Have you
told her where you are?"
Bonnie slumped a little lower in her seat. "Elena and I are having a hard time
right now," she said. "Over you and Stefan."
She expected a sarcastic retort, but Damon only said, "I expected as much.
Elena might be a lot younger than Stefan, but she has talent. She can brood in
two different directions at once." He didn't say it like an insult. Bonnie
stayed quiet, still chewing on the edge of her nail. There was nothing to break
up the silence but road noise until Damon said, "It's not the first time that
I've been someone's bad decision, cleansing breaths."
"I'm fine," Bonnie said.
"Of course you are."
"I'm fine," Bonnie insisted, more vehemently. Just as soon as you take the fact
that I slept with a killer, am embarking on a crazed revenge mission, and I
liked watching those vampires die more than I probably should. "What are you
going to do when we get back to Mystic Falls?"
"Have a tearful reunion with Stefan and a cliche about Disney World."
"I mean it," Bonnie said, and Damon looked at her. "What are you going to do?
Where are you going to get your blood?"
"Ah, that. I thought that you were too keyed up on vengeance to worry about
petty little details."
"I won't be forever," Bonnie said as if she were making a promise, both to
herself and to her only witness.
"Sometimes you little humans remind me of just how little you've seen, that you
think it's going to be just like that," Damon said in a musing tone. Bonnie
poked him hard in the arm when he didn't seem particularly interested in
answering her question. "I haven't taken human blood from anything other than a
plastic bag in months, relax. The whole town's too keyed up on vampires to risk
it."
"Not exactly the answer that I wanted," Bonnie said, turning back and chewing
on her thumbnail again.
"Like I said." Damon's voice didn't match the rest of him. "You are not the
first time that I've been someone's bad decision, and you won't be the last.
Let's just take our agreement for what it is until the last vampire is in the
ground and then head home, all right?" He showed her his teeth, and they
glittered in the sunlight that he shouldn't be allowed to ride around in to
begin with. "I might just win you over by then."
End Part Five
***** Chapter 6 *****
Part Six
They stayed mostly quiet throughout the drive to Miami; Bonnie had enough going
through her own mind to keep her busy, but she would have figured Damon the
type to keep up a constant prattle both to annoy her and because driving didn't
allow him to touch everything within reach. She was surprised when he was
mostly content with the radio. By late afternoon, they were passing through the
Miami city limits and Damon was adjusting his sunglasses on his face. Bonnie
glanced over him, sensing something different in the gesture. God help her, she
thought that she was developing fluency.
"What is it?" Bonnie asked.
"We're not in a small town anymore, Bonnie." Damon changed lanes without
signaling and threw his middle finger over his shoulder when the car behind
them honked indignantly. "Like I said. Do you know how many hunting grounds
there are in Miami?"
Bonnie made a face. "Can you say 'bars and clubs' and at least try not to make
me throw up in my mouth?"
Damon laughed a little. "It's a tourist city," he said. "People come, people
go, they spend lots of money for the chance to do dumb shit without
consequences." He stuck his thumb back over his shoulder. The car behind them
honked again. "Oh, for fuck's sake, get a thicker skin." Back to Bonnie, "It
started being a hunting ground the second we passed the city limits sign."
She folded her arms over her chest. "So, what you're telling me is that we're
going to be needle in a haystacking it from this point forward?"
"Not necessarily." Damon took them off of the highway and eventually into a
residential area, old houses with citrus trees heavy with fruit in the front
yards and paint peeling quietly off the porches and down into the grass. Bonnie
stared at Damon hard, until he sighed. "Is this going to be a twenty-four hour
arrangement?"
"I told you that we weren't doing that again." It probably should have told her
something about herself that she knew exactly what he was referring to without
needing to ask, though. Bonnie shivered once, then shivered again when Damon
flashed her that crooked smirk without fully taking his eyes off of the road.
"I don't know," she said. "Do you want to redraw the original rules?"
Damon snorted, but Bonnie still thought that he did it as a cover for another
sound. "Maybe," he said. "Let's play it by ear for awhile. After all, I'm hard
to hurt."
"I don't--" Bonnie shook her head and watched the trees go by. "It's not about
that."
"It's more about that than you want to say out loud," Damon said softly. He
smiled when Bonnie remained silent. "But back to the business at hand. There's
someone in Miami who might be able to help us. But you have to promise that you
won't set her on fire first and then ask questions later."
"This someone is a vampire," Bonnie said. Her stomach twisted, but she had
already gone from working with a vampire to fucking one, she wasn't sure that
she had that much sturdy ethical ground under her feet. On the other hand, she
hadn't made any promises to this vampire, either. "Will she be willing to play
by our rules?"
"Which ones?" Damon was obviously amused by Bonnie's glare. Yeah. Twenty-four
hours a day, her ass. She wouldn't be able to handle the strain of hanging onto
a leash that long. "She's interested in keeping her head down. Beyond that,
you're going to have to make a choice. Do you want to take out a whole lot of
vampires, period, or do you want to take out the ones who killed your
grandmother?"
"It can't be first and second?" Bonnie chewed on the edge of her thumbnail and
finally made a quick, flicking gesture of assent. Damon took them deeper
through a maze work of houses that didn't look as if they had been adequately
cared for in years. The grass was so green that Bonnie had to push her
sunglasses more firmly onto her eyes, and the smell of oranges and lemons was
sharp and sweet to the point of being nearly overpowering. Bonnie saw dozens of
the fruits lying out on lawns, rotting.
"Classy place," she said.
"Florida wasn't terribly kind to her while she was still alive," Damon said.
"Some people just love to tongue sore teeth."
"Some people sure do," Bonnie said wryly. She held up her hand. "If you compare
me to a tongue, I will never touch you again." Damon didn't smirk and point out
that she had already told him that she was never going to touch him again.
Point to whom, Bonnie was not quite sure. "Look how many times you and your
brother have come back to Mystic Falls."
"Touche." Damon pulled the car over to the curb in front of a house that nearly
looked as if it could have been made of gingerbread, and was doing just about
as well in the humid, salty air. Bonnie scuffed her shoes through the grass and
kicked at a lemon that had fallen from a tree in the front yard, branches so
overgrown that that they caught at Bonnie's hair as she passed under them.
Damon pulled down a cluster of leaves and crushed them idly between his fingers
as he led Bonnie up the porch steps. They creaked under her feet so alarmingly
that she half-expected the door to swing open all on its own.
"Your friend is really going to help us hunt down vampires?" she asked, while
Damon visibly measured the length of the shadows extending down the porch
steps.
"If we give her a good enough reason."
"Doesn't take much to get you guys turning on each other, does it?" Bonnie
leaned up against the porch railing while Damon lifted his hand to knock, then
decided that that was a bad plan as it wobbled dangerously beneath her.
Damon scarcely brushed his knuckles against the door before he dropped his hand
to look at her, but a few flakes of paint still floated down to the porch. "Be
glad for the universe's small mercies, Bonnie," he told her. "Humanity would
not do well if vampires didn't turn on each other so easily. Tigers are sexy,
but wolves are the ones who get things done."
And tigers don't have alphas, Bonnie thought as she wiggled around to find a
place on the railing that would actually support her and Damon resumed
knocking. They waited for so long that Bonnie was starting to think that they
might have just met a vampire who didn't leave forwarding addresses before the
door swung open and showed the figure within. She stayed well back from the
porch and even the vaguest hint of of light, though the sun was sinking down
below the house she would have been safe as far out as the grass.
"Matilda," Damon said lightly.
"It's been a long time, Damon," the woman said, coming out a little farther.
She was black, slim and petite like a dancer, curls held back from her face
with a headband and gaze focusing on Bonnie as it had been guided there by
radar. Matilda's eyes moved over her in a long, slow way before she turned back
to Damon, lips thinning. "Why?"
"Can we come in?" Bonnie asked abruptly, lifting herself off of the porch
railing. Damon shifted himself to the side so that there was a clear path
between Matilda and Bonnie. Which one he was clearing the way for, Bonnie was
not entirely certain.
"Forward," Matilda remarked. She looked at Damon hard. "Your tastes haven't
changed." Damon and Bonnie found common ground long enough to glare at her in
tandem as she shifted to the side for them to enter without saying a word.
Bonnie guessed that the same rules of invitation didn't apply to the homes of
vampires as they did to humans. She and Damon filed silently past Matilda,
while Bonnie listened to the snick of the door shutting behind them.
That's not at all ominous, Bonnie thought, though she also reminded herself
that the door was made of wood, and Matilda didn't know what Bonnie could do.
She flexed her fingers in and out of fists a few times and made certain that
she was ready, if it should come down to that.
The inside of Matilda's house was an almost direct reversal from the outside.
While the outside of the house had long strips of paint peeling off like
shedding skin where there was paint left at all, overgrown shrubs, and lemons
rotting on the grass like golf balls, the inside was all quietly gleaming wood
and Tiffany glass, furniture that could have come straight out of the antiques
store that Bonnie and Damon had allowed to burn down. Bonnie felt an urge to
run her finger along the edge of an end table to see if she would be able to
come up with even a speck of dust, and maybe open up a drawer or two to see if
there wasn't a photo of Matilda in full flapper regalia inside. Damon settled
down on the edge of the sofa and made a grandiose gesture Bonnie's way, putting
it into her court.
"We need your help," Bonnie told Matilda.
"Really." Matilda folded her arms over her chest. She had the curtains drawn
and only a few lamps on inside the house. "Why do I care?" Matilda was up in
Bonnie's face before Bonnie even saw her move, looking deeply into Bonnie's
eyes. Bonnie hissed and was about to bodily move Matilda to a safer distance
before Matilda sidled back of her own accord. "He doesn't have you compelled."
"She has a certain natural charm," Damon said from his space on the edge of the
sofa. "Don't want to squander it."
Matilda rocked back, looking at the way that Bonnie and Damon were positioned
in relation to each other, mirrored body language and a united front. "Oh,
Damon," she mused, "you are so very predictable."
"You're still living in a state that you have every reason that you despise,"
Damon told her smoothly. "Our routines are long, but they're still our
routines."
Tigers never did get along when they were placed in close quarters with one
another. Neither did wolves, when they were from different packs. Bonnie placed
herself between Matilda and Damon and said firmly, "There are a group of
vampires in Miami that Damon and I are very interested in killing. You can help
us find out where they are."
Matilda's jaw went a little slack, and she looked rapidly towards Damon as if
she were asking for confirmation. He lifted his shoulder into a shrug. "She has
a way of getting what she wants," was all that he said.
"Why on God's earth would I help you turn against my own species?" Matilda
asked Bonnie. She started to loom up on Bonnie again, and this time Bonnie
didn't wait for Matilda to back off of her own accord. Matilda yelped and then
let out a series of very interesting curses as she staggered back, one hand
pressed against the side of her head. Bonnie counted to five and then stopped.
It was another count of ten before the black eyes and spiderwebbing veins
receded from Matilda's face; she looked towards Damon.
"Yeah, it's kind of a bitch when she does that," Damon said.
"That's your reasoning?" Matilda asked Bonnie, breathing hard. "You must not
think much of us, if you think that I would turn against my own kind because
you can do that."
"She really doesn't," Damon answered for Bonnie, though he looked over
Matilda's head and made eye contact with Bonnie the entire time. "The vampires
in the Mystic Falls tomb escaped. So far as we can tell, they're in Miami. We
thought that you would be able to put your ear to the ground and get us a
little closer to the mark than that."
Matilda rubbed at the side of her head and then looked at her fingers where a
few drops of blood had leaked from her ear. Her expression as she looked Bonnie
over turned a lot more considering. "That's just you telling me what you want
in more words," she said. "It's not a suitable motive for me putting my ass on
the line with every surviving vampire in Miami when it's done. Try again."
"For my part, they hurt Stefan," Damon said, though the side of his mouth
jerked like he was getting a bad taste even saying it. Matilda lifted one
shoulder and then dropped it again as if she were struggling not to twitch.
"Yeah, you remember him? And as for this charming young thing here, you already
guessed right: she's a Bennett witch."
All of the expression dropped from Matilda's face, leaving her looking as if
she had been chiseled from wood. If her stance weren't still so predatory,
Bonnie would almost think that all of the life had leaked from her altogether.
"It wasn't just a guess. She has their look about her."
"You knew my family?" Bonnie asked.
Matilda roamed her gaze slowly up and down Bonnie's body, but Bonnie didn't
think that Matilda was really seeing her, rather than applying her form to a
photograph from the past. "I might have had a run-in with a Bennett or two,
back in the day," she finally said. Matilda rolled her eyes and knocked a lamp
that had probably seen Prohibition off of an end table that looked even older
than that; Damon flashed across the room and caught it before it could hit the
ground.
"You know you just would have regretted that later," he admonished her as he
set it back down in its rightful place.
"You're pushing your luck, Salvatore," Matilda told Damon in a tone so furious
that she seemed beyond expressing it when the predator in her was trapped in
the form of a mere human.
"Living this long isn't fun unless you put in on the line every now and again,"
Damon answered evenly.
"Yes or no?" Bonnie asked Matilda. Neither she nor Damon flinched when
Matilda's response was to knock the lamp from the table again, and Damon didn't
intervene this time. The colored pieces of glass that made up the shade looked
like jewels as it shattered up against the wall and then fell back down to the
carpet in shards.
"Come back in the morning," Matilda told Damon flatly. She only looked at
Bonnie in sideways glances. "That'll be the very earliest that I'll be able to
find anything."
Bonnie had been keeping a clear path between herself and the door the entire
time. She knew that she, and Damon if she could bring him along, had an escape.
Enough was still enough. "I am not sleeping here tonight," she informed Damon
coolly.
"I wasn't offering," Matilda responded. For the briefest of moments, they met
eyes before Bonnie turned to let herself out. The back of her neck prickled;
she trusted Damon behind her to get between the two of them if Matilda
attempted something. And if he didn't, there was a lot of wood in Matilda's
home, to either burn or to break into stakes.
"You made quite an impression on her," Damon said as they walked to the car.
Bonnie took her keys back from him and ignored the face that he made at her.
"Do you have vampire ex-girlfriends scattered all over the country or
something?" she asked.
Damon hesitated long enough to make Bonnie certain that he was going to say
something that would necessitate her smacking him before he folded himself into
the passenger seated and responded coolly, "What makes you think that I stopped
at the boundaries of the US? The whole world's a banquet."
Bonnie made the irritated noise that she was certain Damon had grown very
familiar with by now and pulled them away from the curb. It didn't take long to
find a place to stay for the night, and soon Bonnie was filling out the same
forms in another cheap, anonymous motel. She hesitated only a second before
deciding that she was going to be Elena Fell here; who knew how the owner of
the previous night's room had reacted to the destroyed dresser.
"You need one room or two?" the bored-looking girl with the nose ring asked as
she accepted Bonnie's assumed name without asking for ID. She pushed a few
pieces of purple hair out of her eyes and looked Damon up and down in a way
which communicated clearly that they would make the rest of her night if the
answer was two while Damon smirked.
He leaned forward to look at the name that Bonnie had put down for tonight,
making her barely hold back the urge to kick him, and started, "Elena here's so
temperamental, it's probably a good idea for her to have her space--"
"Just the one," Bonnie interrupted, staring Damon down and not certain who was
calling whose bluff while the clerk's face fell. After she had accepted the
room key and they were walking to the door, she said, "I am amazed that more
people haven't kept you on a leash."
"Fun suggestion, we'll have to keep it in mind." Damon threw a skeptical eye
about their room, which contained furniture that had seen better decades and
more than a few cigarette burns in the carpet, but at least housekeeping seemed
to be on top of things. "Not that I'm encouraging you to lower your standards
even more, but how are you paying for this little venture? Shouldn't your
allowance have been gone by the end of the first day?"
"Cute. Don't forget, the younger I am, the more that makes you kind of like a
pedophile." Bonnie threw her bag down beside the bed and turned, catching a
glimpse of herself that she had not expected from the mirror above the dresser.
She looked harder than she had before she had left Mystic Falls; she wasn't
certain that she looked any older. "Grams left me some money. I can't think of
a better way to spend it than taking down the things that killed her."
"What about school?" Damon was roaming about the room, touching everything in
it as if he had never seen it before. It was probably a good thing that he had
been born in a time before supermarkets, or he would have driven his parents
nuts as a child. Bonnie hesitated, weighing the odds that Damon was actually
being sincere, until he glanced back at her and waited.
"Doing this is more important than spending a few weeks in summer school and
dealing with the wrath of my dad," Bonnie said shortly. She checked out the
fading bruise on the side of her face in the mirror while Damon kept circling
the room behind her.
"That's nicely obsessive."
"Says the guy who protected my family for nearly a century and a half on the
off-chance that we wouldn't kick your ass when it came to getting your ex out
of the ground." Bonnie looked up and noticed Damon watching her, an unreadable
expression on his face. He had his head tilted to one side, halfway between a
predator taking the measure of prey and a wolf waiting for its next cue, making
Bonnie think of alphas again. She cleared her throat and went back to examining
her collection of injuries. When she was busy pulling her blouse down her
shoulder to make certain that she hadn't tugged a stitch loose, it was easy not
to look Damon in the eye. "Did you know her? My grandmother?"
"Before the tomb? No. She impressed the hell out of Stefan, though." Damon
pulled off his boots and then sprawled out across the bed, taking up as much
space as he possibly could and looking not a little like a starfish in the
process.
Bonnie turned around while Damon laced his hands behind his head and grinned at
her. "Take your pants off," she told him as she shucked her own blouse over her
head and then tossed it in the general direction of her bag. It wasn't vampire
speed with which Damon obeyed her, but it was still damned close, and he didn't
say a word about what she had told him that morning. Bonnie paid close
attention to where his belt landed over the side of the bed while she finished
removing her own clothes and then straddled him. It took three kisses before
she felt him hardening against her and herself responding in turn, three long
kisses where Bonnie took control of his mouth and tried her hardest to detect a
hint of fang, but got nothing other than male, just a little too cool than he
ought to have been. He made a soft, pleased sound when Bonnie pinned his wrists
down by his sides, an annoyed one when she leaned back. Bonnie raked her nails
down his chest and then splayed her fingers across his abdomen, feeling his
muscles quivering and reflecting on the silence ringing through her head.
"What is it?" Damon asked her, curiously soft.
"The first time that I touched Stefan, I saw death," Bonnie said. She leaned
down and kissed Damon, biting hard at his lower lip. "Every time that I've
touched you for the past three days, I haven't seen anything. No past, no
future, nothing." She knew the past well enough. As for the future: that was
still up in the air.
"I think we need to institute a tit for tat clause," Damon muttered, running
his tongue over the place where Bonnie had bitten him. When Bonnie released his
wrists, he put one hand against the small of her back, guiding her. Bonnie
rocked back against his erection without actually taking him inside of her yet
even though she wanted to, because the face he made at her while she teased him
and made him wait was better. "Am I to take it that's a bad thing?"
"It's a thing." Damon started to take her by the hips and lift her onto him
when she showed no signs of doing it herself, but Bonnie stopped him by putting
her hand against his chest and pushing him back down to the mattress. "Wait a
minute." She left him just long enough to bend over the edge of the bed and
retrieve his discarded belt. "Grab the headboard."
Damon's eyes were the blue of a frozen lake as he obeyed her, heavy-lidded.
Bonnie looped the belt around his wrists several times and secured it by
running one end beneath the loops, leaving his wrists bound to each other, but
not to the bed itself. He still hadn't released the headboard.
"You know that it won't be anything for me to break that," Damon said, twisting
his wrists a little and making the leather creak for emphasis.
"I know." Bonnie straddled him again and leaned in close, so that her hair was
tickling the sides of his face and her throat was probably the most interesting
thing in his entire field of vision. "But you won't, because I'm telling you
not to." She finally took Damon's cock in hand and guided him into her, gasping
and giving herself a minute to adjust to being filled before she started to
rock, slowly for now, one hand staying on Damon's abdomen for balance and the
other finding her clit when the angle wasn't just right just yet.
Damon didn't test the belt that they both knew didn't mean a damned thing to
his strength and didn't let go of the headboard, either, even though the angle
had to be awkward. His eyes moving every inch of Bonnie's body as she lifted,
sank down, lifted and sank down showed how much he wanted to be touching her,
but. She had told him not to.
"Far be it from me to turn down a pretty woman who wants to sleep with me,"
Damon said after a few moments, his voice gone raspy. His eyes were tinging
over slightly into black when they made eye contact. "But I thought that I
would have to work a little longer on you before you would be willing to switch
gears from hate into hate-sex, even with tequila."
Bonnie slowed and put both of her hands against Damon's torso, feeling the
lines of his muscles, the dips where his hips began. His hands were loose,
relaxed, until Bonnie dug her nails in just a little, and then they became
fists.
"I haven't been in control of anything in my life for over six months now,"
Bonnie said. "Do you have any idea what that's like?"
Damon stared at her hard until Bonnie started to move again. He closed his eyes
and pushed his head back against the pillows when Bonnie returned to tracing
patterns against his skin with her nails, just this side of rough. "More than
you know," he said. "Being in control all the time gets pretty fucking old,
though, too." Said the man with his wrists bound above his head.
"Could have guessed that. I'll just make up for lost time and let you know when
the moment comes." Bonnie kept Damon's hands on the headboard and fucked
herself on him until she was close, and then grabbed for him. She came hard
when Damon's finger on her clit and the feel of the leather belt brushing
against her thighs, and when Damon himself reached orgasm shortly afterwards,
he was watching her with eyes that were pure black.
End Part Six
***** Chapter 7 *****
Part Seven
Bonnie took twice her normal time in the shower the next morning, in no small
part because Damon joined her and then took great delight in coming as close as
he could to breaking every direction that she gave him without actually
crossing the line in disobedience. By the time she stepped out, there was a
darkening line of love bites running down her breasts and across her belly,
making it clear where Damon's eventual destination had been the entire time.
They had made Bonnie feel even less sorry for how hard she had jerked his hair
when he had gotten there than she might have otherwise.
Morning sunlight was falling across Matilda's porch when they arrived at her
house, and she swung the door open while staying well behind the protective
wood at their knock. "Creepy," Bonnie muttered under her breath without caring
that Matilda's ears were certainly good enough to catch it. Girls not smart
enough to turn right around and head straight back down the steps tended not to
fare well in the kinds of horror movies that Matilda's house evoked, even
though Damon with his hand once again in the small of Bonnie's back was a lot
more formidable than a horny high school guy.
Matilda had cleared away the broken lamp at some point during the night, though
Bonnie noticed that a few other trinkets appeared to have suffered as
casualties after they had gone. She folded her arms over her chest as Matilda
shut the door behind them and asked, "So, where are we on this?"
Matilda tugged at her sleeves and looked as if she wouldn't mind breaking a few
more of her things, now that they were right down to it. "I wasn't able to get
anything last night," she said. Bonnie made an impatient huffing noise, and
Matilda snapped back, "What do you propose I do right now?" She pointed towards
a golden ray of sunlight that was managing to crawl its way around the edges of
her heavy living room curtains and trace patterns along the wallpaper. "That's
daylight out there, sweetheart, and not all of us have magic rings."
Bonnie took a deep breath and tried not to notice the way that Matilda would
scrutinize Bonnie's face when she thought that Bonnie could not notice, as if
she were searching for something there. "I'm sorry," she said finally, even
thought it made her a little sick to do so. "I know that you're doing us a
really big favor here. And, for the record, we just want info, I'm not going to
ask you to attack your own kind." She would have thought that that would make
things better, but Matilda drew back and looked Bonnie up and down all over
again as if she was seeing someone or something else there.
"Bonnie, most of us have no problem whatsoever attacking our own kind," Damon
said easily, back in his previous perch on the arm of Matilda's couch. The
rogue beam of sunlight was falling over his hand, his ring.
"You mean, you have never had any problem whatsoever attacking your own kind,"
Matilda corrected. "It always bothered the hell out of me." Bonnie, surprised,
flinched before she could stop herself.
Damon shrugged. "Semantics."
Bonnie wondered if she was going to need to call them back to attention as she
would school children. "Regardless," she went on forcefully. "That's not what
we're asking you to do. We just need information. Access. There are--" Grams,
I'm sorry, Bonnie thought without quite being able to pin down why. She had
started this in order to avenge Grams, hadn't she? Weren't all the lines that
she had to cross on the way all right? She didn't look towards Damon, the line
that she hadn't had to cross three times and counting, as she went on, "There
are only a few vampires in this city that I'm interested in. Just point me in
the right direction."
Still looking dubious, Matilda said, "I'm working on a few things, but they
haven't borne fruit quite yet."
Bonnie was debating whether or not to trust her and was wondering whether a
quick convo with Damon on the subject of just where the hell he had met this
woman would not be in order when his cellular phone began to buzz. "It's
Elena," he said after glancing at the screen, and rose gracefully from his
perch and exited the room before he answered. Bonnie was left alone with a
vampire, but she didn't feel particularly nervous.
Matilda watched Damon go and said, "You must not be the jealous type. That's
weird, because Damon always liked the jealous type."
Not afraid of being unable to defend herself from physical attack, but more and
more unsettled by the moment with the way that Matilda continued to look at
her, Bonnie said, "It's not like that."
She had to give it to her, Matilda had a pretty impressive eye-roll when she
threw her weight behind it. "Please." She snorted. "I can smell you all over
Damon, and your scent is--muted. Vampires don't really smell like anything, you
know. Not even death."
Bonnie might have considered that if Damon could hear her blood rushing and her
stomach gurgling so easily that he knew when she was hungry almost before she
did, that another vampire would be able to tell that their business arrangement
had extended to an after-hours arrangement as well. She rocked her weight from
one foot to the other and refused to let herself be intimidated even though she
could feel blood rising into her face. "It's not like that," Bonnie repeated.
"I don't own Damon. We laid down a few ground rules, but other than that he can
do whatever he wants."
"Funny." Matilda eyed Bonnie up and down. "Then maybe you're not as much his
type as I thought. Little secret, by which I mean half the world knows it? He
kind of likes being owned."
The last part was said from a place much deeper into Bonnie's personal space
than she could remember inviting Matilda, and without vampire speed getting her
there, too. Bonnie refused to step back. "If you're trying to make a point,"
she said in a low, quiet voice that made Matilda blink, "then you might want to
rethink. I don't really care who's been in Damon's bed before me."
Matilda blinked a few more times and rocked back as if she were genuinely
startled. "Oh," she said, and tilted her head to the side. "No, no, sweetheart.
It's not Damon's bed that I've been in before at all."
Not the first time that Matilda had had a run-in with a Bennett. Bonnie went
very still and could feel her face growing cold, but Damon walked back into the
room before she could say anything. He paused in the doorway and took each of
them in in turn before he moved on to the whole picture, eyes sharp, and for a
second or two Bonnie actually thought that he was going to ask her if she was
okay. She shook her head at him slightly, not certain herself if she was
telling him that, no, she wasn't, or that, no, this was not the time to ask.
"What did Elena have to say?"
Damon shrugged, though the airy gesture did nothing to mask how closely he was
watching them both. "Oh, the usual. Wanted to make certain that I wasn't
corrupting you with my wicked ways, all of that." He grinned at her. "If only
she knew that it was mutual."
