Лиза Смит - The Return - Midnight

Carefully Elena reached a fingertip in. She touched one of Meredith’s canines.

Tiny pinch.

Startled, Elena pulled back. She stared at her finger where a very small drop of blood was welling up.

Everyone watched it, mesmerized. Then Elena’s mouth said without pausing to consult her brain, “You have kitten teeth.”

The next moment Meredith had brushed Elena aside and was pacing wildly all around the kitchen. “I won’t be one! I won’t be! I’m a hunter-slayer, not a vampire!

I’ll kill myself if I’m a vampire!” She was deadly serious. Elena felt Stefan feeling it, the quick thrust of the stave between her ribs and into the heart. She would go on the Internet to find the right area. Ironwood and white ash piercing her heart, stilling it forever…sealing off the evil that was Meredith Sulez.

Be calm! Be calm! Stefan’s Influence flooded into her.

Meredith was not calm.

“But before that I have to kill my brother.” She flung down a photograph on Mrs.

Flowers’s kitchen table. “It turns out that Klaus or someone has been sending these since Cristian was four — on my real birthday. For years! And in every picture you could see his vampire teeth. Not ‘kitten teeth.’ And then they stopped coming when I was about ten. But they had shown him growing up! With pointed teeth! And last year this one came.”

Elena leaped for the photo, but it was closer to Stefan and he was faster. He stared in astonishment. “Growing up?” he said. She could feel how shaken he was — and how envious. No one had given him that option.

Elena looked at the pacing Meredith and around at Stefan. “But it’s impossible, isn’t it?” she said. “I thought that if you were bitten, that was it, right? You never got any older — or bigger.”

“That’s what I thought too. But Klaus was an Old One and who knows what they can do?” Stefan answered.

Damon will be furious when he finds out, Elena told Stefan privately, reaching for the picture even though she’d already seen it through Stefan’s eyes. Damon was very bitter about Stefan’s height advantage — about anyone’s height advantage.

Elena brought the picture to Mrs. Flowers and looked at it with her. It showed an extremely handsome boy, with hair that was just Meredith’s dark color. He looked like Meredith in his facial structure and olive skin. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket and gloves, but no helmet, and he was laughing merrily with a full set of very white teeth. You could easily see that the canines were long and pointed.

Elena looked back and forth from Meredith to the picture. The only difference she could see was that this boy’s eyes seemed lighter. Everything else screamed

“twins.”

“First I kill him,” Meredith repeated tiredly. “Then I kill myself.” She stumbled back to the table and sat, almost knocking over her chair.

Elena hovered near her, snatching two mugs from the table, to prevent Meredith’s clumsy arm from sweeping them to the floor.

Meredith…clumsy! Elena had never seen Meredith ungraceful or clumsy before.

It was frightening. Was it somehow due to being — at least partly — a vampire? The kitten teeth? Elena turned apprehensive eyes on Stefan, felt Stefan’s own bewilderment.

Then both of them, without consultation, turned to look at Mrs. Flowers. She gave them an apologetic little-old-lady smile.

“Gotta kill…find him, kill him…first,” Meredith was whispering as her dark head lowered to the table, to the pillow of her arms. “Find him…where? Grandpa… where? Cristian…my brother…”

Elena listened silently until there was only soft breathing to be heard.

“You drugged her?” she whispered to Mrs. Flowers.

“It was what Mama thought best. She’s a strong, healthy girl. It won’t harm her to sleep from now through the night. Because I’m sorry to tell you, but we have another problem right now.”

Elena glanced at Stefan, saw fear dawning on his face, and demanded, “What?”

Absolutely nothing was coming through their link. He’d shut it down.

Elena turned to Mrs. Flowers. “What?”

“I’m very worried about dear Matt.”

“Matt,” agreed Stefan, looking around the table as if to show that Matt wasn’t there. He was trying to protect Elena from the chills racing through him.

At first Elena wasn’t alarmed. “I know where he might be,” she said brightly. She was remembering stories that Matt had told of being in Fell’s Church while she and the others had been in the Dark Dimension. “Dr. Alpert’s place. Or out with her, making the rounds of home visits.”

Mrs. Flowers shook her head, her expression bleak. “I’m afraid not, Elena dear.

Sophia — Dr. Alpert — called me and told me she was taking Matt’s mother, your own family, and several other people with her and escaping Fell’s Church entirely. And I don’t blame her a bit — but Matt wasn’t one of those going. She said he meant to stay and fight. That was around twelve thirty.”

Elena’s eyes automatically went to the kitchen clock. Horror shot through her, flipping her stomach and reverberating out to her fingertips. The clock said 4:354:35 P.M.! But that had to be wrong. She and Stefan had only joined minds a few minutes ago. Meredith’s rage hadn’t lasted that long. This was impossible!

“That clock — it’s not right!” She appealed to Mrs. Flowers, but heard at the same time Stefan’s telepathic voice, It’s the mind-blending. I didn’t want to rush. But I was lost in it too — it’s not your fault, Elena!

“It is my fault,” Elena snapped back aloud. “I never meant to forget about my friends for the entire afternoon! And Matt — Matt would never scare us by keeping us waiting for his call! I should have called him! I shouldn’t have been—” She looked at Stefan with unhappy eyes. The only thing burning inside her right now was the shame of failing Matt.

“I did call his mobile number,” Mrs. Flowers said very gently. “Mama advised me to do so, all the way back at half past twelve. But he didn’t answer. I’ve called every hour since. Mama won’t say more than that it’s time we looked into things directly.”

Elena ran to Mrs. Flowers and wept on the soft cambric lacework at the old woman’s neck. “You did our job for us,” she said. “Thank you. But now we have to go and find him.”

She whirled on Stefan. “Can you put Meredith in the first-floor bedroom? Just take off her shoes and put her on top of the covers. Mrs. Flowers, if you’re going to be alone here, we’ll leave Saber and Talon to take care of you. Then we’ll keep in touch by mobile. And we’ll search every house in Fell’s Church — but I guess we should go to the thicket first…”

“Wait, Elena my dear.” Mrs. Flowers had her eyes shut. Elena waited, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other. Stefan was just returning from putting Meredith in the front room.

Suddenly, Mrs. Flowers smiled, eyes still shut. “Mama says she will do her utmost for you two, since you are so devoted to your friend. She says that Matt is not anywhere in Fell’s Church. And she says, take the dog, Saber. The falcon will watch over Meredith while we are away.” Mrs. Flowers’s eyes opened. “Although we might plaster her window and door with Post-it Notes,” she said, “just to make sure.”

“No,” Elena said flatly. “I’m sorry, but I won’t leave Meredith and you on your own with only a bird for protection. We’ll take you both with us, covered in amulets if you like, and then we can take both animals, too. Back in the Dark Dimension, they worked together when Bloddeuwedd was trying to kill us.”

“All right,” Stefan said at once, knowing Elena well enough to realize that a halfhour-long argument could ensue and Elena would never be moved an inch from her position. Mrs. Flowers must have known it too, for she rose, also immediately, and went to get ready.