Matilda rolled her eyes so that Bonnie didn't have to. "I need to feed," she
announced without preamble. Bonnie's nerves were already on a war-zone trigger
from the past few days and the innuendo-wrapped bombshell that Matilda had
already laid down in front of her; she could feel the air in the room growing
warmer before she was even aware of what she was doing. Matilda paused in mid-
step, mildly concerned but not the tiniest bit surprised, though Damon took a
protective step back towards the staircase.
"I going for the finest vintage that my fridge has to offer, actually," Matilda
said. She waited until Bonnie had allowed the air to cool back down to a normal
temperature before she continued on her way. Back over her shoulder, she said,
"Though, as much as you might find it distasteful, there are more than a few
humans who don't mind being bled. Some even find it erotic."
It was too dark in this house, and the antique furniture, no matter how well-
kept, was nothing to Bonnie but a reminder of how old its owner actually was.
She turned towards the front door. "I need to eat, too." Even though her
stomach was roiling, she couldn't remember the last time that she had put
something in it, and that way led to sloppy thinking and unpredictable magic,
one of which she was already seeing way too much of in herself.
Damon glided up behind her, the return of his hand in the small of her back the
only warning that he was there. Bonnie tightened her hand against the doorknob
and took several deep breaths until she could force her fingers to release.
"It's fine," she said, even though Damon had not asked. If only she could pick
up Spanish this fast, Mrs. Ramirez would be amazed. "You should feed, too. You,
ah, don't really hit me as the type who handles low blood sugar well." She was
nearly babbling, her heartbeat only slightly slower than it had been when Damon
had tried to take Emily's necklace away from her and they had both felt the
charge of power before it had burned him. Damon put his fingers lightly under
her chin and looked at her hard, but nodded and slipped away after Matilda
without another sound. Bonnie didn't know whether she ought to be grateful or
not.
The sunlight was a welcome antidote when Bonnie slid behind the wheel of her
car again, though the smell of citrus was so overpowering until she exited the
neighborhood that her shy appetite dove even deeper out of sight. She drove
until exhaust and the barest hint of salt replaced it, found a place that could
have been The Grill with a more aged facade and a sign advertising that it was
open twenty-four hours a day, including breakfast. The first thing that she
ordered was the strongest coffee that they offered, as she felt more than a
little like she had just been punched in the head and didn't like it in the
slightest.
It had been long enough; it had been too long. Bonnie took out the prepaid cell
phone and hit in Elena's number, putting her head into her free hand as she did
so.
Elena answered on the very first ring, just as Bonnie's father had done, as if
she had been waiting for the call. "Hello?"
"Elena?"
"Oh, my God!" Elena nearly yelled. There was a muffled sound that Bonnie
thought might be Elena actually clapping her hand over her mouth, and she
wondered who else was there with her. "Caroline is telling everyone that you
ran off to Atlantic City to get married--" Bonnie was going to kill Caroline.
"With some guy that she had never seen before--" Scratch that, Bonnie was going
to kiss Caroline. "Do you know how worried everyone is about you?" And under
the fading fear and obvious relief, yeah, there was a little hurt there. Bonnie
didn't think that it would help to tell Elena that she hadn't called Caroline,
either, since Caroline had known that Bonnie was leaving in the first place.
Bonnie shrugged a little guiltily before she realized that Elena couldn't see
her. "It's fine, between me and Damon we can handle just about anything."
"Wait, Damon is with you?" Elena pulled away from the phone. Bonnie could dimly
hear her relating the news to someone else, a masculine rumble responding.
Stefan, most likely.
"Weren't you talking to him just awhile ago?"
"Yeah, he said that he had left town to clear his head--" Bonnie tilted her own
head to the side and wondered in what possible universe Damon could ever do
soul-searching and it be believable. "I know, I know, I figured he had run off
to cause mayhem or get laid or something." Bonnie made an abrupt, mortified
sound and dropped her head into her hand again. Elena paused. "Are you all
right?"
"I really, really, really have no idea," Bonnie confessed, meaning it. She
pointed at something on the menu blindly as the waitress came by for her order.
"Bonnie." Elena's voice was soft and scared. "What's going on, has Damon done
anything to you?" Stefan said something else in the background, and Elena
answered, "I know, I know, but still."
"No. If anything, I think that I'm in charge of this shindig, which is kind of
scary--" I'm watching living things burn to death and making pacts with
vampires, never mind sleeping with one. "I'm going after the vampires from the
tomb, and Damon's helping me."
"What?" Elena didn't try to contain her yell this time. "Bonnie, are you
serious? You could get killed, or hurt--"
"Elena, I'm fine," Bonnie said firmly. She rolled her sore shoulder and tried
to keep the wince out of her voice. "It's something that I need to do."
"Where are you?"
"Are you going to send Stefan down here to save me from myself?"
"I might," Elena said. "Or I might come down there and do it myself. Bonnie,
seriously. What are you thinking?"
"That my grandmother died to close that tomb," Bonnie said flatly. "And if I
can't bring her back, then the very least that I can do is finish the job."
Elena was quiet on the other side for a long beat, clearly at a loss for how
she should be responding when the reason that Grams had broken the seal in the
first place was her boyfriend, before she finally said, "I am so going to kill
Damon for not telling me that you've been with him this entire time."
"Only if you can fly, I'm closer to him than you are." Bonnie leaned back as
the waitress came back with her plate and was pleased to discover that she had
ordered nothing more dangerous than pancakes. "Elena, there's something else
that I need to tell you." Bonnie carefully smashed her pat of butter with the
fork until it was a golden-yellow mess and she could delay no longer. "When you
said that you figured Damon was off causing mayhem and getting laid,
well...that's maybe not so far off from what he's actually doing with me,
except that I made him promise to direct the mayhem towards vampires only until
we're back in Mystic Falls."
Elena didn't speak for so very long that Bonnie thought that they had been
disconnected, or worse, that Elena was so disgusted with her that she didn't
know what to say. Coming from Damon's biggest champion outside of his brother,
that was saying a lot. "Okay," Elena finally said slowly. "I don't...is he
compelling you?" Stefan said something, and Elena answered, "In a minute. I
don't know, she's Bonnie, she might be able to tell."
Bonnie felt herself smile a little, warmed by the faith in her. "He's not
compelling me," she said. "That was the other rule. No killing humans, and no
compulsion. He says that he's a man of his word."
Stefan said something else. Elena answered, "It's kinda creepy how you're not
even trying to hide that." Back to Bonnie, she said, "In case you couldn't
figure it out, Stefan's close enough to hear everything that you're saying to
me."
"Rude." The pancakes had come with pineapple sauce better suited to the top of
a sundae. Bonnie swished them around before she speared one on the end of her
fork and held it up, comparing the color to the bright sun outside. She wanted
to stay around gleaming things for as long as she could before she had to go
back into shadow.
"Well, you have us kind of rattled here." Elena said something that Bonnie
didn't quite catch. "Okay, he's leaving the room. Are you okay, Bonnie? Really?
I mean, I know I asked that, and you said that you didn't know, but..."
"I really don't," Bonnie answered. "I'm just--" She felt her voice tremble the
tiniest bit, and it was worse that she wasn't doing it because she was sad.
"I'm angry all the time, Elena. And when I'm not angry, I'm scared, because
this is some fucked-up shit that I'm doing here. I guess Damon just knows from
fucked-up shit, and is a lot harder to hurt than Joe Normal if I slip."
"What do you mean by that?" Elena asked, sounding guarded.
"I need to talk to Stefan," Bonnie said. "Um, alone."
Elena hesitated, and then said, "Sure, hang on." There was a series of rustling
noises, a quick exchange between muted voices, and then Stefan came on, saying,
"Hello?"
"If we both make it through this conversation alive, we're going to be very
lucky," Bonnie informed him solemnly. "I just want to let you know what you're
getting into before you commit."
"I'll...keep that in mind. Are you certain that you're all right, Bonnie?"
Stefan sounded genuinely concerned for her. Bonnie tried to focus instead on
the way that he had looked on the night of the pageants, the skin around his
eyes so laced-over with veins that he had looked as if he were wearing a mask
and eyes that were black rocks without the slightest hint of humanity left in
them.
"I'm fine," Bonnie said. "I can handle myself. If necessary, I can handle
Damon, too. That's kind of what this is about." She took a deep breath and
blurted, "Stefan, have you ever noticed that your brother kind of, um, likes
women who push him around?"
"Oh." Had they been standing face to face, Bonnie was fairly certain that she
would have been able to answer the question of whether vampires still had
sufficient blood pressure to blush. "And I'm guessing that you're not asking
for this in an academic way."
"Academia was about two days ago." Bonnie struggled against the urge to hide
behind her hair as the waitress refilled her coffee cup. "So. Does he?"
Stefan sounded as if he were weighing his words very, very carefully and was a
little perturbed that he could not also find a place to hide as he said,
"Katherine...kind of did a number on Damon."
"You are underselling that in so many ways," Bonnie said.
"Yeah, well. The point being that she...woke something up in him that he liked
a lot, and he has been looking for her, literally and figuratively, ever since.
Look, if he's manipulating you into something--"
"He's not," Bonnie answered firmly. "Whatever we're doing, we're definitely
doing it because we both want to." She entertained only briefly the idea of
whether it would be better at the end of the day to say that Damon had tricked
or coerced her into this little dance, and dismissed it a second later. If
nothing else, she could say that she had walked in with eyes wide open.
"Damon is very good at manipulating people," Stefan said, but he still sounded
worried, and Bonnie didn't think that it was entirely for her. "So much so that
you don't realize what he's doing until it's over."
"He's still kind of a rat bastard, got it." Bonnie took a deep breath and gave
herself a note of congratulations for working through a conversation about
Damon's sexuality with his freaking brother, but there was still one more thing
that she needed to say. "Stefan? For the record, just in case--just in case,
you should know that I couldn't think of a single thing that was going to
convince Damon to do this, the vampire hunting thing, with me until I pointed
out that he was going to be taking out the same vampires that hurt you."
"Oh." It was a different kind of surprised this time, pleased but trying to
hide it in case it should turn sour. The language of Stefan didn't have quite
as many modifiers as the language of Damon. "Thank you for telling me that."
"We both deserve to deal with him with eyes wide open," Bonnie answered. "Can I
talk to Elena again? Alone?"
"Sure." There was the sound of a phone changing hands before Elena was back on
the line and going, "Call it third time's the charm, but, really. You would
tell me if there was something that I could do, right?" She sounded so unsure
of herself, and Bonnie hesitated so long in her answer, that it was like a
canyon opening up between them even though they were nowhere near each other.
"I'm scared, Elena," Bonnie finally blurted. "I mean, I'm not scared of the
vampires anymore. I really am powerful enough to take them on. But I'm scared
that I might not like myself when I'm done, and I'm scared that if Damon really
is messed up over Katherine and not just a little different in the way that I'm
kind of figuring out that I'm a little different and that if I keep just being
mad like this I could wind up hurting him for reasons that have nothing to do
with what he's actually done. I've watched...I've set a vampire on fire and
watching him burn. I told myself that I was doing it because I needed to face
it if I was going to do it, but I kind of liked watching it, too. I'm scared
that I might not be a good person when I do make it home."
Elena was quiet for so long that Bonnie was afraid that she had either lost the
connection or worse, that Elena was so disgusted that she couldn't respond,
before she finally said, "Bonnie? Even if the rest of this is weird and new,
there is one thing I'm sure of: you are a good person, you are always going to
be a good person, and whatever is trying to make you not a good person has no
idea what it's messing with."
Bonnie laughed a little even though it sounded strange, and put her hand over
her mouth. "The thing might be me," she answered, but went on, "Okay. Message
received. We'll talk again soon?"
"Bonnie Bennett, the next time that I talk to you, we're doing it face to
face."
The laugh came out better the second time around. "Make it a date," Bonnie said
before she hung up the phone.
End Part Seven
***** Chapter 8 *****
Part Eight
"Your porch is about to fall in completely, you know," Bonnie said as Matilda
swung the door open to let her in upon her return. The sun was nearly at its
midpoint in the sky; Bonnie had driven around until she had run her tank nearly
dry before filling it again and coming back. Her head wasn't that much clearer
than it had been when she left.
Matilda eyed the place where the sunlight took control again at the edges of
her railing as she stepped to the side. "The worse this place looks like from
the outside, the less people want to actually come inside and bother me." She
shrugged and shut the door behind Bonnie, closing the reality off from the
appearance. "I've been doing this a long time, I know how to walk the line
between discouraging door-to-door salesmen and getting the whole place
condemned."
"Clever." Bonnie caught Damon leaning up against the stairway bannister,
scrolling through a message on his phone. Somehow, she had a feeling that he
was being read the riot act, and probably not by the person he was related to.
"Not all of us have boarding houses and a deep-seated compulsion to drift in
and out of the same small town until someone is bound to remember us again,"
Matilda said sweetly. She didn't bat a lash when Damon flashed her his middle
finger. "I'm much safer, and my life much less complicated, if I don't attract
the attention of humans at all." Bonnie stared at her hard, trying to pick up
on any subtexts in what she was saying and how it related to the innuendo-laden
pile of dirty laundry that Matilda had dumped at her feet before, but then
Damon was sauntering down the stairs, eyes sharp on her no matter how hard he
tried to play nonchalance.
"What did Stefan say?" Damon asked.
"Maybe I just talked to Elena," Bonnie said, lifting her shoulders and not
trying to deny that she had spoken to at least one of them.
"After everything that went down right before I left, they'll be using each
other as mutual security blankets until Elena has to go to college and someone
finally figures out that that nice Salvatore boy doesn't look quite right,"
Damon said dismissively. His little hand-wave didn't disguise the fact that he
was still watching Bonnie, waiting for her answer.
"Stefan told me to tell you that you're a pervert," Bonnie answered, and got
Damon's real laugh before he was able to smother it.
"He's been calling me a pervert since well before the two of us were turned,
that's hardly more than 'hello.'" Damon frowned at his phone and muttered,
"They're going to start looking like each other soon," leading Bonnie to
believe that Stefan was not the only one calling him a pervert.
"He told me to be careful that you weren't manipulating me."
"Oh." Damon circled around, caught Bonnie with nowhere to go but further back
up against the stairwell and smiled faintly when she stood her ground. "Did he
read you the whole speech about how I'm mad, bad, and dangerous to know? He
wrote that one out years ago, keeps a copy in his pocket."
Bonnie had Damon spun around and pinned against the staircase before she had
time to think about it without laying a hand on him, though that found itself
resting against first his jaw, then the side of his throat, a second or two
later. When her thumb stroked lightly against the line of his jaw, she was not
certain which of them was more surprised. "He was worried, too, though he
didn't say it. That I might hurt you."
Damon's pupils dilated slightly as he turned his head to kiss the side of
Bonnie's thumb. "I thought that you had a whole deal about not doing that
unless I ask very, very nicely."
"I don't want any stains on this rug," Matilda interrupted. "Of any kind. It's
turn of the century, you can't replace that." Damon tested Bonnie's hold on him
by putting his hand against her wrist, curving his fingers against her pulse
point, for the briefest of seconds before she released him and stepped away.
Matilda, meanwhile, was pacing back and forth across the rug that she claimed
not to want to see destroyed, arms folded over her chest and a deep frown line
driven between her brows. "I don't hunt often," she said. "So my ties into the
vampire culture around here don't run that deep. I was only able to find out
two things."
Judging by Matilda's body language, at least one of them wasn't happy. Bonnie
asked, "And they are?"
"The first is that there's a group of about fifteen or so vampires who come
together every summer and agree to play nicely with the other children for the
duration of the summer tourist season. They have a controlling interest in a
nightclub called Cameo down near the beach where there are a lot of drunk girls
who can be compelled to forget, if they get to come home at all."
"Nice," Bonnie blurted, forgetting for the moment that she was standing beside
someone who probably would have leapt at the chance to join the party a few
months or weeks before. She wasn't certain whether she was referring to Matilda
or to Damon, only because she wasn't certain when it was that Matilda had
stopped hunting or if she could be believed when she said that she had stopped
at all.
Matilda made an impatient flicking gesture and otherwise didn't acknowledge
that Bonnie had spoken at all before she was going on. "You two go have your
fun, and good for you if you survive it. The second thing is this: I don't know
who you've killed or how discreet you were while you were doing it, but someone
knows that you were headed this way and has put out the word. I have not lived
this long by jumping into stupid fights that I know I can't win, so that's it.
I want the two of you out of here and not coming back. I don't care if she's a
Bennett."
Bonnie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, wondering why she had
somehow expected that Matilda would help them more than that, and why she
somehow knew that it wasn't the power of the Bennett witches that Matilda was
referring to. "Fine," she said grudgingly. "We'll respect your wishes." Damon
was already turning towards the door, losing interest now that Matilda wasn't
showing that she could be any further use to them, while Bonnie hesitated. "Who
was it?" she blurted. Matilda looked her over. "The Bennett that you were
involved with. Who was she?" Goddamnit, she couldn't stop herself from asking
even if she wasn't certain that she wanted to know. "Her name wasn't Sheila,
was it?"
Matilda looked as briefly startled for a moment as if Bonnie had hauled off and
smacked her before she began shaking her head. "Sheila Bennett, with a vampire?
She'd kill herself first." Bonnie felt vaguely sick, and didn't look Damon's
way. "Her mother." Matilda's voice and face grew soft in the same way that
Elena's did when she talked about Stefan. Bonnie wasn't even sure that she and
Damon should still be here while Matilda was retreating back into what were
obviously very private memories, and she couldn't believe that she was
respecting the emotions of a vampire enough to care. "Her name was June, and
she was the loveliest woman that I had ever seen when we met. She was--we
remained friends until the day that she died. Sheila didn't take to that too
terribly well. I suspect that that's why she hated vampires so much, me and
June. You have eyes a great deal like hers, the same way of carrying yourself."
"Oh," Bonnie said, knowing that her voice and posture were both stiff and not
particularly caring. She turned to Damon, whose face was carefully guarded and
blank in the way that he got when there were things happening behind his eyes
that he wanted no one else to see. "Did you know that was why she would help
us?"
Damon's face barely moved as he answered, "Witches and vampires are found in
close proximity to each other a lot. I knew that they had known each other.
And...you might not be an exact match the way that Elena is to Katherine, but
people do stupid things all the time when they want to hang onto the past."
Bonnie thought long and hard about whether it would be worth it break their
deal before she turned back to Matilda and said, very carefully, "Thank you for
getting us this far. We won't bother you anymore." She turned and walked out
the front door without waiting to see if Damon would follow. She no longer had
to wonder what Grams would think of what Bonnie was doing with Damon, and maybe
even what she would think of Bonnie for doing it.
Bonnie felt cold even in the warm sunlight as she and Damon walked across the
lawn and to her car together. She felt his hand starting to slide into her
pocket to retrieve her keys and grabbed his wrist hard enough to hurt a human.
The warning knell rolled out of her before she could stop herself; that wasn't
good. "I'm fine."
"Right. You look fine," Damon said with his fingers pressed lightly against his
temple and his eyes seeing much too much. He crossed around to the passenger
side and then folded his arms together on the hood so that he could still
address her. "Granted, you're a lot more likely to be killed by a crash than I
am, but it still wouldn't be the bestest-best moment of my day, all right?"
Bonnie answered by hurling her door open and then slamming herself down into
the driver's seat so hard that she nearly ruined it all by smacking her head
against the frame. "I'm fine," she snapped again, shoving the key into the
ignition.
Damon folded himself down into the passenger seat more slowly, putting on his
seatbelt. "Of course you are," he answered smoothly. While there were certain
times when Bonnie could admit that his little verbal games could be amusing and
even that they gave her an outlet for her irritation so that she didn't go into
that scary place that Elena was so convinced she would never be able to reach
(and Bonnie really did not like the hint that she had just gotten from herself
about which one of them was right), it had officially become not one of those
times from the very second that Matilda had let them know that Bonnie was not
the first among her family to lay down with a wolf, and that Grams would be
absolutely disgusted by it. She jerked away from the curb so hard that she
nearly sideswiped a Volvo in the process and held up a finger at Damon in
warning to keep his smart comments to himself for once in his life.
She might have known that there was very little on this earth capable of making
Damon Salvatore actually shut his mouth. He sank down low in his seat and
braced his knee up against the dash like he had the first time that they had
ridden together, all but lacing his hands behind his head. If he actually
licked his lips, Bonnie swore that she was going to open the passenger door
with her mind and bodily shove him out. Maybe she could still get some credit
with Grams on the basis of better late than never.
"You're looking at this the wrong way," Damon said. "You're really just
following in a family tradition, once you think about it. What's so awful about
tradition?"
"Damon?" Bonnie asked in a voice savage enough that, nope, that settled it,
Elena was wrong, wrong, wrong, and Bonnie just hoped that this didn't go far
enough that she ever found out how much. "This is not a talking time." Damon
shut his mouth so quickly that it was nearly comical, and Bonnie sighed,
putting one hand briefly over her eyes. She didn't drop it again until Damon
reached out and jerked hard on the wheel, and then she realized that she had
taken them within a foot of slamming into the back of a pickup truck
manufactured during the days when had been built like tanks rather than out of
fiberglass.
"I'm just saying," Damon said in response to Bonnie's look. "One of has to be
at the helm of this ship, and I think that we both know that I'm not the
responsible type."
That doesn't mean that I have to fuck you came directly on the heels of But I
thought that she was doing it all because it was right. Bonnie sighed again,
and only felt the ache behind her eyes tightening as she pulled into the lot of
the motel. Having one room might have turned out to be a benefit when it came
to easy access to her smart-mouthed mistake, but it was a real bitch when she
mostly wanted to storm around, break some stuff, and cry. It also didn't help
when the door was barely closed behind them before Damon was taking her by the
waist and turning her towards him. Bonnie put her hands against his forearms
and he stilled immediately, but did not let her go. He was wearing a long-
sleeved shirt in defiance of the Miami heat, but he still felt cool underneath
it. She might not be getting visions of death when she touched him, but it was
still impossible to forget what he was, what she was by laying with him. Bonnie
shoved him away without noticing at first that she was shoving him towards the
bed until he sank down on the edge with a grace that was nearly feline, wolf
comparisons or not.
"I would ask if it was talking time now, but I think that I know exactly what
answer I would get," Damon said smoothly, leaning back onto his elbows. There
was no other way to read him than as an invitation when he was like that; since
she wasn't even tempted, maybe there was hope for her yet.
Sometimes she thought that he said and did the things that he did because he
was actively looking for someone who would enjoy smacking him around. Bonnie
kept pacing back and forth in front of the dresser and held up a hand of
warning towards him instead, hoping to get back some of the points that she had
lost in front of Matilda's house by not giving him what he wanted now.
Especially not when she wasn't certain of her ability to do it without losing
control. Even if Damon had a hell of a lot coming to him from all of his years
on the earth...not like that. "Not a good plan, Damon," she said, and gestured
up and down the length of his body when he assumed an over the top innocent
expression. "No. You know exactly what I'm talking about. All of that. Trust
me, not right now, even if I was in the mood. It ever comes down to you versus
me in a serious way, it's going to be because you actually did something, not
because I'm pissed off and I could." Bonnie stopped and put her hands over her
face. "Oh, my God, the fact that I even have to say that."
"I'm more amazed that you and Stefan aren't the ones having pillow fights when
you talk like that, let alone you and Elena," Damon said. He sounded almost
bored, which was Bonnie's cue to peek through her fingers and see that he was
watching every move she made. His body language was tight, displeased even
though he didn't want her to see it, making Bonnie wonder what exactly it was
that he did want that she was refusing to give him. Somehow, she doubted that
anyone looking like Damon Salvatore had to work hard to find people willing to
tie him to a bed and fuck him silly.
Bonnie ignored Damon for the moment and thought back to the pictures that she
had seen of her great-grandmother, a tall woman who had had eyes large and
green enough that they stood out even in a black-and-white photograph. Matilda
hadn't said that her great-grandmother had actually been unfaithful to her
great-grandfather while they had been married, but she hadn't ruled it out,
either; Bonnie tried to be upset about the woman in the photographs, but mostly
she couldn't help but think that she knew exactly what it felt like to sit
where she had when the picture had been taken.
Damon was very, very still in his place on the mattress, and Bonnie thought
that she might even have hurt his feelings by not paying sufficient attention
to him, which was just proof that she was so far gone that there was no hope of
her ever coming back. Finally, he sighed and raised his eyes towards the
ceiling, leaning further back onto his elbows against the bed. On a human,
baring his throat like that would have been a mark of vulnerability, but on
Damon it only made his skin look even more pale and the whole package more like
a statue than a man. "Sometimes I forget how young you are," he said.
Bonnie stopped pacing long enough to spin towards him and snap, "You're not
going to make me angry enough to fuck you!" She didn't realize how loud she had
been until someone in the next room over turned their television up, and then
she pressed her fingers against her eyes until colors flashed across the
insides of the lids. She wondered if Damon could feel how much the room was
vibrating or if it was just something within her, magic aching to get out. "Can
we just go kill something now?"
Damon was pure grace and temptation in motion as he rolled off of the bed.
"Finally, the lady asks for something that I can do."
End Part Eight
***** Chapter 9 *****
Part Nine
"I don't guess that you have a dress and heels anywhere in your fourteen bags,"
Damon had said, while Bonnie had been getting ready to check out this Cameo
place that Matilda was pointing them towards and cursing the fact that being a
girl meant she had to spend so much more time on the physical details. He had
still been and irritable for reasons that Bonnie could not pin down and hadn't
particularly cared to. Kind of too busy handling my own issues to take on
yours, too, Salvatore. Her hand had been shaking slightly with...something, as
she had applied eyeliner and pinned up her hair.
Bonnie had made a face at him and then leaned over to produce a red dress and a
pair of heels that she could probably even run in without absolutely killing
herself, if it came right down to it. She had sworn that Damon was doing all
that he could to keep his jaw from dropping.
"Please tell me that you did that just to fuck with me," he had said.
"Shut up," Bonnie had answered. "I basically just dumped my dresser drawers out
and went. And it's three bags, so whatever."
"But you didn't think to bring stakes," Damon had said slowly.
"Did I get to the part where you need to shut up?" Bonnie had snapped back,
just enough edge to her voice that Damon had actually done it. Oh, yeah, she
could just see this night ending well.
Three hours later, Bonnie was smelling salt through the open window and
clenching her fingers so tightly around the steering wheel that she was going
to have to crack her knuckles when she finally let go. Damon had his knee up
against the dashboard again, fingers laced together against his midsection, but
there was no mistaking the posture for one of relaxation this time. Bonnie
thought that he might leap out the passenger window if for no other reason than
to do something with all of his restless energy, and he wasn't the one who was
wearing a dress designed to do extremely flattering things to her chest at the
same time that she was mentally preparing herself to go to war.
Are you going to be able to control it, or is it going to control you? Bonnie
asked herself, and was unsettled even further when no answer came back. She
shifted about in her seat, and Damon, apparently mistaking the gesture for
nervousness, took his knee down from the dashboard. "Having second thoughts?"
he asked her.
"No," Bonnie answered, maybe just a shade too quickly. "You?"
Damon's smile was tight and meant mostly to show teeth. "I'm not good at
second-guessing, period," he said as she guided the Prius into a darkened
parking garage. It was full dark out, though not quite late enough for the
Miami nightlife to get started in earnest.
Through the cement pillars of the garage, Bonnie could vaguely see the club's
neon and silver sign flashing across the street and the line that was already
starting to stretch from the entrance. Everyone waiting in there had one thing
in common, and that was that they were staggeringly beautiful. Bonnie pulled
her dress a little higher up on her chest and touched at the hair that she had
put up. Damon had given her appearance an approving once-over when she was done
getting ready and had told her that she showed much more neck that way, and
that had been nearly enough to make her take it right back down again.
"Vampires who were locked away for one hundred and fifty years with nothing
better to do than hold staring contests with each other are able to adapt to
the modern world enough to blend in with that?" Bonnie asked. She wondered how
many of the women in particular standing outside of the club she would have to
add together before she amassed clothing and accessories worth more than her
car. Probably not nearly as many as she thought, and the red dress that seemed
very impressive when she had been picking it out at the mall didn't quite
compare.
"Very few of the vampires who went into the tomb were rookies," Damon answered.
He leaned across her to get a better look at the line across the street
himself, putting his arm against her shoulder in the process. Bonnie wasn't
going to believe him for a second if he tried to protest that it was for
balance, but even in her current mood the contact still settled her more than
it threw her off her game. For better or worse, she was probably more of a mind
with Damon Salvatore right now than she was any other creature walking the
planet. "For some of them, the musket was a revolutionary invention. They know
how to adapt quickly and blend." He leaned back and absently pushed a piece of
Bonnie's hair that had fallen down back into place as he did so. "You're not
scared."
"Not of this," Bonnie said, and knew Damon well enough by now that she could
mimic his eye-roll right along with him. She weighed the pros and cons of
having an actual bonding moment and went on. "Believe it or not, I don't like
feeling like I could pull someone's head off for no reason at all all the time,
and I've already done enough that my grandmother would be ashamed of."
"Sometimes I forget that witches really are still just humans under all of
that," Damon said under his breath, just loud enough for Bonnie to hear. He
held his hands up when she glared at him. "I'm not worried about the tomb
vampires blending in nearly as much as I am the fact that it's a nightclub in
the first place."
"Why?" Bonnie asked, and Damon leaned over her again so that he could point out
the driver's window.
"Look at that crowd," he said. "And it's not even ten o' clock. They won't make
it through the night without hitting capacity." Bonnie stared at him, not
comprehending, but Damon didn't seem exasperated when he had to explain
further. "You stand a human and a vampire side by side and I'll be able to pick
out the vampire every time. We don't have a heartbeat, and we smell different,
more muted. But when you're one vampire around a whole bunch of humans, the
heartbeats, the smells, they really just become white noise. You don't notice
any more unless someone is bleeding."
"So if the place is filled with humans to begin with..." Bonnie finished,
getting it.
"Even if it's a favorite hunting ground, I'm going to have some trouble
figuring out who's a vampire and who isn't unless they're right on top of me
just because there's going to be so much information that I won't be able to
sort it. I'll have to try to find the tomb vampires by sight, which doesn't put
me at a much bigger advantage than you." Damon paused. "Are you scared yet?"
Bonnie answered by way of an arched eyebrow. "I really should have figured out
sooner how much you're my kind of girl." They got out of the car. Damon offered
Bonnie his arm, but this wasn't an absent gesture the way that he had tended to
put his hand into the small of her back a few days before. Bonnie hesitated a
second before she took it and allowed him to lead her out of the parking garage
and across the street. It was warm enough that she still felt a few beads of
sweat prickling out against her hairline even though she wasn't heavily
dressed. Damon dipped his head to murmur against her ear as they walked.
"If they're are a lot of vampires in there and they get close enough to tell
that you're human, it'll be easier and safer if they think that you're
compelled. I assume that you know to fake it?"
"I remember how Caroline was acting while you had her," Bonnie said, a little
sharply. Damon didn't look particularly penitent before he continued.
"Then you also know that it'll be more convincing if you have a mark somewhere
on you that a vampire would notice but a human could miss or buy an explanation
for."
"Damon." Bonnie leaned further onto Damon's arm like they were a real, normal
couple and gave him her most dazzling smile as they joined the end of a line
that was moving fairly quickly, all things considered. Bonnie dearly hoped that
it didn't mean that the humans were being separated into menu items just as
soon as they walked through the door. "If you try to bite me, then I swear to
God I will pull your fangs out of your mouth without laying a single hand on
you."
"At least I can't fault you for sending me mixed signals," Damon murmured
without appearing offended. He was already looking ahead, getting that focused
hunter's expression Bonnie was coming to recognize in the span of a heartbeat.
She followed Damon's gaze to the bouncer and got a bad feeling; Bonnie squeezed
at Damon's arm in question and saw him shake his head very slightly. Oh, no. He
wasn't looking at the bouncer after all, but to a half-visible figure standing
just inside the door. Well, fuck.
Bonnie disentangled herself from Damon's arm just long enough to drag her dress
down a hair, so that the tiniest dark edge of one of the bruises that Damon had
put onto her that morning was visible. In a shadowed enough atmosphere, it
would be impossible for human eyes to pick it out. "That's the best that you're
getting," she whispered.
One corner of Damon's mouth crooked even though he did the gentlemanly thing
and didn't look. Several people ahead, a pair of rangy blondes were turned
away, sulking. "The bouncer's human," Damon murmured to her, "and actually
doing his job. It'll be easier to just compel him--"
"Absolutely not," Bonnie interrupted in a voice loud enough to make Damon jerk
his arm hard against hers in warning. She made sure to lower it before she went
on, but still said, "What did I say about no compulsion? I know a spell that my
cousin taught me, it'll cast an illusion over my ID for a few seconds."
"I had been wondering if you had gotten into that bar based solely on your
charm," Damon murmured. Bonnie looked at him. "Well, you're charming to me, but
I thought that we had already roundly established that I'm a pervert. For
someone who seems to pride themselves on their sense of ethics so much, you're
making a pretty fine distinction there, witch."
And it kind of says something right there that you think I'm taking an
unreasonable ethical high ground when I won't fuck you while I'm in a mood to
make somebody hurt. They were getting close enough to the front to make
continued conversation dangerous, but she went on, anyway. "Playing with what
someone sees outside of their head and playing with what goes on inside of it
is a huge difference," Bonnie hissed at Damon with enough force to make him
look down at her as well as give her that warning tug against her arm. This
time she pinched him back. "There are spells that I could have used to force
you to come with me, but I would never do that, even if it meant that I had to
do this alone or actually stay in Mystic Falls and pretend that I was okay
until I eventually snapped and set the school on fire. Free will is not
something that anyone deserves to have taken away, not even you."
"I feel like most of that was wasted by lack of a street corner and bullhorn,"
Damon answered, but he was quiet afterwards. Probably because they were getting
close enough to the bouncer for voices to start carrying. Bonnie still gave him
a curious side-eye while she retrieved her ID and tapped it in the sequence
that Kayla had taught her. The bouncer scrutinized it for long enough that
Bonnie was certain the spell was going to wear off, and she was going to have
to put her money where her mouth was on what she had just told Damon before he
handed it back and allowed them entrance. The figure who had been standing just
inside the door while they were waiting in line was not within sight, but
Bonnie still had the feeling of being watched. She started to draw closer to
Damon before she remembered that a person under compulsion would not have felt
any reason for alarm.
She still must have done something obvious enough for Damon to sense, because
he dipped his head and murmured down to her, "Good instincts." He put a kiss
against the side of her mouth and shifted so that one hand had her by the arm,
the other against his favorite spot in the small of her back, giving for all
the world the illusion that he was the one in control. Bonnie shifted until she
was able to rest her fingers against Damon's wrist in the place where his pulse
should have been. If they couldn't talk freely, then they would just have to
find a way to send other signals.
Bonnie sketched a question mark against Damon's wrist and raised herself up
against his ear as if to murmur an endearment. She bit at his lobe instead and
told herself that it was to maintain their cover, though the way that Damon
jerked slightly before he had himself under control again still sent a
different and darker thrill through her.
It wasn't taking Bonnie long to realize that Damon got nearly as much enjoyment
out of her fucking with him as opposed to simply fucking, as long as he still
got to return the favor. He let his mouth drift along the line of her throat
and made good and certain that she could feel his teeth before he answered,
"Too many to tap out without making it look like Morse code, Matilda was aiming
low. How many fires can you set?"
Bonnie let her eyes drift around the space that was already becoming crowded
with bodies and echoed, "Too many to tap out without making it look like Morse
code."
"Atta girl." Damon gave her a final retaliatory nip and rumbled something that
was almost a laugh when Bonnie called his bluff and sent a warning of her own
rippling through his mind. The prospect of mayhem had certainly improved his
mod from what it had been at the hotel room. He started leading her around the
edge of the dance floor, where people were wiggling so hard to the latest beat
that even Bonnie could smell the fresh sweat and wondered what all of the
exertion-dilated veins must be doing to Damon. Save for a strobe that made
Bonnie's head ache over the middle of the floor, the lights were being kept
low--the better to eat you with, my dear--and the air was smoky with something
that wasn't cigarettes, something vaguely sweet, though Bonnie looked and could
not see incense burners. By the bar and on the outskirts were clear enough, but
Bonnie couldn't see the features of the persons deeper out on the floor even
when she squinted. The strobe caught the smoke and did eerie things with it,
like watching animals moving through a horror-movie mist.
"If any of these booths were upholstered with vinyl, I would say that this was
the biggest fucking cliche that I had ever seen." Even though he was still
holding onto her with both hands, Bonnie had nearly forgotten that Damon was
there.
"Do any of the humans in here know that they're with vampires?" Bonnie
murmured.
Damon shook his head, dipping his head so that Bonnie felt him speak as much as
she heard it. "A handful, maybe. Not most. Set up the right atmosphere, though,
it makes it easier to forget or to think that you're remembering wrong if you
catch a vampire who will let you go again when they're finished. Some of them
might even come back for more." Bonnie stiffened and didn't realize that she
was breaking character until Damon's hand flexed against the small of her back,
looking around at the faces that she could clearly make out and wondering which
ones had fangs hiding behind their lips. Even when he was pretending to be a
boy, there was no "just" in front of it about Damon. Either a streak of latent
honesty or simple laziness, he never put forth that much of the effort. "You
should have been around right after Rice made it big. Good fucking Christ,
Twilight is nothing is in comparison."
"Pattinson doesn't do it for me and Cruise was already nuts by the time that I
started paying attention." Damon gripped hard at the small of Bonnie's back as
a couple wandered by; she went silent. Bonnie watched the pair carefully from
beneath her cover of being entirely satisfied settled like a doll against
Damon's side. The woman and the man were watching each other with nearly
identical rapt expressions; Bonnie could not tell which of them was the vampire
and which was the human, or what the odds were of the human making it out of
here alive. She tightened her grip against Damon's wrist before she quite knew
what she was doing, not attempting to send him any message other than perhaps
that she was pissed. Damon squeezed back in warning, and Bonnie let out her
breath in a long, slow exhale that made the female of the pair glance at her.
Guess that answered the question of which one of them was the vampire, anyway.
She made eye contact with Damon and watched him shake his head very slightly,
though whether he was telling her that the woman wasn't one of the tomb
vampires or that she really needed to keep it together better than this she
could not tell.
Bonnie spent the next fifteen minutes following Damon in a wide circuit about
the club and feeling him growing more and more tense, which was making it
pretty damned hard for the one of them who was supposed to be artificially
serene to remain calm. She finally squeezed at his wrist again and took them
into a relatively deserted corner where it they could speak without being heard
as long as they kept it low, coughing a little from the sweet-smelling smoke.
It wasn't pot, of that much Bonnie was sure, but it was still making her head
swim.
"What's wrong?" she whispered. "Do you see any of the tomb vampires here?"
"No," Damon said shortly. He had the hunter's look on again, still face and icy
eyes, but the muscles in his arm and shoulders were tense. Trying to be as
inhuman as possible; it was working. "The problem is that there are a lot of
vampires, period. This could be something of a problem."
"Oh." Bonnie took a look at all of the alcohol, wood, and otherwise very
flammable things within her mental if not physical reach and still felt the way
that Damon was nearly vibrating with tension beside her. When the scary things
were scared, that was when you started paying attention if you smart and wanted
to see another sunrise, even if she was one of the scary things herself now.
Bonnie still weighed how much power she felt welling up inside of her against
how many flammable things there were inside the club and thought that it was a
fight she would like to take on.
As Bonnie swallowed, Damon looked down at her sharply. "Your heart rate's going
up," he said. "If you were really compelled, that wouldn't happen."
"Well, I'm sorry, but we humans don't have that much control over things like
that," Bonnie snapped back, louder than she had intended, and then winced. She
tried to stem the flow of adrenaline going through her, but she obviously
didn't do such a good job. Damon swore and tugged her towards the bar so
quickly that it was an effort for Bonnie not to drag her feet and then really
prove that she was still of sound mind and not a vampire plaything. It had
ended explosively, to put things mildly, the last time that she had had
anything to drink around one Damon Salvatore, but if he was right and they were
surrounded by bloodsuckers, then she needed to calm down. Fast.
"Salvatore," a voice behind them said as Damon was giving the drink order and
the thankfully human-appearing bartender wasn't doing more than giving Bonnie a
disinterested glance. Damon tensed for the barest of seconds before he released
Bonnie and gave her a little nudge to get her out of the way. Not to put her
out of the way of danger, because that wasn't going to happen until the job had
been finished and she would really hate to discover that Damon was in fact an
idiot at so late a date, but so that they both had room to do what they each
did best. Bonnie stepped out of her heels and nudged them to the side while
Damon's body went loose-limbed and deceptively lazy. "I figured it would take
you a day or two longer to work your way down here."
"Hi," Damon said to an unimpressive-looking man with ginger hair and blue eyes
that had probably watered at least seven months out of the year while he had
been alive. Bonnie took one look at the way that he was holding himself and
knew, tiger, without having to be told. The man gave her a once-over, head-
tilted and obviously curious, as Damon went on, "So, since you obviously
already know who we are and why we're here, we can skip the big villain speech
and just--"
The gingery man was holding a drink. Bonnie wasn't close enough to actually
smell it, but she had a feeling her guess wasn't going to be off as she caught
at the rim of it with her mind, flipped it up so that the contents thoroughly
doused the front of the man's shirt, and then whispered, "Incendium." She was
concentrating so hard that the flames leapt up straight blue rather than a
cooler yellow or orange, and ran across the alcohol-soaked fabric like a living
thing seeking revenge. The man fell back against a table, yelling, while every
non-compelled human in the room started shouting and either running to help or
running for the exits.
"I might have been going somewhere with that," Damon said to Bonnie as he
reached behind him for a discarded glass, broke it against the edge of the bar,
and then drove it into an attacking vampire's eye with a noise that Bonnie
could hear even over the yells and the crackling of flames. The first vampire
that she had set ablaze was struggling to get off of the table, so Bonnie
pinned him there, so hard that the legs broke and sent the entire thing
slamming down to the floor, where she kept him until it was finished. Damon
scooped up one of the legs as it rolled towards him as deftly as if he and
Bonnie had planned that from the beginning and staked the bar-glass vampire
while it was still clawing at its face. None of the not-inconsiderable humans
who weren't under compulsion were drawing close enough to get a good look at
either Bonnie or Damon's faces, and she just might have counted herself lucky
for small blessings if she didn't see that they were all being rounded up by
people who did not yet have black eyes and a lace-like webbing of veins
crawling over their faces just at the moment, but were certainly about to pull
them out.
"Like hell," Bonnie said; she heard a whining in her ears like being on a plane
with a bit of a headcold. Every drink in every hand exploded upwards into a
gout of flame, catching more than a few vampires in the process, and clothing
burned just as well when the body wearing it was dead. As it turned out, once
Bonnie had them down, Damon was pretty good at staking them, and Bonnie started
to think, For the future: Damon exaggerates like a mother--
Of the table legs that Bonnie had broken while making sure that the ginger
couldn't get up again, two had rolled off for parts unknown and one of them was
still trapped under the smoldering corpse, but that didn't stop a vampire from
snatching it up and lunging at Damon from behind. He had the same blue and
black coloring as Damon, but was stockier and more innocent of face until it
came to his eyes. Damon might not have puppies and sunshine reflecting there,
but at least he had something. Bonnie yelled something garbled and wrenched the
vampire away from Damon with her mind, hurling him all the way back and over
the bar as her ears finally, blessedly popped. Damon spun, and they made eye
contact for about half a second before the stocky vampire was leaping back over
the bar, someone was grabbing Bonnie from behind, and there were fangs digging
into the side of Bonnie's neck. Bonnie hurled the body away from her with an
extra shot of flame to make sure that they paid for their mistake, and didn't
realize until a full five seconds and three dead vampires later why that may
have been a mistake.
But it wasn't a part of our deal, Bonnie thought even though Damon had not been
the one to bite her. Blood was gushing down the side of her neck; she sank down
in a graceless heap onto her discarded heels, dimly felt someone picking her
up, and then she was gone.
End Part Nine
***** Chapter 10 *****
Part Ten
Bonnie felt cold all over, and not as if this was still her body that she was
resting in at all. If she was waking up a vampire, then she was going to be
pissed. That she had never taken any of Damon's blood wouldn't have stopped
someone from pouring their own down her throat while she had been unconscious.
Bonnie had never asked him what it had felt like right after he had died,
before he had made the final leap. Missed opportunity.
"I know that you're awake. I can hear your heart rate changing."
That was what had screwed them over in the club, too. Bonnie might have to ask
Damon for a few tips on that whole vampire control thing, if it would make it
easier for her to hunt and kill like she needed to. For the time being, she
focused very hard on opening her eyes and let everything else remain a problem
to be handled another time. Her limbs felt heavy, and she could feel gooseflesh
on her arms and legs. There was something sticky on the side of her neck. By
concentrating very hard, Bonnie was able to open her eyes and turn her head to
the side, while a very small part of her whispered that she really ought to be
panicking when that was an accomplishment.
Kneeling down beside her was a vampire. Bonnie didn't need Damon beside her to
point out what he was; she could have passed him on the street before any of
the past several months had happened and would have known that there was
something very wrong with him. It was the same stocky man from the club, the
one that she had hurled back over the bar. His eyes were a muddier, less
crystalline blue than Damon's, but that only made it more clear that there was
no one standing behind them. From the beginning of their trip, Damon had at
least been showing some kind of emotion, even if it was more often than not
satisfaction at how hard Bonnie was struggling against the urge to push him out
the passenger door. This man was a shark who was only choosing, for the moment,
to wear a set of blunt human teeth.
"It's kind an old wives' tale that witch's blood is supposed to make you
stronger or something," the vampire explained, touching at the oozing wound on
the side of her neck while Bonnie tried to lift her head. He lapped at his
finger. "You just taste human, though."
"Fuck you." Bonnie dropped her head back down to a dirty cement floor and threw
all of the energy that she had into a truly excellent brain explosion,
something that would leave him with a literal gray paste occupying his skull
when she was done so that she could take her sweet time following it up with
fire. The air shivered, and the vampire leaned back with a frown line drawn
down between his eyes, but he never went higher than mildly annoyed by the time
that Bonnie's strength gave out and she had to stop.
"Sorry," he said without sounding it in the least. "I took a little more than
your standard Red Cross nurse. You're not going to be up and at 'em for
awhile." He rose from his crouch, picking Bonnie up as he went and not
bothering to support her head when she was too weak to hold it up herself. From
this painful, upside-down vantage point, Bonnie caught a glimpse of stone
walls, timber that ranged from ancient to so new that she was amazed to not
smell the sap, the bright blue of tarps. A construction site. She had woken in
a shady space broken up by intermittent patches of light, but as Bonnie blinked
and squinted, she realized that she had been out for several hours. The sun was
already over the horizon; it looked like eight or nine am, at least.
Which meant that she was either being carried by the stupidest vampire in the
history of everything, and her little dilemma was about to solved with nothing
more serious than a bruise on the behind when he dropped her en route to
bursting into flames, or she was in very serious trouble and Damon was probably
dead.
Bonnie was still wearing the dress from the club, splattered with blood along
her chest and collarbone and riding up on her thighs from the damsel way that
the vampire was carrying her. Against her bare skin she could feel very
distinctly, forever cool because it was being worn on a body that was never
going to be as warm as hers, the imprint of a metal ring. Fuck. Okay. Fine.
This was bad. She had known that it could very well get bad when she had
started out. Bonnie took several deep breaths and tried to focus on her power,
but when she was dangling mostly upside down and all of the blood that she had
left was rushing to her head, primarily she was accomplishing something by not
being sick into her own hair.
"So witch's blood does nothing," the vampire carrying her said. Bonnie craned
her neck as much as she was able and saw that they were now standing on patchy
grass and sand that looked as if it had been trucked in. A handful of forgotten
screws lay on the ground almost directly beneath her while the vampire paused
and stood very still for several moments. Had Bonnie been able to lift her head
far enough, she thought that she would have seen him raising his face to bask
in the sun. "And you're neither compelled nor taking vervain. Why was he
keeping you around?"
Bonnie made note of both the past tense and the insinuation and said the only
thing that she could say, "He likes it when I'm cranky."
"Ah." The vampire resumed walking again; Bonnie twisted far enough to see that
he was taking her towards a haphazard pile of stones that she had to squint
hard in order to realize was actually a well, all of its wooden parts long
since rotted away in Miami's humid, salty air. She twisted the other way,
ignoring the vampire's thoughtful, "Squirmy little thing, aren't you?", and saw
that the structure that she had been unconscious in was actually a large stone
house, half fallen-in at several points and clearly midway through restoration.
New panes of modern, weather-insulated glass were leaning against old frames
that looked like the gaps of missing teeth.
He's not seriously going to-- Bonnie started to think before the vampire
hoisted her up and then dropped her straight down into the darkness of the well
without a second thought. She had time for a scream, raspy and weak, as she
realized how far she was falling. Three full seconds before she landed on
something that had the unmistakeable feel of a body. Bonnie forced back a
second scream that felt like choking and tried to scramble backwards on limbs
that didn't want to obey. There wasn't much room to move; she had barely
wriggled back a foot in a dank combination of mud and cold, foul-smelling water
before her back hit a perspiring stone wall. And she was still close enough to
whatever it was she had landed upon that she could feel her bare feet touching
its leg. The leg moved.
I might die down here, but I am not about to do it jibbering insane, Bonnie
told herself firmly. That didn't stop a shake from entering her voice as she
said, "Oh, please, please be Damon, I do not want to find out that zombies are
real."
"I always do what I can to make a lady happy," Damon said, sounding very tired
and almost as if he were under the water himself. "And, no, not so far as I
know."
Bonnie let out a long, whooshing exhale without caring that Damon would be able
to hear both it and the way that her heart rate changed and know that she was
actually relieved to learn that he hadn't exited this earth just yet. "What's
wrong?" she asked. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw that Damon
was sitting across from her in a space that was no more than four feet at its
widest, and maybe thirty feet deep when she craned her neck to try to see how
far away they were from the sky. He wasn't leaning back against the stone like
Bonnie was, too woozy from blood loss to do much in the way of holding herself
up. Bonnie squinted and thought that it was more like he was arching his back
to get as far away from her as he possibly could.
"What's wrong?" she asked again.
"Five broken ribs, and I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with my
femur," came Damon's immediate response. "Since I can feel those things at all,
throw a healthy dose of vervain on top of that, I don't..." He certainly
sounded as if he had been drugged.. "Quite remember. And someone has my ring."
"I saw him." Something in Damon's voice sounded wrong in a way that had nothing
to do with being sick and in pain that Bonnie could register even though she
was feeling pretty sick and in pain herself, and it made several different
warning sirens go off in her brain at the same time. She pulled her feet away
from Damon's leg and tucked them up under her thighs as she watched him warily.
"Oh, good." Even in the gloom, Damon's eyes glittered. "Then as soon as we get
out of this, we can change things up a bit, you point him out so that I can set
him on fire." Bonnie started to relax at hearing Damon talk about future
things, until he added, in a voice that didn't sound as if his teeth were
fitting quite right in his jaw any longer, "You smell really good, Bonnie."
She smelled like sweat and fetid water, not perfume. Bonnie pulled back further
against the wall until she was fairly certain that there would be pebbled
bruises marking her skin if they--once they got out of here and wondered if she
had enough juice in her to physically force Damon into staying over on his side
if it should come down to it, like children dividing up a room with a line of
tape but with some teeth behind it. Her stomach started twisting and her head
spinning when she even tried to come up with the necessary words for the spell,
so maybe not so much.
"How close are you to losing control?" she asked quietly. Damon's eyes were a
quick-silver flash before he looked away again. Bonnie had an idea that he was
trying not to focus on her spilled blood.
"Closer than you want to know," he answered.
Bonnie fought back the urge to touch at her oozing neck, given the filth that
her hands were resting in, and asked, trying to keep Damon's attention away
from the fact that she was potentially a meal, "Why did they drop us down here
instead of just killing us?" She didn't want to think about how long the
vampire now wearing Damon's ring had been watching her while she had been
unconscious. While there weren't a whole lot of ways that this situation could
actually get worse, she was fairly certain that leaning over and making herself
weaker by vomiting was one of them. "I am going to like burning that one a
lot." The customary flash of rage came over her, but this time it didn't feel
like something that belonged to someone else, or that she should be ashamed of.
Damon laughed, low and rumbling. "Bonnie Bennett, you are my kind of girl," he
said from his side of the well. His voice was lower and more ragged than it
should have been, but at least he now sounded as if his teeth were fitting into
his mouth. There was a white flash in the gloom. Bonnie thought that it was his
bared throat, that he was tilting his head back against his side of the wall
that he would not have to look at her and her bloodied neck. "Too much time
reading Anne Rice and not enough reading comic books," he went on after a pause
so long that Bonnie was starting to think that he had lost the thread of their
conversation. "They're hoping that I'll snap and snack on you just in time for
the sun to get high enough to reach us all the way down here and then fry me.
Poetic or some shit."
Or some shit. Bonnie craned her neck again to gauge the angle of the sun at the
upper part of the well and didn't realize until Damon made a muted sound that
was way too much like some of the ones he made during sex that she had cracked
open one of the fragile scabs on her neck and started it to oozing again. She
put her hand against the slick stones to steady herself and pulled her legs
underneath her. Her dress clung to her thighs as she lifted herself up from the
muddy water, and she started shivering almost immediately. Whether she was
sitting and looking at salvation from three feet up or standing and looking at
it from just over five, the distance was still large enough to be an eternity.
"Okay," Bonnie said, half to herself. Damon shifted behind her, and she tried
to throw up a barrier to keep him where he was. He grunted as he felt the magic
falling down over his skin, but continued to move. Bonnie turned and saw him
struggling up to his feet, visibly favoring the injured leg. The near foot of
height that he had on her wasn't going to get them within reaching distance of
pulling themselves out, either, even if they didn't have the sun to contend
with once they reached the top. Damon was keeping his face turned away from
her, too, which frankly frightened Bonnie even more than he would have if he
had looked at her with eyes like those of the vampire that had dumped her in
here with him in the first place. "Stay where you are," she ordered him in her
strongest voice, even though this little predicament that the were in wasn't
sexy in the slightest and she wasn't certain what she had to throw at him if he
ignored her.
Damon held up his hands and collapsed heavily back against the stone as his bad
leg gave out on him. "Sorry, little witch," he said, sounding as if he even
meant it. "But if we get out of here, it's not going to be on my back."
Bonnie barked out a laugh before she could stop herself, and then put her hand
against her mouth before she remembered why that was such a bad idea. She spent
the next several seconds spitting out mud so that she could answer. "Damon?"
she asked. "I am leaning against a wall because I will fall right back on my
ass in this mud if I don't. I am barely staying conscious right now, let alone
doing magic. If you think that it's going to be on mine, then we are in big
fucking trouble." Too late she remembered that maybe letting the vampire who
had already admitted to being on the verge of losing himself know that she was
low on fuel was a bad plan.
Damon twitched as if he were shaking a mosquito from the back of his neck,
closest thing to acknowledgement of the barrier that she had tried to throw
down over him a few moments before as she was likely to get. His teeth were a
silvery glitter when he smiled, and way, way too close to her in the small
space. "Then as I see it, we have two options," Damon said, sounding grimmer
than Bonnie thought that she had ever heard him, but also less as if he were
struggling to speak to her from somewhere deep underwater. She was horribly
afraid that it was the smell of fresh blood that was doing it, too. He was
keeping his body inclined away from her, but even in the shadows Bonnie could
see the strain. Damon lowered his head to his own wrist, and Bonnie didn't
realize what was happening until she heard the sound of flesh breaking, way too
close to the sound of a peach's skin giving way, and saw the dark smear of his
blood.
If he wanted to see if she was capable of scrambling straight up the interior
of the well and over the top via pure disgust, then he was a devious bastard,
but also a successful one. Bonnie leapt back hard enough to bark her shoulder
against the wall and tear one or two of her stitches, sending a little tickle
of warmth down her bicep. Oh, good, more blood for Damon to salivate over like
a rabid dog while she definitely couldn't get away from him and wasn't certain
that she could control him.
"What the fuck are you doing to yourself, are you crazy?" Bonnie demanded,
though she still didn't go any nearer to him to see how deep the wound actually
ran.
Damon tongued the blood from his lower lip and made a face before he spit it to
the side. "The wound's not closing, do you see that?" he asked. "That means I
need blood, and I need it badly, to heal myself and to get the vervain out of
my system. You are the only blood that I have near to me right now." He took a
deep breath, and Bonnie did not like at all how much he sounded as if he were
steadying himself. Damon was supposed to be aloof, smart-assed, happily amoral
and violent. He was not supposed to be...this. When the scary things are
scared, Bonnie thought again. If she counted as one of the scary things
now...yeah, pretty much.
"Two options," Damon repeated. "The first is that I eat you, and then I die
anyway, because you don't have that much blood left and the sun is still going
to catch me out once it gets high enough."
"Lovely," Bonnie said faintly.
"Just the facts, ma'am. Option two is that I still snap and drain you, but I
pull back in time to turn you, and then we both die together. You'll be too
pissed off at me for turning you against your will to enjoy the romance of it,
and I don't want to find out if my ghost theory is right any more than you want
to meet your grandmother again before you can lay a whole lot more vampire
heads at her feet."
That would have gotten his ass thrown against another wall, had she been
capable of it, and Bonnie was on the verge of saying so when Damon added in a
tight, nearly trembling voice, "Don't get too mad at me, Option One is kind of
the winning horse right at the moment."
It was like being thrown into the tiger pit at the zoo, only without the gamey
scent or anyone with helpful tranquilizer guns coming to rescue her. "What
about Option Three?" Bonnie asked slowly, staring at the wound on Damon's wrist
as it continued to ooze. Drops of blood trailed down his fingers and then into
the water; that the sunlight was now far enough down the line of the wall for
her to see that well told her that she had better made her choice quickly.
"Option Three's trainer scratched him out of this race, sorry." Damon lifted
his head and stared at her neck hard; Bonnie considered the line of sunlight
creeping down the wall and wondered if she had enough juice in her current
state to keep Damon pinned where he was until it got late enough for his
natural enemy to do her job for her. She dismissed the idea less than a minute
later, surprising herself by feeling a little ashamed that she had let it enter
her head at all. The practical problem was that a dead Damon was only going to
save her until her new friend wandered back to check on their progress, and
beyond that...she and Damon had made a deal. He had done everything that she
had asked of him when it came to honoring it, and letting him die without a
fight was going against the spirit of their bargain even if it was still
abiding by the letter.
"Will the vervain in your blood do anything to me?" she asked.
"If I turn you? You'll be too weak to feel the difference."
"No," Bonnie said slowly. "If I drink from you, right now. Will it do anything
to me?"
Damon finally looked her straight on again in his shock, even if it did last
only a second or so before his attention went back to her neck. "What?"
"Stefan healed me when he gave me his blood," Bonnie said. "Yours will do the
same, it'll give me enough magic back to get us out of here. I'll have to get a
lot closer to you, though, and you'll have to...not eat me."
"No, the vervain in my blood won't do anything to you while you're still
human," Damon said. "The rest...Bonnie. If nothing else, have faith that I will
never, ever blow smoke up your cute little ass."
If Damon wasn't going to be in control, then Bonnie had better find the ability
to take over the task from somewhere. Drinking vampire blood was just one more
step down the path that had taken her from working with one to sleeping with
one to even being okay with the fact that another one had been girlfriends with
her great-grandmother and was maybe not even a horrible person. Or, she could
and Damon could both die here and then find out whose ideas on the afterlife
turned out to be correct.
"Give me your wrist," Bonnie demanded in a tone that probably would have been a
lot more imposing if she had been able to stand up without the benefit of the
wall behind her. Damon obeyed, Bonnie took his arm in her hands. His body temp
was even lower than normal in their chilly surroundings, but still felt him
shiver at her touch as if she were the cold one. Bonnie looked up, and Damon
was carefully looking away from her, standing very still save for a muscle
twitching in his cheek and, once, his throat moving up and down. From what she
could see of his profile, his expression was as inhuman as she had ever seen
it. Bonnie started to put her other hand out and against his chest in the
warning gesture that she had done so many times before before deciding that the
less that she touched him right about now, the better off they would likely be.
She still curved her fingers more tightly about his arm and didn't realize
until she was doing it that it was intended more to reassure than it was to
blast him right back into the earth if he tried something.
"Bonnie?" Damon asked her in a strangled voice that once again sounded as if
his teeth were not quite fitting correctly into his mouth. "You really, really
need to get out with this."
"Damnit, damnit, damnit." Cringing the entire time, Bonnie lowered her mouth to
the weeping bite wound on Damon's wrist.
He tasted like blood at first, just blood. Bonnie wondered at first what she
had been expecting, rock candy going off inside her mouth or something since
she had been too far out of it to remember Stefan, but Damon tasted like copper
and salt and nothing else to differentiate him from any other time that she had
cut her finger and then stuck the digit into her mouth without thinking. She
let her mouth fill and then swallowed, which in turn brought more blood flowing
into her mouth while Damon continued to tremble like a highly-bred horse.
Bonnie took a second mouthful and forced that one down, too, before she raised
her head and said, "I don't think that it's work--"
Or, okay, so the fireworks were going to happen in her veins rather than her
mouth and down her throat. Bonnie swore and stepped back as her vision went
bright for a few seconds, her ears nearly exploded, and she could see every
single detail within the well down to the fresh drops of condensation being
born upon the stone, hear everything from the raspy breaths that Damon didn't
need to her own heartbeat, faster and the blood heading to whole new places
which proved that Matilda wasn't a liar. Is this what he sees? Bonnie thought
in the brief interlude before the flash was gone and she was her again, albeit
a her who didn't feel quite so much like she had just been hit with a truck and
was nearly vibrating with the urge to...to go do, she would figure out what
after she had gotten there. Bonnie put her hand against her neck, felt her
muddy fingers sliding against smooth flesh that had no mark.
"Holy crap," Bonnie said.
"I can't be the only one getting a sense of deja vu here," Damon said. He was
sagging up against the wall, but he was looking at her again.
Bonnie slid her fingers around her neck, but the bite wound was completely
gone, and all that was left was the dried and drying mess on her neck and
staining the shoulder of her dress. She leaned down and quickly scooped up a
palmful of water to rinse the worst of it away before she asked, "Does that
make it easier for you?"
Damon nodded. "A little. Not saying you should rest on that, though."
Bonnie reached down deep for her magic and found it there, ready for her. She
took a few breaths and didn't let herself relish the sensation of actually
being able to stand on her own two feet rather than needing to lean against the
wall with a spinning head. "At least I got you if you snap. No brain explosions
either, promise."
"Magnanimous of you," Damon said. The fact that he sounded better didn't mean
that he sounded great, either, and the sun was creeping lower down with every
moment.
"Some of us little humans make a distinction between what you choose to do any
what you can't help, believe it or not." Bonnie craned her neck to view the
circle of cheery blue sky. "I saw some tarp up there," she said slowly.
"Are you going to make us a magic carpet?" Damon snapped at her. He was paler
than he should have been when Bonnie looked at him, and his eyes were the color
of dimes.
"Damon?" Bonnie asked, looking up at the top of the well and trying to remember
as much as she possibly could about the layout of the construction site above,
trying to picture every single detail as vividly as she could. She felt better-
-she felt a fuck of a lot better, and not a little like she had taken a hit of
pure oxygen while she had had her lips attached to Damon's wrists--but she
still wasn't certain that she was going to have another burst in her if this
one failed, or be able to hold Damon back if he snapped. Neither did she think
that it was quite fair to be taking another hit off of the bong pipe You're
betting your life on Damon Salvatore, do you realize that? Yeah, well, it
hadn't been the first completely insane thing that she had done since going
below the belt to get him in her car in the first place. And right at the
moment? He was betting his life on her, too.
"You really need to shut up," Bonnie finished. Damon, thankfully, chose this
moment as one of the five times per century that he could actually do that and
remained still, watching her, as Bonnie tried to remember details that she had
seen while upside down and nearly unconscious. The tarp had been over a
wheelbarrow containing unmixed cement. It had been..twenty-five? thirty-five?
yards away from the entrance to the well. She could reach that far. She knew
that she could.
Bonnie concentrated on bringing the tarp to her the same way that she had
slammed Damon against a wall a few days before, except that that had been an
explosion of emotion that didn't really care what happened afterwards and this
had to be subtle, a scalpel instead of a hammer. Bonnie couldn't be the girl
from the club this time. She didn't dare to even exhale until she heard
something dragging against the grass above their heads, and then a shadow fell
across the top of the well and made it nearly impossible to see anything at
all. Damon was a gray blur a few feet away, saying slowly, "Good plan, little
witch. Now I can eat you at my leisure."
"I will pull your head off first and we both know it," Bonnie said, even though
her heart was beating faster from the exertion of even getting the tarp over
there. "Okay. Your turn."
"My what?"
"I can't levitate us out of here, I don't think that I would have had the juice
for that even if I was at all full strength," Bonnie said flatly. She didn't
think that taking any more blood from Damon was a good idea, either, for the
both of them. "Can your leg get us up there or not?" Because the only other
option, from where she was standing, was to shove the tarp back off and then
hold Damon at bay until the sun came down far enough to kill him.
She had blocked out all light but the faintest of glows; she could not see
Damon's expression. His voice might have been amused under any other
circumstances as he said, "Come here and put your arms around my neck."
"Oh, lovely," Bonnie said faintly. Limbs next to the mouth of a hungry vampire.
She couldn't think of a single way that that was going to end well. Bracing
herself, Bonnie stepped up to Damon and embraced him as if they were about to
start dancing. She felt his breath fanning out across her cheek.
Damon said, "That's sweet and all, but I can't exactly climb that way."
Bonnie felt blood rising in her cheeks. "I'm still woozy, okay?" She stepped
back and around him in an awkward waltz that used up most of the small space
and resumed her grip from behind.
Low-voiced, Damon added, "You really didn't need to be that close to my teeth,
anyway." He adjusted her grip a little lower and said, "Wrap your legs around
me if you need to."
"I'm wearing a dress," Bonnie blurted out, before she remembered firstly that
that horses was already in the next county, and secondly that her dress was so
soaked from the water and mud that she might as well not be wearing anything,
anyway. "Shut up."
"So you keep saying. We'll blame it on blood loss." Damon tugged Bonnie's arms
lower yet again even though he didn't, strictly speaking, need to breathe, she
wasn't going to be choking him out even if her forearm did slip and strike him
in the windpipe.
He doesn't want my arm that close to his mouth, Bonnie thought, and shivered
abruptly. Damon didn't comment on it, saying only, "Hold on tight," before he
started fitting his hands and feet into any rough space in the stone wall large
enough to hold them and a few that Bonnie swore weren't and started lifting
them up. She tightened her grip in anticipation of it being fast enough to make
her nauseous, the way that she had seen him move before when he was
deliberately trying to freak her out, but it was the opposite, painfully slow.
Emphasis on the painfully; Damon made a short sound when Bonnie pulled her legs
up and wrapped them about his waist, presumably pressing against the broken
ribs, and then another when the bad leg wobbled under him. The wobble abruptly
became an outright slip, leaving them dangling halfway up by Damon's arms
alone. Bonnie yelped before she could help herself while Damon scrabbled to
find purchase again, and for a few seconds the air underneath them wasn't so
vacant.
"Are you okay?" Bonnie asked when Damon resumed, more slowly than before. The
bad leg was quivering badly enough for her to feel it from his body into her
own.
"I still have some vervain in my system, so I'm not healing very quickly, and
I'm not processing the vervain out of my system because I have to heal," Damon
said, his voice a thick growl that Bonnie did not think this time had anything
to do with the way that his fangs were fitting into his mouth. "I need blood.
Not your problem."
I'm the closest source of blood that you have, I think that makes it by
problem, Bonnie thought, but said, "Don't worry as much about hurting me."
Damon snorted. "I'm serious. I'm glad that it's on your mind and all, but I can
stop you if you slip. Let me pull my weight, here."
"Don't we make the pair," Damon muttered under his breath. Bonnie still thought
that she felt him relax a little right up until the moment when he slipped
again. Damon grunted when Bonnie tightened her grip on him reflexively and
wound up driving her knee directly into his ribs. But they were nearly at the
top.
Calling herself an idiot the entire time, Bonnie relaxed the grip that she was
maintaing with her legs and let more and more fall onto her arms, which wound
up tugging them upwards and directly beneath Damon's chin.
"Bonnie," he started, voice distorted with something that Bonnie was going to
choose to believe was the pressure that she was putting against his windpipe.
"I trust you," Bonnie said. When Damon paused, she added, "With this, anyway."
"Never let it be said that I don't have a taste for noble morons," Damon said
under his breath, so softly that Bonnie wasn't certain that she was meant to
hear. Statements of trust or not, she was very aware of how tense Damon was
beneath her as they finally reached the top and she could scramble up and over
the top of the well with another of those subtle am-I-really-doing-that-nudges
beneath her feet, trying as she went to avoid disturbing the tarp too much and
torching Damon in the process. She landed on the ground beside it with a heavy
thump and then lay there for a few seconds, letting the sunlight warm some of
the chill off of her skin and trying to get the feeling back into her jelly-
like arms. Bonnie only gave herself a moment or so of rest before she pushed
herself back up and then went to Damon, trying to support the tarp with one
hand and help him get his bad leg over the side of the well with the other. Her
fingers were clumsy and so were his; there was a number of creative curses
spoken whenever they slipped and allowed a beam of buttery sunlight to briefly
touch some unprotected part of his flesh.
"There's an old plantation house being renovated about ten yards off," Bonnie
said to Damon, feeling oddly ill at ease when she couldn't see his eyes and
wondering when she had become able to read them so well. "Just follow me." She
didn't speak again, let Damon follow the sound of her footsteps until they
reached the remains of the house and he was in the shade. "Okay," Bonnie said,
stepping back into the sunlight beaming down through a hole in the roof as
Damon let the tarp drop.
His mouth twisted a little as he saw what she was doing. "Wise."
"I'm not doing it because of that." The sunlight felt so good on her skin,
carrying with it a hint of salt and something citrusy-sweet, that Bonnie
thought she might have been able to lay out here forever even if she hadn't
been exhausted and still fighting back a throbbing headache, healing influence
of Damon's blood or not. She sank down into a sitting position on the stone
while Damon all but collapsed in his patch of shadow, throwing his arm across
his eyes. Bonnie didn't exactly have a compact on hand, but she could look down
and see that her legs and feet were muddy and criss-crossed with scrapes from
bashing up against the wall when Damon had slipped and from climbing over the
top. Damon looked downright sick, a gray cast underlying his paleness and
shadows under his eyes that Bonnie could see even while he was masking most of
his face with his arm.
"Then you're a moron." Damon looked out from under his arm at her, visibly
gauging the distance between them. Bonnie felt a momentary urge to scoot
further back into the light and held very still until it had passed. "I could
drag you back in here with me before the sun could burn me too badly." He
sounded eerily as if he was contemplating it.
Bonnie still didn't move back. "One," she said, lifting a finger to emphasize
her point, "you've been voluntarily hanging out with Elena and Stefan for
months now, so if you want to keep calling us all noble morons, that's fine,
but you're just going to have to get over the fact that that's your type now."
Injured, sick, and blood-starved, Damon could still pull one hell of a face at
her. "Two, it wouldn't be the sun that would burn you and we both know it."
Another face. He was like Play-Doh, sometimes. "And three--" Bonnie barely had
time to register the rat from the corner of her eye before Damon was lunging
across his patch of relative darkness for it, snatching it up and raising it to
his mouth before it even had time to squeak. Bonnie heard a sound like a
wishbone being pulled apart and realized half a second later that it had been
the animal's neck breaking. She put her hand against her mouth as the rat's
lifeless body sailed past her and landed out in the grass. Damon settled back
down on his back and replaced his arm over his face, but not before Bonnie
noticed that she shadows under his eyes were slightly less blue. "Oh. Okay, um,
eww."
"We were getting dangerously close to a bonding moment," Damon said. "Have to
nip those things in the bud while they're still small." He didn't seem inclined
to say more, and Bonnie occupied the silence by turning and staring out across
the empty construction site. She couldn't see her new friend, that but didn't
mean much. Bonnie couldn't bring herself to believe that he would have gone
far; he seemed the type that liked to watch.
"You nearly vibrate when you do that." Bonnie turned back and saw that Damon
was watching her from beneath his arm again. "Are you about to run off and do
something stupid?"
"I've spent the past several days doing something very stupid," Bonnie
muttered, hopping up to her feet and pacing a short distance off. "You should
have told me that Matilda and my great-grandmother knew each other."
"Why? So you could go in blazing right from the start? Where the hell would
that have gotten us?"
"I should have known," Bonnie insisted. "If I had known how my grandmother
felt, maybe I wouldn't have--"
"Fucked me?"
Bonnie wasn't certain that her faces were quite up to par with the ones that
Damon could pull, but she still did her best as she flopped back down in the
sunshine. "Ever since I learned about vampires and magic, I have thought that
my grandmother hated what you are because of what you do, how you hurt people.
It turns out that, no, she was working out family issues rather than doing the
right thing, so I'm sorry if maybe I'm just a little snappish."
Damon rolled over, wincing a little as the weight was briefly transfered to his
bad leg. "The more I hang out with humans, the more I realize how young you all
are," he said. "Has it ever occurred to you, Bonnie, that people can have
multiple motives at a time? That maybe Sheila Bennett was pissed off at her
mother's choice of friends and disapproved of eating people?"
Well, if he had to go putting it that way and making sense. Bonnie rocked back
and rearranged the damp remains of her dress across her knees. "You know, the
whole vampires are totally emotionless thing?" she asked. "You should stop
doing that. I like you a lot better when you're a person."
"Bonding moment," Damon said, holding up a warning finger. He looked towards
the body of the rat with something that was very near to longing.
Bonnie shifted a little and wondered if she didn't need to move further back.
"I was going to tell you that I wasn't going to leave you alone here all day,
but do you...do you need me to like, go to a hospital and get you a bag or two
or something?" Damon stopped watching the rat and started watching her; Bonnie
couldn't tell whether the glitter in his eyes was consideration of the fact
that she was willing to procure blood for him or amusement at the fact that she
had brought it up at all. Preemptively defensive, Bonnie added, "That looks
like it hurts, and I don't want you eating a construction worker before I have
a chance to warn them."
"It's Sunday, Bonnie." She drew back and blinked a little as she did the math
in her head and realized that Damon was right. Even though it had been less
than a week, she felt as though this mission had been going on for her whole
life. "Does your cute little thing with your ID work on your whole body so you
won't get hauled off as an assault victim?" Well, there was that small detail.
Damon sighed, sounding as if was more for him than for her. "It hurts like
hell, but I've dealt with it for longer than this before. I'll be all right."
His definition of all right clearly did not match up with hers. Bonnie looked
around hopefully for another rat, but the sudden death of their brethren seemed
to have warned off all other vermin, and she would have said that Damon looked
one step up from dying if not for the fact that he was already dead. "I cannot
believe that I am doing this," Bonnie muttered to herself before she scooted as
close to the line of shadow as she could get without actually crossing it and
tried to clean off her muddy wrist with the hem of her muddy dress, mostly just
succeeding in swapping dirt from one space to the other. Damon propped himself
up on his elbow and watched her without expression. "We couldn't have gotten
out of there if you hadn't given me some of yours, so call this tit for tat."
Damon's tongue came out and caressed at his lower lip, long and slow, as he
realized what she was talking about and nearly made Bonnie change her mind
about the whole thing right then and there. She said his name sharply to pull
his attention back before she went on. "You told me that you're a man of your
word. Do I have enough blood now to lose a little?"
Damon nodded slowly. "Your magic might not be up to full speed yet, but my
blood healed the blood loss almost as much as it did the bite."
"And if I let you have some of my blood, will you be able to stop?" This time
the nod was a little more jerky. "Okay," Bonnie whispered, mostly to convince
herself. "Come here."
She expected Damon to dart at her the way that he had at the rat and was
bracing herself to slam him back if he did. He rolled himself up to his feet
with only the barest sign of lingering injury and crossed the few feet of
shadow that separated where he had been resting and where Bonnie was kneeling
at the very edge of the light and knelt again himself. He didn't reach for her;
Bonnie was the one who put her wrist across the dividing line so that he could
take it in his hands while his eyes and face changed. Even then, he cradled her
arm with an exaggerated gentleness, like he was afraid of what he would do to
her if he forgot himself. Damon lifted his eyes to hers and waited for her to
nod before he lowered his mouth to her flesh.
The past several months of Bonnie's life had been spent mostly contemplating
how much the authors of trashy vampire novels could go fuck themselves right in
the ear, when they chattered on about how erotic feeding was. She had been
expecting it to be awful, though, and outside of the first short, sharp prick
of pain it was no different from donating blood under the watch of a nurse in a
bad mood. Damon was taking great care not to suckle at the wound, but was
instead letting Bonnie's blood fill up his mouth and then swallowing, a brief
pulse of pain that then faded again into a dull ache as soon as he was done.
His lids had fallen to half-mast and taken with them the vein-work around his
eyes, but Bonnie still knew that they would not be blue if he were to look at
her. Damon was holding her wrist with an exaggerated care, fingers trembling
slightly and making Bonnie think of how quickly he could crack the bones if he
were to lose control of himself for even a second. She waited until her head
was starting to get just a touch wobbly on the inside the way that it did right
before the nurse removed the needle during the school blood drive every year
before she said, "Damon, that's enough." She put her hand against the back of
Damon's neck in order to tug him away, but there was no need.
Damon slid his fangs from her wrist immediately, though he held onto her for
just a second longer and traced his tongue around the edges of the wound to
catch the blood that trickled out after before he rocked back. Bonnie rose to
her feet right away while Damon stayed in his kneeling position for a few
seconds longer, watching her. Blue. She had been wrong: they were just blue.
"I told you," Damon said, a little breathless and still pale. "I imprinted."
"I guess." Bonnie tore a long strip from the hem of her dress and wrapped it
around her wrist before she came back and took a cautious seat again right at
the edge of the sunlight line. Damon obligingly moved back in order to give her
space, but that wasn't necessary. They both knew that she could stop him and
that, more importantly, she could easily give an order that would mean she
didn't have to. "Are you going to be okay until the sun sets?"
"You mean am I going to jump on the first person that I see and glut myself
like a tick?" Damon even smiled, which definitely meant that he was feeling
better. "Not part of our little deal, even if you did kinda make me break it
there."
"I didn't make you do anything," Bonnie said. "You could have toughed it out,
buttercup."
"Leave the honorable stoicism to Stefan."
"Says the guy whose biggest role models appear to be medieval knights." Damon
was lying back down in his shady patch, and he looked at Bonnie curiously when
she settled herself into the sun again and started arranging her dress across
her knees. "What is it?"
"When you asked if I was going to be okay for the day, I thought you meant that
you were leaving."
"No, I was asking if you were going to be okay," Bonnie said, enunciating
slowly. "Whatever, we've been in this together this far, we're not going to
split up now."
"Yes, ma'am." Bonnie thought that Damon was going to sketch out a salute to
her, but he turned solemn instead. "I suppose I should thank you," he said
slowly, gesturing out in the vague direction of the well. "That's the second
time that you've saved my life. I owe you two."
"One," Bonnie corrected. "You saved mine first, remember?"
"Oh, right." Damon's face cleared. "I did do that. Was that when you started to
fall for me?"
"Don't get smug," Bonnie cautioned him. "You're good in bed, I'm not taking you
home to meet my father."
"Won't." Damon put his arm back over his eyes. "Just pointing out while I'm
here that I did tell you that you might be the one who wound up donating a pint
or two."
"Damon?" Bonnie asked sweetly. He made a sarcastic zipping motion across his
lips without her actually needing to tell him to shut up, which meant that
there was a learning curve to this thing, after all. In the lack of anything
else to do, Bonnie looked around her and took copious mental notes, but if her
new friend was anywhere near, he was being sure to stay well back. Didn't
matter. They were still going to see each other again.
End Part Ten
***** Chapter 11 *****
Part Eleven
"You look like you're playing dead."
"Don't make me point out the obvious, Bonnie, neither one of us is in the mood
for it."
Bonnie shielded her eyes with her hand and watched the sun as it sank down
below the horizon, turning the air around them velvety-gray with humidity,
slightest hint of gold that lingered on the surface of the wheelbarrows and
shovels. As soon as it was safe, Damon folded his legs back underneath him and
rose as lithely as if he hadn't been lying flat on his back for most of the day
in an effort to conserve the energy that Bonnie's little bit of blood had been
able to give him against injuries and vervain. He was moving more slowly and
carefully than Bonnie was accustomed, but he no longer looked as if he needed
to be in hospital. Bonnie glanced down at her wrist, where the bite wound that
Damon had given her had grown over during the day into a shiny-pink weal of new
scar tissue, bonus side-effect of the vampire blood lingering in her system.
Damon followed her gaze. "That'll be gone by morning," he said. "Don't worry,
you won't have anything to explain to Daddy."
Bonnie traced the edges of the mark and discovered that it didn't even feel
like a real scar, neither numb nor overly sensitive, but was instead just
slightly warmer to the touch than the surrounding skin. "I don't even think
that any mosquitoes bit me today," she said.
It was the closest that any of them were going to to come towards acknowledging
that Bonnie very well could have left during the day but had stayed. Damon
glanced sideways at her, but said only, "Indulge in vampire blood more often,
sweetness. It's even good for your skin."
"I think I'll pass." Bonnie shielded her eyes to look towards the remains of
the sun again. "Is it safe for you?"
"Let's find out." Damon hesitated a beat, then swung one foot slowly across the
dividing line of shadow that had been keeping him out of the light for the day,
hesitated again before he followed that step with the rest of his body and
exposed skin. Though he blinked a few times and turned his face away from the
west, he didn't scream, burst into flames, or do anything more dramatic than
touching at the place where his ring should be with an expression that Bonnie
knew well.
"Come on," Bonnie said softly, touching him on the forearm to bring him back to
her. "Let's find out where the hell we are."
"You could have been doing that today while I was trapped there," Damon said.
"I didn't want to leave you all alone and unable to defend yourself," Bonnie
answered. She fluttered her lashes when Damon made a face. "Since you were
limping around like an old man and all."
Damon's response was to take Bonnie by the wrist and kiss the scar, which
obligingly turned even warmer than before, and Bonnie really, really wanted to
know why she had not gotten anything like this out of the deal the last time
that Damon had bitten her. Maybe because he had been trying to kill her then,
or because she had taken vampire blood after the fact, or because she had been
in the middle of having her world thoroughly rocked in an unpleasant way for
the next several hours afterwards. He beamed at her sunnily enough to let her
know that enough of the vervain had been burned out of his system to return his
senses to their full strength.
Bonnie scowled at him as she pulled her wrist out of his grasp. "Whoever gave
you a copy of La Morte d'Arthur when you were a kid had absolutely no idea what
they were turning loose on the world," she said, turning and striding off
across the restoration site, stepping carefully to avoid cutting her bare feet
on rocks or glass. Her dress was long-since dry, but the dye had run out of the
silk and made reddish splotches on her legs. Flakes of mud fluttered to the
ground as she moved.
"It was my father, actually." Damon sounded reflective, though not necessarily
in a good way. "I think that he was hoping it would inspire me to...curb in
some of my more reckless impulses." Bonnie glanced back over her shoulder, but
Damon looked as if were spending a moment or two in a space where Bonnie was
not welcome to tread. She hiked her skirt up to shake some more mud off of the
fabric and let him go forward at his own pace. "My favorite book is actually
Call of the Wild."
Bonnie stopped, looked back. Damon's face was too carefully blank for her to
know if he was fucking with her or not. "Chivalry and embracing your own
bloodlust," she said flatly. "Well, I can't accuse you of doing things
halfway." She heard Damon padding across the grass behind her, felt his hands
about her waist. "Okay, the rules are back on--"
Damon slid his arm behind the backs of Bonnie's thighs and had swung her up
into his arms before Bonnie quite knew what was happening. She started to
unleash a burst of magic at his head and caught herself just in time, though
the way that he smirked at her made her want to do it again immediately
afterwards. "I never do things halfway," he said. "Where the fuck are your
shoes, anyway, did you leave them in the well?"
"I left them in the club," Bonnie said, much more bitterly than she thought
that she would be, but they had been good shoes, damn it. "They have my shoes,
they have my car--"
"Bonnie, they have my ring," Damon snapped back. His hand against the back of
her legs tightened. "Tell me you're not shocked that this doesn't sit well with
me."
Bonnie tilted her head back so that she could look him in the face. Damon was
staring straight ahead, and she didn't for one second think that he was trying
to be a gentleman and avoid looking down the draping front of her dress. There
was a muscle in his jaw ticking; he looked more like the monster who came out
of the swamp to pick up the pretty young thing than the knight who carried her
to safety.
"We got our asses handed to us, didn't we?" Bonnie said, rather than pointing
out that Damon looked barely on the edge of control right now, and that there
was a part of her who was starting to like that, a little.
Damon snorted. It was a terribly undignified noise for a vampire to make, all
things considered. "That's a very restrained way of putting what happened to
us. You could have been killed." Bonnie didn't know whether he was referring to
her being bitten in the club, or just how many seconds down to the wire they
had been pushing it in the well before he lost control of himself. "If they had
any sense at all, we would both be dead by now."
"Then hooray for stupid villains." Bonnie flexed the arm that she had thrown
about Damon's neck without realizing it. The air smelled mossy and old; they
had made it down to a road that was at least paved, but it was cracked, pitted,
and obviously not exactly a high priority to the county. Bonnie looked back
over her shoulder at the house midway through restoration, but without the
benefit of street lamps it was already long gone, and whatever boost that she
might have gotten from drinking Damon's blood earlier was gone, too. She saw
nothing but ink, broken up along the edges of the road by the even darker
shadows of ash and elm. Even the road beneath Damon's feet was mostly
guesswork. "I can walk," Bonnie said at long last, even though Damon didn't
seem to be straining himself by carrying her.
He shook his head. "There's glass," he said. Hooray for vampire senses, too;
Bonnie couldn't see a thing other than the fact that the road was still there.
"You'll cut yourself."
She didn't think that he was worried about her collecting another set of
stitches, especially when they had a handy medicine kit running through his
veins. Even though the idea of a vampire doing his best to suckle the blood out
of a bleeding foot was one of the more ridiculous that Bonnie had entertained
in a long while, she asked seriously, "How much do you need to feed right now?"
"I'm not going to hurt you," Damon said, which wasn't exactly the response that
Bonnie had been looking for. "Or make you hurt me."
"I could pin you down without hurting you, I think," Bonnie said.
"Well, we both know that," Damon answered. Up ahead, Bonnie was just starting
to get a gleam of light and realized that Damon had been heading for it the
entire time. "But now's not the time to talk about our sex life." He squinted
through the gloom at the light that was slowly, slowly resolving itself into a
porch light attached to a small, white clapboard house and then eased Bonnie
back down to her feet. "You're good now, I think. What are your feelings on
grand theft auto?"
Bonnie was still finding her balance under her again on a road that might not
cut her feet to ribbons any longer but still wasn't exactly comfortable; it
took her a few seconds for the rest of what Damon had said to catch up with
her. "What are my thoughts on what?" she demanded. "Oh, no. No, no, no. We are
not stealing that person's car!"
"Then we are going to have to walk all the way back to civilization, and we are
going to have to run the risk that one of the vampires from Cameo remembers
that no one ever actually managed to kill James Bond by pulling that crap,"
Damon answered. "I'm not up to a fight just yet, are you?"
Bonnie weighed what she wanted to do with her magic versus what she
realistically could right at the moment and swore creatively enough to make
Damon's eyebrows go up. "That's a good girl," he said soothingly. "Look, it'll
be easy. All that I have to do is go up and knock on the door--"
"No compulsion!"
"At some point you're going to realize that I keep bringing that up just to
hear you scream, and then it won't be fun any more," Damon said in a musing
sort of tone. He brightened when Bonnie glared at him. "Okay, I'm lying, it's
always going to be fun. Fine, we have to do this the hard, loud way. Just hope
that whoever is in the house doesn't own a gun."
"I can always use you as a shield," Bonnie answered faux-sweetly. She then had
to smother an obscenity as they encountered the jagged gravel of the driveway,
this time without Damon offering to pick her up and carry her across the space.
She should have thought to include a smugness clause in their deal, she
thought, except that she would have had to kill Damon by the end of the first
day and they would have gotten nowhere.
"Go around to the passenger side," Damon instructed Bonnie quietly as they came
up on the house's sole visible vehicle, a truck that looked as if it might have
come from Mayberry and had abandoned nearly every speck of paint behind as it
had left.
"Are you going to pick the lock or something?" Bonnie asked him across the bed
as she went around the back. She was keeping her voice pitched low, but a dog
still woofed from behind the house, sleepily and as if it wasn't convinced just
yet that it needed to be up. Damon looked at her without speaking; Bonnie
sighed. "It's going to be 'or something', isn't it?"
"Smart girl." Damon drew his hand back into a fist and slammed it through the
passenger window, scattering glass and making Bonnie shriek. The dog out back
started baying to make up for lost time while a light came on in the house.
Bonnie ducked while Damon wrenched the door open and dove into the cab,
reaching for the wires beneath the steering wheel. The front door flew open.
"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" Bonnie yelled. There was a man in the doorway, and
Bonnie didn't need to be able to see his face against the glow of the lights
backing him to know that he was pissed.
"What the hell do you think that you're doing out there?" he yelled as he
started across the lawn. He was holding a rifle in his arms that he had
absolutely no problem bringing to bear on her; Bonnie could not believe that
she was about to be shot and killed by a redneck while Damon was playing with
wires.
The engine choked, coughed, and finally turned over with a sound to let Bonnie
know that it would at least get them somewhere, however much it might bitch
about it along the way. Damon lunged the rest of the way into the cab, unlocked
Bonnie's door, and bodily yanked her in by the arm without caring overmuch
about being gentle. She tucked her legs in behind her as a bullet pinged off of
the closing door and Damon forced the truck into gear. It was able to do more
than whine as it raced backwards down the driveway, bullets punching into the
metal all the while, and then out into the road. Bonnie ducked as level with
the dashboard as she was able and wondered why Kayla had taught her spells to
deal with sneaking out of the house and into bars, but never something to deal
with this.
The gunshots faded away and so did the frantic yelping of the dog; the
headlights were bouncing in patterns like fireflies as Damon proved that speed
limits were for other people across the ill-kept road. "You can sit up now."
Bonnie was not entirely convinced of that. She uncurled herself cautiously,
looking first behind them at the last remains of the house and then at Damon.
He had slivers of glass sticking out of his knuckles from punching the window;
he kept the other hand upon the wheel in order to continue driving and deftly
picked each piece out with his teeth, spitting them out the window. The injured
knuckles he put into his mouth briefly after he was done, only to grimace and
relieve himself of a mouthful of blood that way, too. There was enough light
from the rising moon for Bonnie to see that the edges of the cuts were
trembling, but not quite managing to draw together and heal. He hadn't been
kidding around when he had said that vervain without sufficient blood to knock
it out of his system was throwing him off of his game.
"Give here," Bonnie said, gesturing for his hand. She had the satisfaction of
even seeing him look briefly surprised before he obeyed. Bonnie tore another
strip from the hem of her dress, wrapped it around Damon's knuckles twice, and
tied it off. The silk grew darker immediately. "That's going to have to do,
spells for healing vampires weren't really big on my learning list."
"Good enough." Damon returned his hand to the wheel and pressed his foot to the
gas pedal even harder, making the truck leap forward and roar in a tone that
Bonnie would not have thought it capable of from the driveway. "I would have
assumed you would be a little more high-strung about being a criminal."
"Assumptions, asses, yada-yada." Bonnie pulled her knees up onto the seat along
with her and stared out at the dark road stretching out behind him. "Don't do
anything else to this truck, though, I don't know what kind of insurance he
has."
"That's my girl," Damon murmured in a tone so soft that Bonnie was not entirely
certain that she had been meant to hear. He took a left turn hard enough that
Bonnie was nearly thrown into him, guiding them through the back roads based
upon no signposts that Bonnie could actually see.
"And stop driving so crazy, that guy's bound to be calling the cops by now."
"You are a wealth of contradictions, Bonnie Bennett." But he did slow down, at
least a little.
"That's what keeps me interesting." They stayed mostly quiet, Bonnie exhausted
down into her bones and starting to realize that it had been about twenty-four
hours since she had last eaten, and Damon...she didn't know exactly how often
vampires needed to feed in order to stay sated or what it felt like from the
inside when that schedule was missed, and he didn't seem inclined to volunteer.
As soon as the lights of Miami proper were close and not a handful of glitter
against the horizon, though, he took them off of the highway and towards the
first sign with a familiar blue-and-white cross that they saw. Both his hands,
including the injured one, were clenched around the steering wheel so hard that
Bonnie was amazed when he didn't pop anything out of socket. She swore that he
would snap the neck of any cop who tried to pull him over en route to the
hospital, the way that he was driving, and thus had to yelp and grab for the
dashboard when he took the truck in an abrupt turn off of the hospital route
and towards the familiar green and orange of a 7-11.
"You cannot eat a clerk when we are three blocks from a hospital," Bonnie
warned, grabbing for Damon's arm. She wasn't certain if she was joking.
Damon, even though he had the door open and was halfway out before the truck
had even rolled entirely to a halt, paused without shaking her off. "Oh, ye of
little faith," he said. He waited for Bonnie to release him before he hopped
down from the cab and strode inside. Bonnie stayed inside, reasoning that
Damon's dark clothing could hide the fact that he was also completely filthy
better than hers could, and also that she could see everything that Damon was
doing through the glass walls of the convenience store. The clerk's neck
remained untouched, though Bonnie could still seem him craning his neck over
the counter to look at Damon's muddy pants, so maybe it was best that they
moved along before he though to take a good look at the truck and then listen
to a police report. She was still surprised when Damon climbed back into the
truck and tossed into her lap a burrito, a bag of chips, and a bottle of orange
juice.
"Did you actually pay for these?" Bonnie asked, picking up the food. She had
been too focused all day long to pay attention to her stomach, but at the first
whiff of grease its rumblings became the loudest noise in the whole world.
Damon rolled his eyes as he backed the truck out of the space. "I put aside my
own hunger--which can kill people, by the way--long enough to get something for
you, and the first thing that you ask is if I paid for it. That's nice, Bonnie.
That's classy."
Bonnie took an enormous bite out of the burrito by way of apology; she might
have spat it right back out again if they had been in Mystic Falls, but right
now it was about the best thing that she had ever tasted in her life. "I want
to make certain that you didn't compel the poor clerk."
"Actually," Damon said, with an aggrieved sigh as if he couldn't believe
Bonnie's lack of trust in him. She would have more faith in his nonchalance
once he had fed and stopped carrying himself like a clock that could spring
apart in all directions at any moment. "I told him that we had been mugged and
were on our way to the police station, but that you were diabetic and needed to
eat right away."
"Wow," Bonnie said, impressed with the cover story in spite of herself. She
doubted that she would have been able to come up with one as good on so short a
notice.
"It wasn't hard while you were sitting out in the front seat and looking all
doe-eyed and pitiful." Damon pulled them into the hospital parking lot. He was
already leaning forward slightly in his seat, like a hunting dog going to
point, and Bonnie wondered if he could smell the blood inside from all the way
out here.
"I was glaring at you."
"Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart." Damon hopped down from the truck and
paused a moment before he shut the door, as if waiting for Bonnie to grab him
by the arm and issue her customary dire warnings. She didn't know which one of
them was more disappointed when she didn't.
With Damon gone, Bonnie finished her food quickly and then got out of the truck
herself, walking in a circle around it with her arms wrapped around her
midsection. With food came energy came magic, which inevitably led to what was
going to happen next. "Guess we didn't give you that much of a showing, Grams,"
Bonnie muttered to herself, hand coming up involuntarily to touch the place on
her neck where she had been bitten. If the blue-eyed bastard (who wasn't her
blue-eyed bastard) knew what her blood tasted like, then who knew how many
other people had fed upon her while she had been unconscious. Bonnie started
pacing the other way and just barely stopped herself from kicking at one of the
truck tires, because a broken foot was not going to be something that she could
walk off when there was probably a standing order to keep an eye out for a
runaway matching her description at hospitals far outside of Virginia by now.
"Miss, are you all right?"
Bonnie jumped and spun. Looking at her with concern was a man in his twenties,
wearing scrubs and dark circles under his eyes large enough that they were
their own accessories. Bonnie barely fought back an urge to swear. Damon had
parked the truck far back in a darkened corner of the lot, presumably so that
no one could get a good look at it, or her, until he returned. It would just
have to be the case that interns got all of the crap spaces.
She was apparently wearing enough of a rabbity, damsel-in-distress expression
to be a cause for concern in and of itself, because the guy came stepped
closer. "Do you need me to walk you into the emergency room? Or you could stay
here and I could get a wheelchair--"
"I'm fine," Bonnie said, just a second too late and just a second too loud.
This was the second time that a medical professional wanted to intervene for
her own good since she had started associating with Damon Salvatore, too. She
could tell that the intern didn't believe her for one second, since her hair
was a disheveled mess stained with mud at the tips in more place that one, her
legs were similarly coated, and the hem of her dress was ragged and nearly
indecent from tearing off strips to bandage first her wrist and then Damon's
knuckles. "My, uh, my boyfriend and I were in a car accident." She would just
have to hope that the intern didn't look at the truck too closely and realize
that the only damage was to the driver's window.
"Well, let's definitely get you inside and get you checked out, then," the
intern said, reaching for her. Bonnie took two steps back, putting her right up
against the truck, and really hoped that she was not about to have to use her
magic on an innocent person who was only trying to do the right thing.
"No, I'm really okay," Bonnie said. "I'm just waiting on my boyfriend to finish
getting his hand stitched up, and then we're going to be on our way. I didn't
hit my head or anything, promise."
The intern looked dubious. Bonnie had never thought that she would have a
reason to be annoyed by idealism, but it was really screwing up her night right
about now. Resigned, she started pulling up her magic, when Damon said from
behind the intern, "Everything all right here, babe?" The intern jumped about
as high as Bonnie imagined she had when he had snuck up on her, and his gaze
immediately fell to Damon's hand. Damon's perfectly whole hand, which no longer
even had the remains of Bonnie's dress wrapped around it, because why would it
be? He was a vampire, and thus his accelerated healing had come back right at
the moment when Bonnie could have greatly benefited from him looking more like
a tired and battered human, damnit. At least feeding had brought some color
back into his face so that he was no longer so etched-marble pale.
Bonnie could see the intern's mind working over the fact that Damon had just
referred to her as "babe" and hurried, "I'm all right. How's Johnny doing?" If
he mouthed off, she swore to God, they were going to have to bring an ambulance
over here even though he was a damned vampire.
"Johnny's doing great," Damon answered slowly. "They think that he'll be out of
surgery in a couple of hours."
"Surgery?" the intern started. Bonnie shoved past him, grabbed Damon by the
arm, and all but threw him towards the truck before she skittered around to the
passenger side. By some miracle of miracles, she was hoping that the intern
wouldn't take that moment to realize that the truck had been running the entire
time that he had been talking to Bonnie.
"I could have just compelled him," Damon sing-songed to her as they pulled out
of the lot, thankfully at a pace that wasn't going to arouse any more
suspicion. Bonnie made a face at him. "You're cute when you're cranky."
"And you're in a good mood when you've just fed." Bonnie started rubbing the
dried mud out of the tips of her hair, already picturing what the shower was
going to feel like. She would have to ask Damon to break the door lock or else
hope that her telekinesis was refined enough to pick it, she had no idea where
the motel key had gone.
"Yes, that tends to be a common trait among vampires," Damon said without
rancor. "Aren't you going to ask me how I got past a whole hospital full of
equally nosy do-gooders as our friend back there without being flagged down?"
Bonnie kept her gaze fixed on her hair and said, "I guess I'm going to have to
trust you." She looked up, and Damon had a strange expression on his face.
Bonnie reached over and yanked on the wheel. "But not to drive, apparently."
"I'm going to have to take you out and show you what these reflexes can really
do sometime," Damon said, but he at least turned his eyes back towards the
road. "So, fearless leader, you given any thought towards what we're going to
do next?"
"What do you mean?" Bonnie shrugged. "Okay, so we got beaten one time--"
"Bonnie, dear heart, goddess on a pedestal and freak in the bedroom," Damon
said, until Bonnie picked up the empty juice bottle and hit him with it, "we
didn't get beaten. We got our asses ripped off and then handed to us with a
neat little bow wrapped around them, and I for one do not intend for that to
happen again."
Bonnie pulled back against the passenger door and swore that she felt the
interior of the truck getting colder. "I'm not holding you to this any longer
than you want to be here," she said flatly.
"Don't sulk," Damon said, leveling his finger at her. "We both know you're not
the sulking type."
"No, I'm the--" Bonnie imitated Damon's head-exploding gesture. "Type."
"But you're also the good person type, so you're not going to do that." Damon
could at least manage to look like he thought Bonnie might do that. "You can
stop giving me those dove-puppy genetic experiment eyes, by the way. The sons
of bitches have my ring. I'm not leaving this town until I get it back."
"Then what's the problem here?"
"I'm saying that you might want to leave," Damon answered as he pulled the
truck into the darkened lot of a grocery store a few blocks away from the
motel. He got out himself and then shocked Bonnie by coming around and opening
the passenger door for her, giving her his hand as if she really were stepping
down from a coach while encumbered by a lovely and impractical dress.
Bonnie pulled her hand free just as soon as she was on level ground again.
"No," she said in a tone that nearly frosted the air in front of her face. "No
way. Not until the vampires that killed Grams--"
"I didn't see a single one of them in that club, Bonnie," Damon told her
seriously. He hesitated a beat and then cupped her face, ducking a little so
that they were eye to eye. "If they know that a witch is after them, especially
a Bennett witch, then odds are good that they've already lit out and are
scattered halfway across North America by now. You might never find them all
even if you spend your whole life looking." Damon released her and stepped
back. "And you don't have nearly as much of it as I do."
Bonnie was going to deal with the fact that Damon had just expressed sincerity
and a concern for her welfare that didn't appear to have anything to do with
the fact that she gave him really good orgasms at a later date. She took a
breath, and then another, as she processed the also fact that Damon might be
right. And yet-- "How many people does this pack kill every year, do you
think?" she asked, thinking, Grams, I'm sorry, without being certain that it
was necessary or exactly what it was that she ought to be sorry for.
Damon rocked back and forth on his heels for a few moments, looking at her.
Bonnie swore, if he tried to lie just because he had decided he knew what was
best for her--
"Hundreds," Damon said flatly. "This is a town of transients, from tourists to
runaways. People don't come home all the time. So even if they're compelling
some of the victims to forget and still letting them live--"
"Hundreds," Bonnie repeated after him. "Got it." She started marching down the
sidewalk towards the hotel. She could feel Damon trailing along to the side and
just behind; while well-fed and vervain-free he made no more noise than a
ghost.
"Why do I get the feeling that something reckless is going through that pretty
little head of yours, and that I already know what it is?" he drawled.
"It's the right thing to do," Bonnie said stolidly.
"Oh, and here I thought that it might have something to do with revenge," Damon
said. Bonnie glanced over her shoulder at him, her eyebrows drawing together.
"But you just said that all of the tomb vampires were gone."
Damon looked genuinely surprised, and if Bonnie hadn't been getting such a bad
feeling she might have taken a moment to mark the occasion. "I was really
hoping that you had taken that 'more than one motivation' thing to heart," he
said. "I thought that you had figured it out. Bonnie, there was only one other
person who knew that we were going to be at Cameo last night."
Bonnie thought about it for a second and then spent a few more after that
calling herself eighteen different kinds of idiot for letting herself believe,
even a little, that maybe this one was different, too, in the way that Stefan
was different and she thought that Damon could be if someone kept his head out
of his ass for him, before she started stomping off towards the hotel again.
"Come on," she snapped. "I'm going to need your help smashing up the dresser."
End Part Eleven
***** Chapter 12 *****
Part Twelve
It was just before dawn when they returned to Matilda's house. They had each
taken time to shower and change clothes, though Bonnie's hands had been shaking
so badly as she had handled the bottles that she didn't know how much good she
was actually doing. She would have been perfectly content to storm right up
Matilda's porch barefoot and in the remains of a dress that looked like
something Fae Ray had worn while King Kong was dragging her up the side of the
Empire State building, mud, blood, and all. Her hair was still slightly damp,
and it crackled when she moved as if she were standing near to a fire. Damon
had apparently picked up a sense of self-preservation from the convenience
store, as he was saying little and staying out of her way, though there was a
glitter in his eyes that made Bonnie think he was turning over a few rages
issues of his own. As she recalled, he didn't handle betrayal very well.
They had stopped by the parking garage that sat across the street from Cameo on
the way, each of them carrying a stake even though Bonnie thought that she had
fire enough to suffice against anything that got in the way and Damon moving
with a slinky, lithesome stalk that didn't even attempt to be human. Her Prius
was gone. Neither of them had been surprised.
Bonnie raised her hand to Matilda's door and ignored the discolored brass
knocker altogether so that she could pound her fist against the wood instead.
Damon leaned back against one of the porch's support beams, arms folded over
his chest, eyes heavy-lidded. They could have simply broken in, but Bonnie
wanted Matilda to know why they were there. She wanted her to know.
It still took Matilda such a long time to answer that Bonnie was on the verge
of yanking her foot back and giving the door a good, solid kick followed by
letting Damon simply break it in altogether. It finally swung open just as
Bonnie was about to tell Damon to get down with his destructive self. Matilda's
hair was in a slight disarray and she was blinking a little rapidly as she
looked back and forth between the two of them. Oh, damn, they had disturbed her
at bedtime, look at how very sorry Bonnie felt about that.
"What the hell?" Matilda asked, addressing Bonnie rather than the wolf that
Bonnie was choosing to keep at bay for the moment. She looked her up and down
and seemed to realize that Bonnie was not in a playful mood, at least, because
her body language became slightly more wary. "Great, you survived. I'm super-
duper thrilled, I really am. But didn't I tell you not to come here again?"
"As it turns out," Bonnie said, spitting each word as if it were one of the
bullets that still would have done absolutely nothing to stop what Matilda was.
And she had actually thought that maybe...it didn't bear following any further.
"I'm not really in the mood to honor your requests any more."
"I wasn't aware that respecting my house needed to be a request," Matilda
started in an acid tone, but didn't get a chance to finish. Bonnie stepped to
the side without saying a word, so that she was no longer blocking Damon's way.
It was all the command that he needed. He was fully-fed again, and he was fast.
Matilda made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a snarl as Damon collided
with her hard and carried her back into the house. Bonnie followed, closing the
door quietly behind her and engaging the lock. This was not something for the
street to see.
Damon's weight and momentum carried Matilda backwards, across the living room,
and into the cherrywood end table that had been holding a lamp two days before.
Their collective weight took it down with a tremendous splintering noise,
Matilda grunting as a piece of wood dug into her back. Bonnie took a seat in
Damon's customary perch on arm of the sofa, folded her own arms across her
chest, and watched.
Damon might have been much larger than Matilda, but in vampire terms simple
little things like physics didn't mean very much. She got her legs pulled up to
her stomach enough to drive them like twin pistons into Damon's abdomen. He
flew backwards across the living room and barely caught himself before he would
have slapped straight through the stairway bannister and maybe inadvertently
staked himself in the process. The impact was still enough to make the house
shake; Bonnie looked reflectively out the window and wondered if they should be
worrying about the neighbors calling the cops, or if they could be gone again
before that became an issue.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Matilda said as she leapt back up to her
feet with one smooth ripple of her body. She had a piece of the ruined end
table in her hand.
"Thanks, but I have my own," Damon replied, reaching behind him and producing
the stake that he had tucked into the back of his pants before leaving the
motel. He glanced Bonnie's way; Matilda followed the gaze.
"So you're still the one in charge of this rodeo?" she asked.
"I have always been the one in charge of this rodeo," Bonnie answered. She
settled herself a little more firmly into her perch as Damon charged Matilda
again. She ducked and got in a punch to Damon's jaw that knocked his head to
the side and nearly took him off his feet altogether. He caught himself on one
hand at the last possible second and swept his legs under Matilda's, bringing
her down to the floor, too. She rolled away before he could grab her; she and
Damon were both moving so fast that Bonnie's eye could barely follow them.
"You know how this is going to end," Damon said easily. "After all, I'm older
than you."
"Two years is no reason to get a swelled head," Matilda said. "And maybe I've
been doing more over the past century and a half than mooning after a woman who
wasn't that into you, anyway." She flicked her eyes Bonnie's way, as if
considering using her as a point of attack, only for Damon to dive between the
two of them and then hurl her against the fireplace. The brick cracked in a
long line that ran all the way up to the ceiling. When Matilda shook her head,
drops of blood flew briefly from a cut at the back of her skull and fell down
to the carpet. She grabbed for the fire poker and used it first as a blunt
weapon against the side of Damon's head, then stabbed him directly in the chest
with it while he was still reeling. Bonnie started to leap down from the couch
to help, but Damon seized hold of the poker and ripped it out of his chest with
a sucking noise, brought it down hard against Matilda's stake-holding hand.
There was a loud cracking noise and Bonnie saw Matilda's wrist jerk at an odd
and wrong angle, the stake falling to the ground, before it wrenched itself
back into position with a noise like grains of rice rubbing together. She
lunged for the stake again, but Damon was faster. He grabbed Matilda by the
throat and hurled her down against the coffee table hard enough to make the
legs wobble before the whole thing decided precariously to hold, raised the
stake up to strike. But he still looked to Bonnie first.
Matilda followed his gaze and managed, even though Damon was holding her so
tightly that a human would not have been able to breathe, let alone speak,
"Guess you are his type, after all."
Bonnie stalked forward and told herself that she was going to control the urge
to light the whole house on fire, if for no better reason than because Damon
was close enough that the odds of her managing to end Matilda without catching
him at the same time were slim. If this was the thing that she had been afraid
of since the outset, that she would become so angry that that she would not be
able to control it any longer, then she wasn't certain if she had been scared
for all of the right reasons or all of the wrong ones. Once she was in the
middle, she liked it.
"I want to know why," Bonnie began in a voice that was shaking more than she
wanted to acknowledge. Matilda blinked a few times in seeming confusion, and
that made Bonnie even angrier. "I want to know how the hell you could say to my
face that a member of my family had meant everything to you, and then turn
right around and sell us out to a bunch of vampires."
Matilda started to speak and then gagged as whatever air that she had been
carrying in reserve in her lungs apparently ran out. She got one hand up and
clawed a long furrow down Damon's face, missing his eyes only because he jerked
his head to the side at the very last second. She got in a blow to his abdomen
that broke ribs with force that Bonnie could hear from where he stood as the
cuts closed up without leaving a mark behind.
"You want to get your catharsis out of the way, Bonnie, you had better do it
quick," Damon growled at her. His eyes were flashing from black to blue and
back again as if she were looking into a mood ring.
"Loosen up and let her speak," Bonnie ordered him. "I want to hear what she has
to say for herself."
Damon's face expressed every different kind of idiot that he was calling her
without him needing to say even a word, but he did as she said just far enough
for Matilda to croak out, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
The temperature in the room shot up so hard and so fast that Bonnie herself
reeled back, and Damon winced, unable to back away without letting go of
Matilda entirely. "No one else knew that we were going to be at Cameo but you,"
Bonnie said in an even voice, much calmer than she actually felt. "We were
ambushed and nearly killed." Matilda looked her up and down, obviously noting
the lack of wounds, and Bonnie felt herself flushing even though Matilda could
not possibly know the trade that she and Damon had done to make that possible.
"You want to tell me that you had nothing to do with that?"
"I didn't!" Matilda started to push herself up from the coffee table only for
Damon to slam her right back down again, and they snarled at each other. Bonnie
could see Damon's arm starting to shake from the effort of keeping Matilda in
place as Matilda spit up at him, "Either use that thing or put it away, stud."
"Bonnie, wrap up the story time, already," Damon growled at her, but he still
wasn't doing the staking until Bonnie expressly told him to.
Witches always wind up being pulled into vampire problems. She hadn't known
what her grandmother was talking about, then, and she didn't think that it made
all that much of a practical difference now to point out that her vampire had
been pulled into a witch problem rather than the other way around. "Damon, let
her up," Bonnie said.
"Funny, I don't recall you hitting your head," Damon answered without moving to
obey, staring down at Matilda. She glared defiantly back.
"Damon." He looked at her. "Let her up."
There was a long, long moment in which she thought that Damon was going to tell
her to go fuck herself and end this little dance that they had been doing so
well before he slowly, slowly lifted his hand from Matilda's throat and stepped
away, stake still in hand. Both of their eyes were glittering like cold stones.
Matilda straightened up from the coffee table with a snake's lithesome grace
and turned towards Bonnie immediately. Bonnie didn't need Damon to step in
front of her; she kept her hands dangling by her sides, raised the temperature
of the room fifteen degrees in the time that it took her to blink, and let a
long, level stare be her answer.
Matilda didn't seem just terribly intimidated. "You have a lot of nerve, little
girl," she said, baring her teeth. The edges of her fangs protruded just
slightly over her lower lip even though her eyes and face remained normal.
"That's becoming a thing with me," Bonnie answered. She stood her ground
without flinching while Matilda got inches from her face, staring at her so
hard that Bonnie half-thought that an attempt at compulsion was going to be
following within the next few seconds, while Damon remained on the opposite
side of the room and watched with a hooded expression.
"You really think that I would just sell you out to a pack like that?" Matilda
asked her, not backing up any more than Bonnie was. Her voice was, for as much
as Bonnie hadn't had nearly the time to learn her special language the way that
she had Damon's, more hurt than angry or frightened.
"I think that I know what you are," Bonnie said flatly, with much more
certainty in her voice than she would have been able to manage if she had been
telling the truth. Stefan, fine, he was Elena's guy and was an easy case, Damon
was a harder one but still seemed willing to abide by rules so long as he liked
the person doing the enforcing (and because he liked the enforcement), Matilda
she had known for only a few hours out of a span of two days, and this
was...Bonnie was almost glad that she had been able to look into the eyes of at
least one vampire that had absolutely nothing and no one standing behind them,
just so that she would still know what was real.
Bonnie reached out, grabbed the back of Matilda's neck, and yanked her even
closer, so that they could have been kissing if Bonnie had been so inclined.
Matilda startled and started to lean back; she wasn't used to being out of
control, and didn't like it when it was thrust upon her. From the corner of her
eye, Bonnie noticed Damon shifting his weight from one foot to the other before
he settled again. Vampire physiology being what it was, it was barely more than
a ripple, and not something that she would have noticed a week before.
"If you are lying to me," Bonnie told Matilda in a voice that brooked no
disagreement and seemed to come from someone completely other than herself, "I
will make absolutely certain that it ain't pleasant, how you go." Another
ripple from Damon. Bonnie deliberately did not look.
Matilda matched her, gaze for gaze. "I ever come after you, Bennett witch," she
said slowly. For the first time, the webbing of veins re-made her face. "And
you will know what unpleasant is."
Bonnie let go of Matilda's neck a half-second before she was sensing that
Matilda was about to pull away from her. "Just so long as we understand each
other. Here's how it goes," she said, "and tell me if you disagree." A glance
over Matilda's shoulder towards Damon. Bonnie swore that she was not raising
the heat in the room, this time. "I need to attack a nest of vampires who
already have to be figuring that I'm coming, what with not finding a pile of
ash and a corpse in that well when the sun went down. Best way to do that is in
the daylight, when they're vulnerable."
"Slight problem there, babe." Damon was closer than Bonnie remembered him being
a second before. Didn't matter how long she hung around vampires, she didn't
think that she was ever going to be used to them doing that. "You might be
strong, but you are not strong enough to go up against and nest alone, and I--
" The corners of Damon's mouth twitched, close enough to a smile for government
work if Bonnie didn't focus too hard on the fact that she could see his fangs
pressing against his lower lip for a moment. "Am strictly on the bench until
the sun goes down."
"Then I'll just have to fix that, won't I," Bonnie said, not allowing it to be
a question, even though she was certain that Elena and Grams would have both
taken her by the shoulders and given her a good, hard shake if they had been
there with her. Even Damon looked as though he were considering it, and Matilda
was leaning back and watching Bonnie with her head cocked slightly to one side,
eyes cool and considering.
"My ring was spelled by Emily Bennett," Damon said. "You're tough, Bonnie, but
I knew her, and you aren't anywhere near to drinking from the same well."
"The directions are in her spell book," Bonnie argued, trying not to let
herself be insulted. She wouldn't get mad if someone told her matter-of-factly
that she couldn't levitate, either, except...that she kind of thought she might
be able to, someday. "Witches...lots of things can fuel a witch's power, Grams
told me. Anger, worry. We both know that I have plenty of one of those things."
And not a small amount of the second, which both vampires in the room could
probably detect just fine, but they were about a week too late for Bonnie to
start letting that stop her. Her life had certainly been simpler months before,
when she had worried mostly about whether or not Elena was ever going to come
out from under her gray cloud, what Caroline was going to do next that was
somehow going to end in Bonnie running interference while she scrambled to
extricate herself, and just what the hell kind of vibe she was giving off that
made her so invisible to all of the remotely attractive guys in Mystic Falls.
"Was that right before she used so much power that she had an aneurysm?" Damon
asked. Bonnie sucked in her breath hard and raised her hand, whether to just
slap him or to magically hurl him straight through the walls of Matilda's house
she honestly wasn't sure, until she realized that Damon was worried. That was
almost as big a shock as finding out that vampires existed in the first place.
Bonnie took a deep breath, and then another, until she was certain that she
could be calm again before she held up a finger of warning. "You get one. I
might not be Emily, but I'm not nothing. I can do this. I know that I can."
"Emily wasn't the only Bennett who was capable of that kind of magic," Matilda
said, startling Bonnie with the reminder of her presence. She looked over and
discovered that Matilda had stepped back several paces, the better to be out of
the way if Bonnie and Damon should really start throwing down. Probably a good
idea. "June didn't want to be turned, she was...very adamant about that, but
she wanted to give me a parting gift. She died first."
Bonnie closed her eyes, counted to ten, and then said to Damon, "I would ask if
there were any of your kind who knew how to just be freaking monsters, already,
but I think I met him earlier. Okay. Fine. See, this is totally something that
I can do."
"June Bennett was going to attempt the spell, she never actually completed it,"
Damon snapped back at her. Holy crap, Bonnie thought, looking at his face, I
really think that he might be about to beg me not to do this. It shouldn't have
been shocking, realizing that Damon Salvatore was capable of emotions just like
a real boy after she had been traveling with him for this long...except that it
really kinda was. I am the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water. Ribbit.
Bonnie nearly missed the last part, as it Damon gave Matilda a smile dark and
glittering. "And how did June die, anyway?"
"Liver cancer, you presumptuous prick," Matilda shot right back. Bonnie thought
that she was going to have to step between them for a second as each rose onto
the balls of their feet before settling back down.
"Damon?" Bonnie waited until he was giving her his full attention before she
went on. "Just so we're clear, this is me explaining, not me asking."
Damon swore underneath his breath. "And if I don't want to have any part of it?
I don't trust Elena not to go diving into some dark magic of her own if I take
your lifeless corpse back, even if she has to pay someone else to do it."
"Yeah, those are your sole motivations." Damon made a face at her while the
first rosy glow of a new dawn started to creep through Matilda's living room
windows. She noticed it at the same time that Bonnie did and, swearing, rushed
forward to pull the drapes.
"I went almost thirty years without any witch trouble before you showed up on
my doorstep," she said over her shoulder to Bonnie, "and now I'm nearly
forgetting about the goddamned sun, you've messed everything up so much."
Matilda shook out her hand where a ray had become strong enough burn, though
the blisters were sucked back down into the skin again almost as soon as they
arose.
"Funny. My grandmother said that it was always witches being pulled down into
vampire trouble." Bonnie turned her attention back to Damon and went on in a
voice that would have been private if they had both been human, carefully
ignoring Matilda as Matilda pretended not to hear in return, "No safe words
necessary on this trip. You don't want to go any further, you can walk, no
questions asked."
"Right." Damon swore again before he seized up Bonnie's hand with a speed which
belied the light, gentlemanly kiss that he put on the back of her knuckles
before he let her go. "I still owe you the one, and I want my fucking ring
back. Go on, Icarus, let's just hope that you know what you're doing."
"Making it up as I go along hasn't failed me yet." Bonnie hesitated, then
placed her hand gently against the side of Damon's neck for a moment before she
headed for the door. "I'll be back soon. Remember, if you kill each other
before I get back, I'm not going to be doing any spells for anyone."
Damon had left the motel room shortly before they had left to find Matilda
again and had returned with a new car, this one complete with keys. Bonnie was
choosing not to ask any other questions than that under the umbrella that they
were leaving each stolen car exactly as they had found it. (She would find a
way to get some money to the owner of the truck to cover the little matter of
that bullet hole, even if he had made it while doing his best to put a bullet
into her.) She still tensed up everything time that another car passed her,
certain that they were going to turn out to be an undercover cop listening to
their police radio at exactly the wrong time.
Grams had had a few supplies. So had Kayla and Aunt Pamela. Bonnie knew exactly
what they would have said to her if she had been forced to explain what she
wanted and why, though, even if she hadn't only come up with the idea a bare
hour before. In a strange city where she couldn't tell the real from the
poseurs, Bonnie had to rely on luck and let the strength of the pot smell tell
her whether she was dealing with legitimates or fakes. It was fourth store
before she found a place that didn't send her reeling straight back out again
with the sickly-sweet reek, even if the girl behind the counter wasn't much for
confidence right away. She had straw-colored hair looped into a wild
configuration of braids that Bonnie really hoped she didn't have to redo every
day and skin so pale that Bonnie stood wary in the doorway for several seconds,
uncertain that she wasn't dealing with a vampire somehow until the girl finally
realized that someone had come inside and jumped in an unmistakably human way.
"Oh, Jesus--! That damned bell, I swear to God." Bonnie looked up and noticed
that the brass bell above the door was conspicuously missing its knocker. "I
keep meaning to get it fixed, but, you know, rent has a way of taking
priority." She hurried around the counter, revealing a brightly colored broom
skirt in wine and orchid below her tank top and, as she got close, gray eyes
that looked as if they watered a lot.
It took Bonnie that long for both of the oaths that the girl had blurted out to
catch up with her. "Um," she said, and pointed as discretely as possible
towards a large wheel of the year hanging off the back wall, made of many
different colors of wood fitted together and then polished to a high shine.
The girl blushed, giving her so eerie an impression of an opal changing color
that Bonnie wondered if she hadn't been wrong about the whole humanity
assumption. "I grew up Baptist," she said. "It runs deep, sometimes. What I can
I do for you?"
"I need lapis lazuli, among other things," Bonnie said. "Preferably in a piece
of jewelry."
"Stone of the dead, right on," the girl said, nodding enthusiastically. "Here's
all of our stuff, we have a really nice bracelet that just came in." She led
Bonnie over to the counter where she had been reading a magazine before Bonnie
had startled her so, which itself held rows and rows of silver rings, necklaces
and bracelets. The piece that she pointed Bonnie towards was made for a woman,
though, the nearly violent blue of the lapis lazuli broken in a two-one-two
pattern by the much more delicate green of amazonite. Bonnie gave it a quick
once-over and thought that there was enough of the stone there, but it was too
small to fit around Damon's wrist. Nothing else in the jewelry case even
contained a speck of what she needed, though her eye was continually drawn back
to a large and nearly garish silver ring fastened in the shape of a wolf's
head. The animal had been designed in a watchful expression rather than the
snarling one that Bonnie would have expected, the holes for its eyes drilled so
deep that she wondered how old it was and if they had not once held some kind
of stone.
"Do you have anything that would fit a man?" she asked, leaning back from the
case. "It's for my boyfriend."
The girl made a clicking sound with her tongue against the back of her teeth
and shook her head. "Sorry, that's all we have. Don't get a whole lot of
requests for lapus lazuli in men's jewelry, you know, mostly it's women wanting
something to make sure he stays faithful, all of that."
"Star sixty-nine is a hell of a lot cheaper than jewelry, then," Bonnie said.
"It can't be anything other than lapis lazuli. Do you have any raw stone?"
The girl shifted and looked at Bonnie askance. "Does your boyfriend, like, work
in an ER or something?"
"No, he...has a thing about blood," Bonnie said. "Why?"
"Wouldn't have figured anyone to be so adamant about carrying the stone of the
dead unless they had a really good reason for it, is all," the girl said,
shrugging, though Bonnie noticed that she was being watched much more closely
now. "Sure, I have some. Come on." She lead Bonnie away from the jewelry case
and towards a far back corner of the store, where it seemed that the light was
subtly encouraged not to venture by means that Bonnie could not quite put her
finger on. Whereas the items at the front of the store had been pretty pieces
of New Age fluff, here there was power, even if it was still carefully
disguised so that tourists wandering through still couldn't get themselves into
too much trouble. Bonnie spotted a sparkling clean athame set carefully into a
case behind a counter, a dowsing rod whose tips were dark with something very
old.
The girl opened up a drawer in an old dresser that looked as if it should smell
like lavender sachet and rummaged, finally came up with a ragged blue stone
that she placed into the center of Bonnie's palm. "Will that work for you?" she
asked, while Bonnie hefted it and considered. It was twice again as large as
her thumb and a darker blue than it would have been if the stone had been
worked, nearly clotted. Could work for her, could work against her; Emily had
mentioned polishing the stones for the jewelry herself, when Bonnie had brought
herself to look into the very back of the spell book, and putting some of
herself into them as she worked. But untouched stones could be very powerful,
too. It was all a balancing act.
"This will work," Bonnie finally said. She flipped her hair back over her
shoulder. "I'll also need rainbow fluorite, black onyx, and pietersite." Many
things can influence a witch's power. "And rosemary. A lot of rosemary."
She was definitely being watched in a different way now. "Of course," the girl
murmured, returning to the dresser that Bonnie was willing to bet no tourists
ever got to see more as a slightly charming, slightly trashy antique. The gray
eyes didn't look watery as she turned around again. "You know, I can't take
credit cards or checks or shit like that."
"I have cash." Bonnie followed the girl back to the front counter and could not
stop herself from looking at the amazonite bracelet again, the silver ring.
"And those, too," she said, pointing.
The girl was wearing a carefully blank expression as she selected the two
pieces of jewelry and wrapped them up with the rest of Bonnie's packages.
"Since you're all over lapis lazuli, I'm just going to assume that you're
already down with amazonite," she said, swatting back one of her braids as it
fell down in front of her eyes and ruined the solemn air that she had likely
been going for.
"Encouragement of honor and integrity," Bonnie said, laying the necessary bills
out on the counter.
"And romantic love."
"I'm putting a stronger emphasis on the first two." Bonnie started to gather up
her packages and turn away, only for the girl to put her hand quickly on her
arm. The power that flowed from her into Bonnie was nothing compared to what
Bonnie was sending back, and they both knew it right away.
"Whoa." The girl drew her hand back and shook out her fingers as if Bonnie had
burned her. "I was going to tell you to watch your ass if you were going to go
combining lapis and amazonite, but I have a feeling that you already know."
Bonnie smiled a thin smile. "It's kind of a family thing," she said before she
exited, the bell above the door as silent at her departure as it had been upon
her arrival.
End Part Twelve
***** Chapter 13 *****
Part Thirteen
It was getting gloomy as Bonnie pulled up in front of Matilda's house again.
She squinted up at the sky that was making promises without quite yet
delivering upon them and muttered a few obscenities under her breath. If she
wound up giving herself brain damage doing this damned thing and then it wound
up raining so hard that it wasn't needed in the first place, she was going to
be pissed. Bonnie leveled a warning finger at the sky as she got out and
slammed the door shut behind her, dropping it quickly back down to her side
when the sky rumbled back in return. Not even Emily could control the weather,
from everything that the grimoire and family legends had told her, but it was
still probably best not to go pointing her finger at something unless she meant
to use it.
On the porch, it was Damon who swung the door open for her before she could
knock. Bonnie noticed that his eyes went immediately to the bag in her arms and
wondered if he could feel the stone inside, if it pulled him even before she
had had a chance to do anything with it. It must be a bitch of a time to be a
vampire in a New Age store if that were the case. The bracelet Bonnie was
already wearing upon her own wrist; it was funny when Damon actually tried to
control his eye-rolling impulses, because his whole face twitched with the
effort.
"That's just mean," Damon said, tapping lightly at the bracelet and then
holding onto her wrist a bit longer than was necessary in order to pull her
into the house. He muttered something impolite as a bit of sunlight struck his
hand and was still strong enough to burn even through the cloud cover.
"Maybe I wanted to feel pretty," Bonnie said. Matilda was on the far side of
the room, a mug in her hand that Bonnie wasn't going to examine too closely.
She was watching the bracelet around Bonnie's wrist, too, but Bonnie was
careful to keep her face still. "Yours isn't quite so flattering, sorry." She
pulled the chunk of lapis lazuli from the bag and tossed it to him.
Damon turned the stone over in his hands and lifted an eyebrow at her. "You
know that this is supposed to be jewelry, right?"
Bonnie huffed. "That was what they had. I don't know what kind of timeline
Emily was working under--" Unless the reports of Katherine had been greatly
exaggerated, it couldn't have been a lax one, though. "But I'm not going to
learn jewelry-making just so that it can fit your specifications. We'll duct-
tape it to your stupid chest if we have to." Damon tossed the stone into the
air, caught it, and then gave her the infuriating smile which meant that she
was being exactly the kind of cranky that amused him so much. "Shut up and take
this." She dug the silver ring out of the bag and got to watch vampire reflexes
at work as Damon flipped the lapis lazuli into the air, snatched the ring from
beneath it, and then caught the stone again before it had fallen any lower than
his waist, let alone managed to hit the ground.
"How sweet," Damon said in a dry tone, examining it. "You do know that I'm not
the marrying type, right?"
"As if you would get any further than my front door before my dad was meeting
you with a shotgun." Damon flashed her a wicked smile. "Oh, don't pretend you
wouldn't ask to make it all nice and proper first. You're not as edgy about a
lot of things as you like to pretend, Damon Salvatore."
She leaned forward rather than away when he was suddenly in her face like that
now. "You know, most people figure out quick that playing a game of opposites
with me isn't smart."
Oh, look, her hand had found its way into its customary place against Damon's
chest again. "Guess I'm not most people. Consider it a token of thanks.
Besides, it suits you."
Damon examined the watchful wolf's head with more focus than anyone had likely
given the ring since it had been forged in the first place, his expression
wrought too carefully blank for even Bonnie to read. "Suppose it does," he
said, and slipped it onto his finger.
"Can we just get this done already?" Matilda interrupted, making Bonnie step
back from Damon as if she had been caught out in the middle of doing something
wrong. Matilda had her arms folded across her chest and was tapping her fingers
restlessly against her elbow, as close to bubbling over with emotion as Bonnie
guessed a vampire ever got. "This is starting to feel an awful lot like the
last time the two of you had a moment in my house, ran off to do battle, and
then came back to kill me for something that I didn't even do."
You're a vampire, don't tell me that suspicion is something new to you. Bonnie
sealed her lips shut around the words before they could escape. If there was
one thing that she ought to have learned by now, no matter how much it really,
really sucked and she wished that she could just go back to the days of point-
shoot-fireball, it was that things weren't always what they seemed. For all
that she knew, Matilda drank from live and unwilling humans no more than Stefan
did and just supported herself through an uncanny instinct for the stock market
rather than a generational family fortune.
"I'll be out of your space just as soon as I can manage it, trust me," Bonnie
said. "This hasn't been pleasant for me any more than it has been for you."
Matilda roved her gaze across Bonnie's face long enough to make Bonnie shiver,
because the eyes really were the only thing that she had spotted of herself in
all pictures of her great-grandmother, and then twitched as if she were shaking
off a fly. Matilda's stare was blanker and more predatory by the time that she
had finished; it might have made Bonnie more on edge if she hadn't so recently
been acquainted with vampires who did it all the time rather than on occasion.
"I doubt that," Matilda answered finally. "Do whatever you have to do in the
kitchen, not on the hardwood."
Matilda's kitchen was as old as the rest of the house, save for a gleaming
refrigerator that Bonnie saw no reason to open and take a peek inside, um,
ever. The appliances didn't have the air of carefully kept mementos from years
gone by that Matilda's living room did, though. Bonnie didn't think that they
had even been touched since Matilda had purchased the house in the first place.
"Don't deal with humans often, do you?" she asked as she knelt down on the cool
tile floor and began setting out the crystals and the rosemary in careful
patterns. The smell of the latter soon filled with kitchen with a scent that
was probably closer to cooking than it had ever experienced before. No table,
so Bonnie had plenty of room to do what she needed to do.
Matilda and Damon remained in the doorway. When Bonnie glanced back over her
shoulder to await Matilda's answer, she saw that Damon had his arms folded over
his chest and his head cocked to one side, expression curious and sharp. For
all of the magic that he ran on, around, and with, Bonnie wondered how much he
had actually seen performed firsthand. Matilda mostly just looked as if the sun
doing battle with the clouds outside was the only thing that kept her from
finding an elsewhere to be just as fast as her legs would carry her.
"Not so much," Matilda answered. "I've found that it's much simpler this way."
So sorry for complicating up your life, Bonnie thought, unsure if she was being
sarcastic or not. She took a moment to center herself and then flipped rapidly
through Emily's grimoire, looking for the correct place. The spell that had
made the charms of immunity for Katherine and her friends had been one of the
very last ones that Emily had designed in her life, or perhaps one that she had
had a deep feeling that she would regret and had so hidden it away until one
had to be devotedly looking in order to find it. It was on one of the very last
pages of the book, and Emily's normally firm, sure hand was so faint that
Bonnie had to lean down and squint to make certain that she was reading
correctly under the outdated lights. More than once there was a splotch on the
parchment, as if Emily had stopped in the middle of a thought in order to
compose the next one or ask herself if she really wanted to continue the
current. Bonnie read over the spell three times, making certain that she wasn't
moving her lips (Aunt Pamela had an area rug that was never going to be the
same; lesson learned), before she was certain that she was ready.
"Don't go plunging into anything that you can't handle, witch," Damon cautioned
her from the doorway.
"I don't want to wind up down a well with you again," Bonnie said. Matilda made
a soft snorting noise.
"That's not a euphemism," Damon said to her. "We really were down a well. Also,
we're fucking."
"Trust me, Salvatore, you are only of the last people in the world that I would
expect to have a delicate tongue."
Bonnie turned around and leveled a warning finger at Damon before he could
answer, though that didn't wipe away his expression of clearly wanting to. She
concentrated hard on the blues and greens of the bracelet encircling her wrist,
the properties of the amazonite in particular, and then started reciting a
jumbling tumble of words in a language that had the syntax of Latin but wasn't,
and no one in the family had any idea where Emily had learned it, whether her
teachers had even been living or dead. For all intents and purposes, she was
the starting point of the line, the flame that everyone else was reflecting.
While Bonnie continued to recite and did her very best to block the audience at
her back from her mind, she kept her gaze focused on the green. People were
allowed to have more than one motivation at a time, Damon had told her, and
maybe that was even true, but in magic concentration was everything. People
came to ugly ends when they tried to harness dark forces with equally dark
intent. So Bonnie watched the green, and did her best not to acknowledge the
deep blue stones that ringed it at all.
She wasn't certain how far in she had gone, certainly no more than a phrase or
two, when the pressure in the room began to change, get thicker. The air
stopped smelling like rosemary and started smelling like ozone and earth, a
sharp and unsettling scent. Bonnie started breathing a little faster and hoped
that the two vampires at her back would be smart enough to give her space of
her own accord, because something down deep in her gut was telling her that
this was not a magic that would welcome the dead, no matter how much it might
benefit them in the end. The world became more somehow, the gray-green of the
rosemary and the lines in the grout that Matilda clearly paid indifferent
attention to at best becoming so bright that they hurt Bonnie's eyes, and she
couldn't look at her bracelet any more at all. A second after that, she had to
shut her eyes entirely and found that that did little to help when her sense of
hearing was being amplified by the web that she was drawing around herself, her
sense of smell. She had touched lightly at a vampire's senses when she had
taken those few mouthfuls of Damon's blood the previous day, but she thought
that she could blow him away if they were to be laid side by side right about
now.
A witch's power can be amplified by many things. She loved Grams, her father,
Elena and Caroline. These were bright emotions, untainted, and the more that
she focused on them the more powerful she could feel the force reverberating
out of her becoming. She was not doing this to hurt. She was not doing this for
revenge. She didn't know what would come crawling out of the pit for her if she
did.
Someone said something behind Bonnie, and she thought that the timbre of the
voice was male, but she couldn't even think about breaking concentration long
enough to look around, let alone consider the ramifications to the spell if she
were to do so. There was a pressure in her chest that felt as if someone or
something was inside with her and struggling to get out, frightening at first
until she remembered that she had been possessed before and the two experiences
didn't even begin to compare.
Caroline. Elena. Her dad. Grams. Stopping a nest of vampires before they hurt
anyone else because they thought that people were simply disposable like that.
These were all good things to concentrate upon. Bonnie focused so hard that the
world seemed to disappear even though she had her eyes closed and couldn't see
where it was going, and she missed the sweet smell of the rosemary abruptly
turning acrid and burnt. Something brushed against her mind, and she caught a
whiff of perfume that she had known since childhood.
Bonnie discovered where the world had gone when she abruptly tumbled back down
into it, opening her eyes and yelping. Someone tried to catch her from behind,
before they swore and leapt back, leaving her to fall the rest of the way back
down to the tile and just barely avoid cracking her head. It was a male voice,
and she would have known that particular flavor of obscenity anywhere.
She stayed on her back, gasping, as she wasn't certain that she was going to up
to the task of sitting just yet, and craned her head to bring Damon into view
instead. He was holding his hands out from his body, palms up like a
supplicant. Bonnie caught sight of reddened skin that waited several seconds
longer than it should to start healing, considering what he was. Matilda was
standing several feet back from him looking as if she was seriously weighing
the pros and cons of taking her chances with the sun rather than staying near
the kitchen and whatever it was that Bonnie had just done.
"Did I do that?" Bonnie asked, staring at Damon's hands.
Damon shook the last of the lobster-redness out of the tips of his fingers and
answered, "Bonnie, you were glowing." She didn't think that he meant of the
"with happiness" variety, either.
"Oh." Bonnie stayed on her back for a few more seconds until she was certain
that her head could handle it, then slowly pushed herself up onto her elbows.
Her whole body felt tired and battered, but in a pleasant way, as if she had
just had...as if she had just had herself a truly excellent time that may or
may not have necessitated being vertical. Bonnie touched her tingling face and
then pushed a few strands of hair behind her ears, not looking at Damon.
The rosemary was gone, leaving only in its place ash in the pattern where she
had laid it out, and probably some truly spectacular scorch marks underneath
that. The chunk of lapis lazuli that Bonnie had been attempting to spell didn't
appear harmed, but the other stones... "Holy crap," Bonnie breathed. She pushed
herself up onto her hands and knees and inched forward when that didn't make
her wobble too badly so that she could examine the bases of each one where they
appeared to have melted slightly, and required prying before she could get them
up from Matilda's floor. Bonnie rubbed at her wrist and then plucked up the
chunk of lapis lazuli, the only of the stones that had come through the smell
undamaged. She flipped it through the air towards Damon. "See how that fits
you."
Damon shoved the stone into his pocket with a casualness that left Bonnie
feeling slightly piqued--hey, did you not see me apparently turning myself into
a lightbulb in order to pull that off--so that he could come forward and take
Bonnie beneath the arms instead. Just when she was worried that he was going to
go too far into his self-described chivalric fantasies, she was half a second
later nervous that he was going to toss her over his shoulder just to make
certain that he took the charm and the source at the same time. Would really
suck if she had failed and he dropped her on her face while bursting into
flames, then. Damon flopped her down on her rear on the top of the kitchen
island, holding his hand out with mock-care in case she should fall until she
flipped him off, and then headed for Matilda's back door. Bonnie craned her
neck as far as she could, not quite certain that her legs were going to hold
her yet. If this went wrong...
Damon pulled the lapis lazuli out of his pocket and, tensing slightly, opened
the back door to put his other hand out into the light. There was a distinct
lack of anything dramatic, exactly as it should have been, and Bonnie sighed so
hard with relief that she nearly fell off of the counter. Damon caught the tail
end of the reaction as he was coming back.
"That was a vote of confidence," he said. "Thought you were certain that you
had this down."
"Haven't you ever heard of bravado?" Bonnie hopped down from the counter and
was proud of herself for wobbling only a little. Her sneakered foot came down
in the rosemary ashes. "Um, sorry about your floor?"
"If I tell you not to worry about it will you be gone for good this time?"
Matilda asked. She was still looking at Bonnie in that weird way that made
Bonnie think she was really just a photograph into the past for Matilda rather
than a girl in her own right; maybe June had looked like that while she was
doing magic, too.
"Probably?" Matilda didn't look impressed. "I'm learning to stop talking in
absolutes, they only turn around and bite me in the ass later." There was a
sudden rush of noise as the clouds opened up and started spilling down the rain
that they had been promising for hours. "Oh, come on." Her brain still felt
like tapioca pudding, she was going to be mad as hell if it turned out that
they hadn't needed an extra piece of lapis lazuli, after all.
"I'd still be worrying about one stray beam coming through, not to mention that
I'm not a fan of the hoodie look," Damon said. He started for the door.
"Where are you going?" Bonnie demanded.
"Did that spell give you brain damage? I'm going to kill some vampires."
"Not without me you're not." Bonnie stormed across the kitchen and was stopped
by Damon putting his hand against her chest in the exact same gesture of
warning and warding off that had become their signature. There wasn't enough
"bitch, please" in the whole world to fill the look that Bonnie shot him, but
she didn't see him backing away, either. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to
make him pay now or later.
"Can you even levitate a feather right now?" Damon asked her.
"Do you really want to test what I can still do?"
"Sorry, sweetheart, but that doesn't work right after you admitted to being
very brave and full of shit." Bonnie took Damon's wrist and let a subtle pulse
of heat slide along his skin, just hot enough to walk the line between
discomfort and pain. He dropped his hand. "Point taken."
"I'm just saying. Look, I have to do this, for people and puppies and all of
the things that are making you want to upchuck your blood right now." That was
a very expressive blankness that he was wearing, right there. "And a little bit
because I still want to make some vampires hurt, but we already had the 'people
are complicated' conversation, didn't we? You don't have to go, you have a
piece of charmed lapis lazuli to go have another ring made."
"Doesn't work that way," Damon said. "Anyone tries to alter the stone now, it
will...removing its protective capabilities will probably be the least dramatic
thing that happens."
Bonnie had been learning pieces of Emily's personality ever since she had
started studying the woman's choices in spell work, but she was more and more
wishing that she could find a personal journal somewhere within the family
heirlooms. She had a feeling that the founding member of the Bennett line could
have out-strategized Sherman if she had been given a chance. She shrugged. "You
still don't have to go. I'll give your ring back to you if I can get it."
Bonnie leaned forward. "Damon, in case you've started thinking in any way that
I need to ask your permission in this shindig, I should probably remind you
that I'm supposed to be the one with the head injury."
"Then I won't point out to you how much you looked like Katherine right about
then." Damon dropped his hand and made a big show of ushering Bonnie ahead of
him, but not before she caught him looking faintly disturbed as he made the
connection.
Not hardly, Bonnie thought. I might use you, but I won't use you up. Big
difference between us. She satisfied herself with making a face at him and said
only, "Point being permission, and the fact that I don't ask for it from you."
"Do you even know where you need to go?"
"We wouldn't have been dumped far from the nest, so it's got to be around the
restoration site," Bonnie said simply. "They would have wanted to race back and
see their handiwork as soon as the sun set." She smiled sweetly when Damon
looked annoyed. "Aw, did you think that you were having a big insight with that
one?" He made only a disgusted noise and gestured her ahead of him again, but
Bonnie paused long enough to throw a look back over her shoulder at Matilda,
who was leaning up against the kitchen doorway and looking more forlorn than
she probably would have liked to hear.
"Thank you for everything that you've done to help us," Bonnie said, meaning
it. "Really."
Matilda stirred and took a step back before she tossed her hair. "I almost wish
that I could go with you," she said. "Prove Sheila wrong about me if nothing
else."
Bonnie thought about the whiff of perfume that had, for the slightest of
moments, been strong enough to overwhelm the smell of burning. "Who knows? She
actually kind of liked being proven wrong."
End Part Thirteen
***** Chapter 14 *****
Part Fourteen
No one was foolish enough to forget his or her stake, not this time. Bonnie
shifted a little in the passenger seat of the car that she was still really,
really hoping that Damon hadn't stolen, feeling the tip of it press against her
spine. Damon slid her one of his sideways glances.
"If I get killed because your battery isn't charged back up yet, I'm going to
be mad as hell," he warned her. "And then I'll have to haunt your pert little
ass for eternity, and neither one of us wants that."
Bonnie was still equal parts gratified and completely weirded out by the fact
that she was now able to have a conversation with Damon Salvatore in which the
threats were mostly playful, she didn't even want to think about having him
around her for an eternity. They should at least see how long she could go
without smacking him in public first.
"If you get killed, I'm probably going to get killed, too," she pointed out.
"Minor detail. I'm certain that I can still be an effective ghost without being
able to physically pull your pigtails."
Oh, so that's what you've been doing? "It's okay to say that you'll miss me if
I'm not there to be cranky at you anymore," Bonnie informed him, watching the
windshield wipers as they sluiced through the driving rain. It hadn't let up
since they had left Matilda's. Pointing out emotions to Damon Salvatore was
like petting a dog that wasn't certain yet whether or not it wanted to be your
friend: you had to sidle up on them sideways. "Really. You can even go all
medieval and write a sonnet about it or something."
"Sonnets weren't developed until the Renaissance." Damon sounded almost
comically disgusted. "Jesus, and I thought that Saltzman had a frontal lobe
even if no one else teaching at that school can say the same."
"I'm not in his world history classes, be nice. See, you care about someone
enough to be disappointed in them, it's sweet." Bonnie flexed out her fingers
against her legs and asked herself if she was running on foolish bravado again
and hoping luck would help her, if she really was up to this. Answer from the
Magic Eight Ball: try again later. Damn, this had all been so much easier when
she had been too angry to care. "I'll be all right, Damon. I know my limits."
Frankly, thanks to this little trip, she now knew about her limits in places
where she hadn't even known there was pasture, let alone fences.
"Little late to back out now, anyway." It wasn't clear whether Damon was
talking it himself or her. The car idled along at a devastatingly slow speed on
the back roads and in the bad weather, making Bonnie more twitchy by the
moment. So maybe she was overestimating things when she said that she had it
all under control.
"This...is going to take us the entire goddamned day," Bonnie muttered, looking
through the windshield at the blurry smears of houses through the rain, some
set right up on the road and yet others so far back that their shapes had to be
sensed at much as seen. If she were a blood-sucking fiend, she wouldn't want to
have a house that encouraged people to run up and try to sell Girl Scout
cookies...or maybe she would. "Ew."
"I'm not even going to ask what's offended your moral sensibilities this time."
Damon was hunched over the steering wheel and staring as hard as she was, but
his enhanced senses didn't seem to be doing him all that much good. "Look for a
foreclosure sign."
"What? Why? They have enough resources to control a club, I don't think that
they're lacking for nest eggs."
"They don't control that club with money, Bonnie," Damon answered, so...okay,
not the creepiest thing that she had heard all day, but definitely in the top
ten. Bonnie shivered and hoped that killing all of the vampires responsible for
the compulsion would be enough to free the people stuck inside their bodies
like that. "Just keep an eye out, it's an old trick I taught someone that I
turned once." Bonnie turned her head to look at him, but he didn't return the
stare. "Less judging, more looking."
"Less judging than you think." If she was going to keep...whatevering with
Damon, then it wasn't fair to constantly judge him for things that had had
happened before. And that doesn't mean that I'm not still totally willing to
burn his ass if he does them again. Bonnie pressed her face so close up against
the window that she was nearly leaving nose-smudges against the glass, then
yelped triumphantly when she caught a flash of red and white. "There!"
"Atta girl." Damon could pull the car only partway up the dirt driveway before
the rain took the wheels and held them fast like glue. His irritable stomping
of the gas pedal only made the engine whine and threw up thick clots of mud
behind the vehicle which reminded Bonnie way too much of blood shooting out of
an artery. He swore, then asked, "Don't suppose any of you Bennetts can control
the weather?"
"Not even Emily."
"Well, then." Damon took out the uncut lapis lazuli and turned it between his
fingers. "Let's see how far this toy will take me."
"I don't think that you have to have skin to skin contact," Bonnie said
uncertainly. There was a band of metal separating Damon and Stefan from the
stones proper whenever they were wearing their rings, after all. "I think that
it just being on your person will be enough." Damon turned his head slowly to
stare at her, and Bonnie flushed. "I'm sorry, but Katherine didn't exactly line
up a whole cage full of vampires so that Emily could practice her scientific
method, okay?" Knowing what she knew about Katherine, it was more surprising
that she hadn't done that, actually.
"Right. Never let it be said that I was afraid of a risk." Damon hesitated for
long enough to make Bonnie wonder if he wasn't really blowing smoke up her ass
and he actually was nervous, his statements about life being easier to risk
when he had already lived so much of it be damned, before he went on. "Bonnie,
as much noise as this car is making, they probably already know that we're
here."
Oh, for the love of-- Bonnie concentrated on one of the puddles in front of the
vehicle, dimly though she could focus on it through the driving rain, and then
watched in satisfaction as it became a plume of flame so five feet tall before
dying down again.
"And now they definitely know that we're here," Damon went on without a beat.
"Good job."
"Shut up and let's do this." Bonnie expected a shock of cold water as she
stepped out into the rain, but it was so warm that she half-thought that it was
alive, already waiting for her to thread magic through it. She started at a jog
towards the house and saw Damon from the corner of her eye zipping around
towards the back. Towards what end Bonnie wasn't quite certain yet, except that
she didn't think that vampires could sense the presence of one another quite
the way that they could a human. She waited to hear screams and things
breaking, but there was nothing.
It was a fairly long driveway, and Bonnie's feet were squelching before she
made it more than a few steps. Well, they had agreed that stealth was a lost
cause before leaving the car. Bonnie slowed to a walk as she approached the
house and saw a figure standing on the porch, safely back under the shadow
where even the dimmest light wouldn't be able to hurt them. She was too far
away just yet to see what color the vampire's eyes were or even tell if it was
a man or a woman, but Bonnie still knew and thought that she would have even
without the touch of clairvoyance.
"Were you watching us climb out of the well?" Bonnie called to him. She had
been right, and he resolved himself into the same vampire who had bitten her as
they both came closer to one another. He leaned forward and put his hands
against the porch railing without seeming to care that he was bringing the
driving rain into his face, Damon's ring clearly visible on his hand. Bonnie
felt her face twist and wondered if she could yank it, and maybe the whole
fucking hand right along with it, over to her from where she stood. "Did you
stay there the whole day hoping that he would snap and feed on me?"
"Or that he would try and you would kill him." As Bonnie got closer, she felt
the water falling down into her hair and across her body get slightly warmer,
but the vampire on the porch wasn't picking up on those kind of subtleties
quite yet.
Scratch that. Vampires. Bonnie noticed a woman gliding back and forth behind
the male and staring at Bonnie from beneath muddy-blonde bangs. She had a
rangy, overbred look, like a puppy mill hound, and the edges of her nails were
raw from constant biting. Bonnie wouldn't guess her to be any more than twenty
or so when she had been turned, and probably not much older than that even now.
All of her aggression was still human, rather than the effortless animal grace
that Bonnie was coming to recognize in vampires who had been around for awhile.
The male elbowed her back when she got too close, the closest that he came to
acknowledging her existence.
"You're a Bennett, right?" he called down to Bonnie. "You've got their look."
"Nice to know that I'm famous before I even get started." Bonnie hid her hand
against her thigh from a moment, snapped her fingers, and felt a brief spark of
flame lick against her skin before the next few drops extinguished it away. Oh,
yeah. No need to worry about her battery in the slightest.
"There was a Bennett running around here a few decades ago," the male said,
shrugging. "You guys sure tend to wind yourselves around vampires, don't you?"
"Other way around." Bonnie started to raise her hands.
"Look, there's not a vampire on the East Coast who doesn't know what you and
Salvatore are off doing," the male vampire said, with far too little unease, to
Bonnie's mind, to fit someone who was about to be burned alive and then stolen
property dug out of his ashes so that it could be returned to the proper owner.
"So why are you still fucking around in Miami? What if I told you that I knew
exactly where the vampires that you're looking for have gone?"
Bonnie regretted it immediately, but she still couldn't help but lower her
hands, just for a second. "You're assuming that it's either-or," she then
snapped, and raised them up again. Water was actually easier than alcohol, for
reasons that Bonnie had never found explicated in Emily's book and that Pamela
and Kayla were both at a loss to explain themselves. Every drop of rain between
Bonnie and the vampires at the porch simultaneously burst into flame and
ignited the ones above and below them, too, so that a solid wall of fire was
racing straight towards the house. Bonnie saw the male vampire shout and then
grab for the wrist of the female to drag her out of harm's way in the first
display of care that he had shown yet. The nearly broke down the front door in
their haste to get inside and out of the way, which was pretty stupid from
where Bonnie was standing. After all, any fool could see that she wasn't aiming
from the window in the first place. The flames licked along the exposed wood of
the porch, leaving orange and yellow glowing in their wake, teased at the edges
of the roof and found that to be good homestead, too, and ultimately shot
straight through the front window and into the living space beyond. Bonnie only
barely heard the sound of the glass breaking over the crackling of the flames;
by the time that the fire found its way into the vampires' inner sanctum, it
was glowing white.
To stop concentrating so abruptly after that much magic had just poured out of
her was like the longest, hardest exhale that a human being could ever take and
then some. Bonnie swayed a little bit and then consciously straightened her
spine when she caught herself at it. The grass was still smoldering and hot
enough to make the bottoms of her sneakers feel slightly sticky as she marched
the rest of the way across the lawn, up the porch, and into the house.
The furniture wasn't from the scattered timeline of eras and memories that
Matilda had decorated her home with; it was sterile, modern, the kinds of
things that a realtor would pick out in a desperate attempt to prove that the
old plantation house really could be pulled forward and into the twenty-first
century. Bonnie didn't have much time to pause and judge the decor, though, as
most of it was being obliterated by the burst of wild fire that she had sent
into the house ahead of her. Flames leapt from couch to ottoman like trained
pets, all of them under her command even though it was making the tips of her
fingers tremble and her heart shudder in a beat that she had never felt before.
Bonnie jerked her head to the side so hard that her neck creaked and twinged,
bringing the blonde vampire from the porch into view, and pinned her against
the wall beside a staircase out of Gone With the Wind will a pillar of pure
flame. It ended quickly, Bonnie could say that much for her; she was too high
on the anger and the magic for the fire to be anything cooler with a brilliant,
nova-searing white.
Just as Bonnie was whirling to find the next vampire, there was a hand against
her shoulder, and Damon nearly wound up seared alive by the same fire before
Bonnie could catch herself. "Fuck me," he breathed, looking at something within
her face that Bonnie could not view without benefit of a mirror and was not
certain that she wanted to.
Bonnie let out a short laugh and decided not to press the obvious. "How many?"
she asked, and before Damon could answer, "And that blue-eyed bastard?"
"So glad that you're not referring to me." Damon scrutinized Bonnie's face for
a second and then leaned down and kissed her hard. Not the time; Bonnie pushed
him back.
"Kill vampires now, make out later," she ordered, and was gratified somewhere
down deep by watching Damon nod once and then fall back. He was holding a
stake; Bonnie had nearly forgotten that she still had one tucked into the back
of her jeans at all. There was blood on Damon's knuckles that Bonnie could not
tell whether belonged to him or not, as any injury that might have bled them
was long gone.
"Two dozen, near as I can tell," Damon said. He was flinching away from the
fire that was racing all around them from wall to ceiling, whether he realized
it or not, and the air was so hot. Bonnie concentrated again while only barely
aware that the reservoir from which she drew was growing more shallow and that
she was swaying slightly on her feet. The flames drew back to give them a clear
path. Upstairs, Bonnie could hear vampires screaming.
"A dozen, now," she said.
Damon whirled and hurled the stake at a place directly behind Bonnie's ear
before she could react, and it wasn't until she turned that she saw a male
vampire pinned back against the wall via the shaft of wood in his chest for the
barest of moments before her fire took care of the rest of him. "Eleven."
Bonnie wrenched the stake from the vampire's chest with her mind before the
flames could render it useless and repeated the trick on another vampire racing
down the stairs and towards the front door, hoping to take its chances with the
sun. "Ten."
"I love smart women." Damon caught the stake out of the air as Bonnie wrenched
it back for him, then deftly reached around her and took the stake that she was
carrying out of the waistband of her pants, too. "Since it looks like you're
carrying your own weapons as it is."
"The blue-eyed bastard headed out the back," Damon went on. He casually staked
a vampire, tossed it into Bonnie's flames, and then tossed it back again when
his first strike apparently hadn't gone deep enough to end things and it tried
to leap at him. Bonnie finished up by holding it there. It was getting harder
to keep the fire back a safe distance, but she barely noticed the beads of
sweat running down her spine and making her shirt stick to her skin. Her hands
had begun to tremble slightly and in a way that was entirely outside of her
control, like coming up for air on the other side of an all-night studying and
coffee binge.
"Flip a coin with you for who gets to take him out," Bonnie said, grabbing for
Damon's hand and having to satisfy herself with his wrist when that was
occupied by stake. She tugged him along willingly in her wake while the fire,
finally released from its leash, ate up the rest of the room behind them and
then split, one tendril racing up the stairs to the upper stories and the other
following along behind Bonnie to see what she could do.
"He took my ring," Damon said, as if that was supposed to end the matter.
"Well, he pissed me off," Bonnie growled right back in a dangerous tone.
"Maybe we can break him like a wishbone, then." She should have been more
disturbed to hear Damon talking about violence so casually, and more disturbed
to find herself agreeing. Bonnie thought again of the whiff of perfume that she
had caught while enchanting the lapis lazuli and said to herself, This is for
you, Grams. These are vampires who don't get to do to anyone else what happened
to you and me. She raced through the kitchen with Damon and watched metal
appliances already starting to pop and bow out from the tremendous heat that
was following along behind her. The glass exploded out of the front of the
microwave and might have blinded them both if they had been in the way.
At the back porch, Bonnie stumbled and grabbed for the railing to steady
herself. The moment her fingers touched the water-slicked wood, they stopped
being hers and became his instead, cool to the touch from blood no longer
needing to flow to animate them, calluses on his fingers and palms from a
lifetime of work that had ended decades ago. He had wanted to be a musician--
Bonnie yanked her hand away from the wood as soon as she ascertained where he
was headed, not wanting to know anything else that would make him more of a
person to her, even his name. She only then realized that Damon had her about
the waist and was about to swing up up and into his arms. "I'm good," she said.
The window behind her exploded outwards from the heat; Damon shifted them both
so that the glass bounced harmlessly off of his back.
"You were somewhere else," he said.
"I'm still good. The son of a bitch is headed towards the restoration site, the
well." Damon's lips curved up with the edges of a thought that Bonnie wasn't
certain that she wanted to hear. He finished swinging her up and into his arms.
"I'm faster," he said when Bonnie gave him a look.
"Then carry on, steed." She looked behind them once as Damon started to run,
saw that the entire house was engulfed in flames that the rain pouring down
wasn't even beginning to touch. I did that. Pamela and Kayla had never
mentioned doing anything that big--
Damon ran so fast that the raindrops striking Bonnie actually became painful,
and she didn't even feel the jarring of his gait. She gripped hard at his neck
and barely had time to realize that he was carefully tilting his head away from
her own before they were entering the wide open space of the restoration site
out of the thick trees and he was setting her down on her feet. She didn't
wobble before she managed to find them again. She didn't.
"Oh," Bonnie said, stumbling back against Damon's chest a little. He put his
hands against her waist to steady her. "Is my vision doubling?"
"I doubt it. Do you see about half a dozen pissed-off vampires?"
"Goddamnit." Some were wearing jackets with hoods and some had blankets drawn
over their heads to protect them from the weak sunlight; Bonnie saw one vampire
with a singed couch cushion held up over her head. The tops of her hands were
turning pink and slowly starting to bubble. All of their eyes were blacker than
the onyx that she had used for Damon's stone, and their faces looked as if they
were wearing Mardi Gras masks. Fire, Bonnie thought. I want fire. She
concentrated as hard as she could and thought that she smelled smoke, but the
rain washed it away without so much as a spark. Oh, fuck.
"You got this, right?" Bonnie said back over her shoulder to Damon. "'Cause I
think that I'm kinda--" She had thought that her balance in the mud was good,
but then suddenly her feet weren't under her any more and Damon's hands against
her waist were the only things holding her up. He swore so violently that
Bonnie was a little surprised not to see the air light ablaze from that and let
her go. She dropped to her ass in the mud with a yelp, would have been offended
if not for the fact that he was half a second later fending off two vampires at
a time, one per stake, and not looking as if he was doing such a good job of
it. The blue-eyed bastard turned his head towards Bonnie as if she had a radar
beacon glued to her head.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She hadn't considered the possibility that she might
die doing this as she had set out, not really. She had considered the
possibility that Damon might and hadn't been able to honestly tell herself that
she cared, but that had been then, and now only one of them going back to
Mystic Falls and having to face the loved ones of the other was nearly as bad
as no one coming back at all. Bonnie propped herself up on her elbows and
thought, Burn you bastard, burn, burn, as the blue-eyed son of a bitch leaned
over her, but he refused to oblige. Water dropped off of his forehead and onto
Bonnie's as he grabbed the front of her shirt and lifted her up. She kicked out
as his midsection, struggled to pry open his hand and take Damon's ring back,
but it was all like fighting against a Terminator.
"You should have taken me up on my offer," he told her.
"You're not one of the things that I'm second-guessing myself on," Bonnie
grunted. Over his shoulder, she saw Damon fall, and then made an aborted sound
as the blue-eyed bastard twined his fingers through her hair and wrenched her
head to the side so hard that she thought her spine was going to snap. There
was no fucking way that she was going to scream for him, not on this earth or
in any worlds beyond it.
Something dark blurred in from the side and slammed into the blue-eyed bastard
hard, making Bonnie's neck pop in warning yet again as she was suddenly
released and dropped to the ground, mud splattering up and into her eyes. She
thought that by some miracle Damon had managed to get the better of all of the
vampires that he had been fighting and come back for her, but this figure was
much too small. She was wearing a dark hoodie and gloves on her hands; it still
didn't take Bonnie much longer than a second to recognize Matilda. She moved
like a dancer as well as looked like one, and Bonnie wondered what she had
wanted to be before someone had killed her and let her back up again.
Matilda drove her fist into the blue-eyed bastard's throat and then his solar-
plexus, bam-bam, doubling him over and making him gag out something that looked
suspiciously like half-digested blood into the puddles at his feet. He
straightened back up again almost immediately afterwards and backhanded Matilda
off of her feet so hard that she left a long skid mark through the mud to park
her progress as she landed. His features were softer than Damon's even as their
coloring was the same, but Bonnie still thought that the things he was doing
with them now were nearly obscene.
"Do you have a pheromone or something?" he asked Bonnie as he rounded on her
again. Bonnie took a deep breath, drew together every last scrap of magic that
she had left in her body, and swore that if she could do nothing else then she
was at a bare minimum going to make certain that her blood burned all the way
down.
She had to have something left in her. She had to. Bonnie lowered her chin and
squeezed her eyes tight shut, reached down deep inside of herself. She barely
even felt the rain pelting down across her face. If she had fire, or sunlight,
or, hell, she would even settle for being able to levitate a pencil right at
the moment. The blue-eyed bastard was the only one immune to the sun, the rest
of them were just getting lucky, if she could just...
Bonnie was focusing so hard that she barely noticed when the rain stopped
hitting her, though her eyes flew open once she started to hear screams. She
started to lunge back up to her feet, fell into the mud again as her legs let
her know that they weren't there yet, watched as every vampire attacking Damon
burst into flames from the bright, bright sunshine that had burst through the
moody clouds. Damon let out an obscenity that Bonnie could hear from where she
stood and rolled away, letting the mud and the puddles put out the few sparks
that actually landed on him. Matilda yelped something similar and scrambled for
the same shadowy place that had sheltered Damon a day before, seeming to make
it there with only minimal damage. Bonnie could feel her mouth falling open. No
Bennett witch had ever been strong enough to control the weather before, not
even Emily herself, and the sun was still blazing bright and strong up in the
sky even though Bonnie hadn't gathered herself together nearly enough to
attempt a spell.
That was when she noticed three figures standing together, formed of the steam
that was rising up from the soaked ground and the smoke of vampire corpses and
vaguely woman-shaped. Two of them were still familiar, one of them so much that
Bonnie made another aborted attempt to leap to her feet, and the third was
staring off in the direction that Matilda had gone.
Damon flinched instinctively from the bright sunlight before he realized that
Bonnie's stone was still holding, and then a smile that would have told anyone
in his right mind to run like hell and not come back again started spreading
across his face. He and the blue-eyed bastard slammed into one another in a
snarling rush that looked more like wolves attacking one another than men.
Damon had lost both stakes at some point during his melee with the rest of the
vampires, and the blue-eyed bastard had none at all, so they were left to tear
at one another with nothing more than fists and teeth. From where Bonnie was
sitting, they seemed to be doing a fairly effective job of it, too. Damon was
clearly tired and still had a half-dozen healing wounds scattered across his
body; Bonnie reached down so deep that she felt her ears pop and set fire to
the blue-eyed bastard's shirt sleeve. He leapt back, yelling, while Damon
refused to let him go more than a foot or so before grabbing the same arm and
snapping it with a sound that reverberated all the way back to Bonnie.
"You have something of mine," Damon growled right up against the blue-eyed
bastard's face. Bonnie saw a gleam of blue metal on the far side of the
construction site, noticeable now only because there was no longer such a hard
rain falling that seeing things more than a dozen feet off was impossible. She
called Damon's name and pointed. "And you have something of hers, too." He
rummaged about in the blue-eyed bastard's pockets until he came up with the key
to the Prius and flicked it Bonnie's way before he dragged the spitting,
struggling vampire over to the very same well that they had spent a morning in
before. It was only there that he noticed the trio of misty figures, startling
so hard that he nearly lost his grip upon the blue-eyed bastard. Damon dipped
his chin slightly, towards one or all of them Bonnie had no way of knowing,
before he looked to her.
"Well, m'lady?" Damon asked her in a voice that came out slightly distorted
around his eager fangs.
Bonnie lifted her chin. "Do it," she said. Damon snapped the blue-eyed bastards
finger with such a loud sound that Bonnie thought for a second that he had
taken it completely off, wrenched the ring free, and then dropped the other
vampire into the depths of the well. Bonnie didn't hear him hit the bottom. She
was pretty sure that that was due to the flames brought forth from the high
noon sun getting to him first, though this time she didn't need to see it,
knowing that it had been served was enough.
"Okay," she said softly to the misty figures while Damon slipped his ring back
onto his finger. "It's okay, I think I got this." Two seconds later, the sun
was gone, so were they, and the rain was pouring down again. Bonnie pushed
herself slowly back up, her legs now shaky for an entirely different reason.
She went to Matilda, who was still staring in the direction of where the
figures had been. Bonnie had a good feeling that Matilda only cared about the
one of them; Matilda ignored Bonnie's hand for a good three seconds before she
took it and allowed herself to be helped up.
"That was--" Matilda pressed her lips together, shook her head, and pulled her
hoodie back over her hair again.
Bonnie almost did it then, but Damon touched her lightly in the small of her
back before pointing in the direction where Bonnie's inferno still glowed. She
could hear police sirens when she listened carefully.
"Thank you," she told Matilda, meaning every word.
Matilda seemed to realize that she was holding Bonnie's hand and extricated
herself with an over-exaggerated care, as if she were afraid of what she might
do to Bonnie if she forgot for a second that she was a vampire. Her hands were
shaking nearly as badly as Bonnie's. "You're not the mystery that you think you
are," she said. "Wasn't hard to figure out where you were going."
The sleeve of Bonnie's jacket had fallen down, hiding the bracelet. She said,
"Come on, let us give you a ride home."
End Part Fourteen
***** Chapter 15 *****
Part Fifteen
Bonnie and Damon left Matilda at her house, where she wished them with great
sincerity that she would never have to lay eyes upon either of them again. Back
at the motel, Bonnie washed great clots of mud out of her hair, had herself a
good cry in the shower, and then told Damon in no uncertain terms that they
might only have one room, but sleeping was all that she intended to do that
night. She stumbled into the bed and didn't expect to move again until it was
well into the next morning, but her dreams were troubled and her sleep uneven.
Bonnie startled awake more than once to jump even harder when Damon's calf was
thrown over hers, or her arm about his waist, and him seeming to be sleeping
just as deeply as she needed to.
"I'm not going to bite you," Damon murmured after the third time, not bothering
to open his eyes. "I promised."
"You did." Bonnie put her hand against the side of Damon's face and turned it
towards hers. How it was that he could breathe, sweat, and have stubble over
his cheeks while still being so cool was something that Bonnie was always going
to have trouble with. Damon opened his eyes just far enough for Bonnie to see
the blue glimmering while she looked him over, even knowing that all of his
wounds had sealed themselves up again almost as soon as they had been
inflicted. She patted lightly at his cheek, turned over, and slipped asleep
again before she could realize that she had just thought of Damon and herself
as a thing that was going to keep happening, even when they were back in Mystic
Falls and the adventure completely over.
Bonnie woke up the next morning with a very different kind of soreness than the
one she was becoming accustomed, and with an ache behind her eyes suggestive of
either a raging bonfire party or a hard night of studying. At least then she
would have had a lot of fun or a good grade to show Dad and Grams. She had
killed a lot of vampires, though, and saved a lot of people, even if none of
them knew it yet. Grams would have been pleased to know that, if by some wild
chance what had happened the day before was an identical hallucination shared
across three people. Bonnie knew that she would have.
She and Damon spoke little as they each dressed and repacked their things;
Bonnie wondered if his thoughts were traveling down the same path as hers were.
The second that they stepped foot back in Mystic Falls, his promises to her
were finished, and so were hers to him. Back into the wild, wild west. She had
already killed a whole nest of vampires who had barely done a thing to her.
Killing this one...was really going to suck, if he forced her into it. Not
something that she would have ever found herself thinking while she had first
been rolling out of town with Damon Salvatore in her passenger seat.
"We need to make a stop on the way," Bonnie announced without explanation as
she threw her bags into the backseat. Damon, for once, didn't run his mouth
about it. Bonnie had a feeling that he already knew. Well, it wasn't as if he
had any room to talk about doing completely insane things for the sake of
family. Bonnie didn't knock on Matilda's door and thus wasn't sure if she was
even awake inside the house and listening to Bonnie's footsteps coming up the
porch. She had looked beyond exhausted herself when they had taken her back to
her house, hurting from a half-dozen small sunlight burns that she wasn't able
to prevent and too irritable to accept Bonnie's thanks to her as sincere. Maybe
she would think differently of the slim white jewelry box, just the right size
for holding a bracelet, that Bonnie set down on her front doorstep before
turning and walking away.
Damon was out of the car and leaning up against the driver's door when Bonnie
walked back across the lawn, twirling her car key idly around his finger. "Oh,
hell no," Bonnie said, and grabbed his wrist so that she could snatch it from
him. "Seriously, Damon, when are you going to learn that you are not in the
driver's seat on this little adventure?" She maybe held onto his wrist for a
little bit longer than she needed to, and he maybe noticed it.
"I figure that we only have about eight hundred miles left," he answered her.
"Might as well savor it."
"Might as well." Bonnie got back into the driver's seat, put the key into the
ignition. "Please, please do not make me kill you," she whispered in a low
enough voice that she was not sure that even Damon's ears could pick it up as
he slid back into the passenger's side.
The pre-paid cell phone started ringing in her jacket pocket as they pulled
away from the curb. "God, you watch, my dad has somehow gotten this number,"
Bonnie said she dove for it and nearly side-swiped a Volvo. "I'm not going to
see daylight for a year after we get back."
Damon put his knees up against the dashboard and gave her that look of his,
clearly nonplussed by the major wreck that she had just narrowly avoided. "Most
vampires seem to do just fine without it," he said.
"Did I say anything about being able to see nighttime, either? I'm talking
about four walls and bread and water." Bonnie answered the phone and right away
knew that something was wrong, because the person on the other end of the line
was crying. "Elena?" Damon straightened and took his knees down from the
dashboard immediately. "What is it, what's happened?"
Elena pulled herself together long enough to say, "It's Jeremy."
*
Bonnie stayed behind the wheel on the way back to Mystic Falls. Damon didn't
even bitch about how he could have gotten them there faster, mostly due to the
fact that Bonnie thought she could count on one hand the number of times that
her foot even went near the brake. They passed the town limit sign shortly
before sunset and by some minor miracle managed not to either pass a cop that
Bonnie would have to magic straight into next week or run over an intern as she
brought the Prius into an Andretti stop in the very first parking space that
she saw at the hospital. Damon didn't vampire-flash inside and leave her there
to follow at her own human pace, but Bonnie thought that it was a near thing.
His hand was in the small of her back as they entered the ICU; Bonnie honestly
could not say how long it had been there before she had noticed. Elena was
pacing back and forth in front of Jeremy's room, arms crossed over her chest
and her face wet; Stefan was quietly shadowing her movements so that he was
never further than a foot away if he should be needed. Through the room's
blinds, Bonnie saw Jenna sitting by the bed with her elbow propped up on the
armrest and her head in her hand.
"Oh, God, Bonnie," Elena said as soon as she caught sight of her. They hugged
each other so hard that Bonnie thought it a good thing they were already in a
hospital in case one or both of them should break the other's ribs. Over each
girl's shoulders, Damon and Stefan regarded each other without speaking.
"I am so, so sorry, Elena," Bonnie whispered. "What happened?"
Elena let go of Bonnie and swiped at each of her eyes, making a visible effort
to pull herself back together. Bonnie thought that that was the primary reason
Elena had stepped out of Jeremy's room in the first place. "He overdosed on my
leftover pain pills from last summer," she said. Bonnie put her hand over her
mouth. "And it wasn't--I hate saying this, but Jeremy knows how to use, okay?
He knows how much to take. Stefan found a vial in his room that smelled like
vampire blood--"
"He was trying to turn," Damon finished in the kind of emotionless tone that he
adopted when he wanted no one other than himself to know what was really going
on inside. Bonnie looked up at him, but he was succeeding in his goal, and she
realized for the first time that his hand was upon her shoulder. She hadn't
noticed him putting it there. Even though she surely already knew this, Elena
still blanched before she nodded. "Did his heart stop? Even for a minute?"
"No." Stefan looked and sounded tired, though Bonnie saw his eyes going to
Damon's on her shoulder and wondered how long he had realized that it was there
before she had. "I was--near enough the ambulance to keep an ear out." Bonnie
had a sudden image of him riding the hood like something out of Teen Wolf.
"Then we're all standing around like it's his funeral why?" Bonnie removed
Damon's hand from her shoulder so that she could kick him sharply in the shin,
and he made a face at her. Stefan wasn't the only one who looked back and forth
between the two of them with visible wheels turning that time. "Hey, you agreed
to play nice." But we're back in Mystic Falls now, Bonnie thought and did not
say. Damon went on, "I can hear his heartbeat from here, it's strong. If
they've already pumped his stomach, then it's not going to stop anytime soon."
"Once again, Damon, you are the master of sensitivity." Elena was clearly only
pretending to be herself, but pretending was better than nothing. She rubbed at
her eyes again. "It gets worse. Uncle John was murdered tonight in the kitchen.
Someone cut his fingers off--" Damon went straighter behind Bonnie. "And then
stabbed him to death. And then Jeremy tries to commit suicide upstairs--"
"Jeremy would never do something like that," Bonnie said fiercely. She reached
for Elena's hand and squeezed until her fingers ached.
"I know that!" Elena's eyes flashed. That was Bonnie's Original Recipe BFF
there, no pretending required. "But without knowing who or what else actually
killed Uncle John, it looks--really bad. Jenna's had to nearly throw down with
the deputies a few times, and I'm pretty sure that the only reason that Sheriff
Forbes isn't here herself is because of Caroline."
"What happened to Caroline?"
"She was in a car wreck," Stefan said with a calmness that was clearly meant to
be soothing rather than uncaring, though Bonnie wasn't quite sure that she was
in the mood to distinguish. He wrapped his arms around Elena's abdomen and
pulled her close to him, and she put her hand against his forearm. "There was
some internal bleeding, but they got it stopped. She's going to be okay."
For the second time in less than thirty-six hours, Bonnie felt shaky on her
feet, and now that their arrangement had run its course she wasn't certain that
Damon was going to catch her, either. She made her way to one of the chairs
lining the hallway and sat. "Why do I get the feeling that there's a whole
book's worth of things that happened while I was gone?"
"Because my brother is damned lucky that he was too young to be recruited as a
spy when he died?" Damon asked, scrutinizing Stefan closely.
"Damon, why don't we get the girls some coffee?" Stefan asked in a deceptively
casual tone of voice. Bonnie narrowed her eyes before she noticed that Damon
was doing the same thing.
"I'd like that," she said, figuring that her odds were better if she had a few
minutes with Elena alone. "Please."
Damon looked at her with tilted head and said, "You sure you still want to be
up on that pedestal, sweetheart?"
"It's the only way that I can look you in the eyes," Bonnie answered. "You're
too damned tall, Damon." Damon's mouth twitched, but there was still clearly
something being said between himself and his brother in their own private
language as the two of them walked off down the hall together.
"They won't actually wave their dicks at each other in the cafeteria, will
they?" she asked once they were out of sight but still near enough that she had
no doubt in Damon's ability to hear her.
Elena gave Bonnie's sad attempt at humor only the dutiful chuckle that it
deserved. "Damon might. Stefan's surprisingly easy to embarrass." She reached
for Bonnie's hand again while taking her own seat, and Bonnie held on tight.
"Stefan told me what you said to him, about Damon going along because of what
the tomb vampires did to him. Thank you, he needed that." Bonnie wasn't sure if
Elena was referring to Damon or Stefan.
She held onto Elena's hand while Elena craned her neck to look back through the
room's window. "What else happened while I was gone, Elena?"
"The tomb vampires," Elena sighed. Bonnie felt very cold all over, and barely
realized that she was still holding onto Elena's hand. "They came back and
attacked the town yesterday during Founder's Day."
The tomb vampires had come back to Mystic Falls. She had gone on this whole
trip, and they had just come back--she had maybe even driven them back herself
when word got out that a Bennett and a Salvatore were killing as many vampires
as they could find together--
Around lips that she couldn't entirely feel, Bonnie asked, "How many people did
they kill?"
"None. No one." Elena shook her head and didn't seem to notice when Bonnie's
entire body loosened by a half turn and she sagged back into her chair. "There
was this thing that Uncle John stole from Damon and Stefan's house, and it made
a noise that was like a dog whistle to them--if Mr. Saltzman hadn't been there,
they would have gotten Stefan, too--but all of the tomb vampires are dead. They
were burned in my dad's old office."
"Good." Bonnie nodded before asking herself if she really meant it, since she
hadn't been there to deliver the blow herself. It was barely a second before
she nodded again. "Good."
"Good," Elena echoed. She sank back a little further in her chair, arms over
her chest. "I'm starting to feel like I've gotten so used to vampires in my
life that sometimes I forget what monsters most of them are."
It was taking Stefan and Damon a damned long time to get coffee unless they
really had stopped somewhere along the way for that dick-waving contest,
metaphorical or otherwise. Bonnie looked off in the direction that they had
gone before she reclaimed Elena's hand and said, "We'll keep each other
honest."
Elena squeezed back and said, "I'm really glad you're back, Bonnie."
Jenna stepped out of Jeremy's room, closing the door quietly behind her. There
were dark circles under her eyes that would not have looked out of place in a
horror movie. "He only woke up for a few moments, and I don't think that he
really knows what's going on, but--" She stopped short when she noticed Bonnie
sitting there. Bonnie raised her hand in a sheepish wave while the reasonable
adult and the not-that-far-gone teenager visibly warred across Jenna's face.
Ultimately, Jenna pointed the no-nonsense finger that Bonnie knew far too well
from both her father and Grams in Bonnie's direction and said, "In the interest
of Elena, I will give you one hour before you call your father."
"Thanks, Jenna," Elena said quietly. She was still gripping Bonnie's hand tight
enough to hurt, and Bonnie didn't think that Jenna was lying when she said that
sake of Elena was the only reason that her father wasn't descending upon her
head right at this very moment.
Jenna's mouth was still a disapproving shape that she probably wouldn't have
liked to see in the mirror, but she said, "I'm going to go splash some water on
my face. Elena, do you want to--?"
"Yeah," Elena said immediately, rising to her feet. She still looked nervous,
though, and Bonnie wondered how much of it had to do with things that had
transpired while she had been gone and how much of it she had been here for
while she and Elena had still been doing an awkward little dance around each
other.
"Okay." Jenna went down the hallway, but she still threw a look over her
shoulder at Bonnie which suggested that if she knew what was good for her, she
wouldn't make Jenna wait the whole hour before she called her father herself.
Trust me, I know.
"Do you want me to go in with you?" Bonnie asked Elena. Elena looked tempted to
take her up on the offer before she squared her shoulders and shook her head.
"No. Jeremy and I have a lot to hash out, and it's best if we keep it between
us. I might be about to do some very gentle, very sisterly yelling, whether he
remembers it in the morning or not."
Bonnie pulled Elena into a hard hug. "I'm going to go see where the boys are
with the coffee and check on Caroline. Holler if you need me." She watched
Elena enter Jeremy's room and take a seat by the bed before she turned in the
direction where she had last seen Damon and Stefan going. The Mystic Falls ICU
wasn't that large, and it wasn't long before she was able to find a nurse to
tell her where Caroline Forbes' room was, even if she did have to solemnly
promise not to sneak in after visiting hours. She was more surprised to find
Damon leaving just as she was coming upon it, taking great care to shut the
door so as to not wake up Sheriff Forbes curled up in a chair inside. She
looked as if she had not so settled down to rest so much as she had simply
collapsed. Through the window, Bonnie watched as Caroline fidgeted for a moment
with her IV line and then shifted back into sleep. Her pale yellow hair was
sticking out in directions that would have mortified her if she had been aware
of it, and there was a dark bruise that no visit to Sephora was going to cover
spreading across her cheek.
"What did you say to her?" Bonnie asked Damon immediately, more threateningly
than she had intended. There was definitely a rebuke in the coffee that Damon
shoved into her hand.
"Did you know that she prattles even more when she's on morphine? Really helps
to cut down on the tender bonding bullshit," he answered. Bonnie could only put
one hand on her hip unless she wanted to pour scalding hot coffee down her
thigh, but she thought she did a pretty good job of looking imposing all the
same. Damon rolled his eyes. "It doesn't matter. Nothing that she's going to
remember in the morning and, no, I didn't compel her. A deal's a deal,
remember?"
That deal had expired when they had passed the Mystic Falls town limits, but
Damon looked tired and unsettled, and if something fragile had happened in
Caroline's room then Bonnie didn't want to be the one to breathe upon it too
hard and break it.
"What's wrong?" Bonnie asked.
Damon startled so briefly and subtly that Bonnie probably wouldn't have known
it the week before and then rubbed at the back of his neck. Now, that she would
have noticed, but it likely didn't say anything good that Damon had been thrown
off his game badly enough that he was giving overt signals of having actual
human-like responses. "If Jeremy didn't kill John," he started.
"Jeremy didn't kill John," Bonnie said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Damon rolled his eyes and held up his hand to stave her off. There was a gleam
of silver about his finger, and Bonnie realized that he was wearing the wolf
ring that she had gotten for him. She couldn't remember if he had also been
wearing it when they had come into the hospital or on the drive back, but that
had mostly been a blur of trying to avoid cops and wondering if it would really
be all that bad to let Damon compel someone just the once. (Answer: yes. Would
she have still let it slide just this once if it had meant that they got back
to Elena faster? Definitely not a multiple choice answer.)
"Easy, sweetheart, I'm not arguing with you," he said. "But since Jeremy
doesn't have it in him to kill someone like that, then we're looking for
someone who could get in and get out without breaking a single window or lock
and without Jenna being any the wiser that that there was someone else in the
house with her."
"A vampire," Bonnie said, realizing. The thought didn't panic her like it would
have once; whatever she had to do would be done, and that was just the end of
it. "Who had to have been invited in."
"And can still get inside now," Damon confirmed. "No one is safe in that house
until it's dealt with."
"Interesting pronoun from someone who started out giving me lectures on how
vampires are people, too," Bonnie said dryly. She grabbed for Damon's hand
before he could smart off at her, ran her finger lightly across the silver of
his ring. He was wearing it on the opposite hand as the lapis lazuli one that
protected him from the sun, and the metal stayed cool until she started to warm
it with her own human contact. "So, whatever. We have two vampires and a witch
on the case. One measly-peasly little vampire is going to turn out to be
nothing."
"From the witch who's probably going to spend the next year in a Catholic
schoolgirl's outfit," Damon said.
"Not my kink, and if you're seriously thinking that I'm going to let a little
thing like parental disapproval stop me from protecting my friends, then you
obviously haven't been paying attention." Damon still looked deeper within his
own head than was probably a good thing to see unless Bonnie wanted to start
planning for mayhem to follow shortly afterwards, so she set her coffee
carefully down on the chair outside of Caroline's room and grabbed Damon by the
front of his shirt. He followed her willingly enough as Bonnie dragged him in
the direction of the first likely door that she saw, and even made a small,
pleased noise from the back of his throat when he saw where they were going.
"A supply closet?" Damon asked. "Really? I never would have figured you for
such a cliche."
Bonnie grabbed both of Damon's wrists, pinned them up as high as she could
reach and said firmly, "Damon, it's shutting up time now." He didn't seem to
disagree when the end result of his not running his mouth for once was Bonnie
kissing him hard and like a promise, feeling some of the tension running out of
his body and into hers because she could take it. Never had she thought that
she would be in the position of reassuring a vampire by taking control of the
situation away from him, and neither had she thought that she would find
herself liking it so much. She tightened her grip when Damon flexed his wrists
and seemed inclined to break free and take things to a further level,
murmuring, "I like you like this."
If anything, Damon relaxed against her even further, making Bonnie think,
There's something else he's afraid of that he's not telling me yet. Or at the
very least that he suspected, or suspected that Stefan suspected, and Bonnie
had really hoped not to be drawn this far down the rabbit hole into vampire
problems with Elena, but she guessed that it was only fair after she had taken
a vampire so deeply into her own. He stopped returning Bonnie's kisses long
enough to blow a soft stream of air across her ear, her neck, as he bowed his
head and very nearly rested it against her shoulder.
"Just so you know," Bonnie said to him, letting go of his wrists and taking him
by the chin so that he was looking her in the eye, "that first thing we worked
out still holds. No killing humans, no compulsion. I don't want to have to stop
you." Hell of it being that she really, really didn't. "But I absolutely will
if I have to."
"You're shit at this whole seduction thing."
"I didn't recall you needing to be seduced all that hard." Bonnie tightened her
grip on Damon's chin until he looked at her again and knew that she was
serious. "I mean it. Don't make me go there." She let go of him so that she
could lean forward and bite his lower lip, hard enough to make him startle
before vampire healing took over and eased away the tiny hurt. "As for the rest
of it, up to you."
"You are never going to stop being a pain in the ass about this free will
thing, I can already tell." But Damon had his hands about her waist, and he was
leaning in and looking more relaxed than Bonnie had seen him since Elena had
called them both.
"Among us humans, that free will thing is kinda a big deal." Bonnie snorted.
"And while you might frequently need to be put on a leash--" Damon's eyes
darkened, oh, God help them both. "I want you to ask me for it."
Damon huffed out a soft breath, leaned close, and still didn't kiss Bonnie
until she tipped up her chin in a silent command. He took his time with her
mouth until Bonnie grabbed him by the back of his neck and made a frustrated
noise, lowered his attentions almost negligently down to her neck. Bonnie could
feel that her pulse didn't flutter any harder, and that that frustrated him,
and that he liked that it frustrated him. He never had been one to ignore a
challenge, she was willing to bet. Damon's hands fell down to her jeans, just
about the surest way that he had of getting her attention outside of running
his mouth, and they had plenty of uses for that, too. Bonnie had the rare
experience of actually seeing Damon Salvatore startled when she slapped his
hands away.
"Shh," she said before he could speak. "Not a talking time."
"Ma'am, yes, ma'am," Damon said, which was why Bonnie was maybe a little
rougher than she had to be when she took him in hand and stroked him off,
running her nails under his shirt and against the skin of his abdomen just hard
enough to remind him that she was still there and that she would keep her
promises, every last one of them. She didn't know if Damon got it, didn't know
if he caught it as a reassurance or as a threat, but he made a low sound as he
came and suckled a dark spot in the side of her neck that she swore he did just
to see if she could either magic or makeup it away before she had to explain it
to her father.
"You are a son of a bitch," Bonnie said, pushing him in the chest as she went
to look for something in the closet with which to clean up her hand. Damon
didn't let her get far before he was tugging her back with the hand wearing the
wolf ring; she could feel it warming at her touch in a way that it would never
manage with vampire skin alone. Whatever it is that you know or think you know,
I got it, Bonnie thought, didn't know whether she meant it to be soothing or
not until her body was pressed up against Damon's and, even though he was the
one resting his back against the wall, she could feel him leaning up against
her very subtly.
"Already told you," Damon said against her ear as Bonnie grabbed his wrists
again and figured up in her head that she had maybe thirty minutes, maybe as
little as twenty, with which to check on Caroline and re-check on Elena before
the hour that Jenna had given her ran out. "It suits me."
End
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