Then, just as Damon began to put a fang to Kenzy’s soft brown throat for the third time, just as his canines were at their sharpest and most sensitive, a psychic scream split his universe.
It was long, it was loud, and it was painful. In addition, it was addressed directly to him, which meant that absolutely no one else in the world was sharing his misery. When Damon was unhappy, he liked to spread the anguish around liberally.
But the really, really bad thing was that he couldn’t just ignore the scream, picking up where he had left off his date with Kenzy’s vein. He couldn’t. Because now his entire body was thrumming with fury. He recognized the screamer as clearly as if she were sitting in the booth with him.
Damon was cynically curious about exactly what he was going to do to the person who had made her call to him.
She belongs to me, he sent out on a heavy wave of Power and on all frequencies, including the one the scream had come on. It might not be obvious, but she is mine. Touch her again and die.
Silence. But there was nothing at all to prevent Damon from tracking the call back to its origin.
That was exactly what he did.
* * *
Killing Elena . . . completely by accident . . .
If there was a single nightmare that had woken Stefan from his sleep more than any other, it was the one he’d had the first night after he’d seen her.
It went something like this:
He was holding Elena, Elena the high-school senior, the radiant girl of only seventeen summers. Somehow he had explained what he was to her, and somehow she had been able to accept it, to accept him, and even to glory in the way it could join their minds like two candle flames merging.
When he was awake he was far too ashamed to ever imagine breaking his vow of drinking only animal blood. However, his sleeping visions were daring, audacious.
In the beginning of this nightmare, he was drinking Elena’s blood and he was very deep inside her mind. He could feel a response to his love so profound it shook him to sinew and bone.
The feeling made him realize that the purpose of his entire life had been to find Elena, to love Elena, to be loved by her.
We’ll stay just like this, Elena told him without spoken words, and he could feel her shiver with terrible joy as she discovered telepathy.
Yes, we will, he sent back to her gently. Whatever you want, love—that’s what we’ll do.
That was when the dream changed.
It began with a dull realization that he and Elena had been reveling at the peak of rapture for a very long time. For . . . an exceedingly long time. He had lost himself and Elena had never uttered a whisper of complaint. But . . . but . . . for exactly how long had he been drinking? How much blood had he drawn out? Oh, please, God, not enough to harm her.
He was so unfamiliar with the ecstasy that came with taking any kind of human blood that he couldn’t judge at all.
He had to stop. Now!
In his dream, Stefan did manage to make himself stop, to sever the blood-bond and lift his he
ad from Elena’s slim white neck. The sudden feeling of separation was shocking, like stepping naked into a storm of icy sleet. But that didn’t matter.
What was important was that the last physical response he felt from Elena was the sensation of her arms around him, trying to renew the link between them.
“No,” he whispered. “No, love. We can’t; not now. In fact, I was getting frightened that we’d already—”
Elena’s arms slipped away from him and fell, limp, to either side.
After which Stefan found to his horror that he was holding a girl who lay like a white swan shot from the sky. Her lapis-blue eyes were open but unseeing; her lips parted but stirred by no breath. Her skin was pale as chalk. Her glorious hair swept down to trail on the floor. Worst of all, her vibrant aura had been snuffed out; extinguished.
“No!” he shouted in the nightmare. “Elena—no! Come back!”
With typical nightmare sluggishness, Stefan used a sharp wooden splinter to open an artery in his neck and tried to force some of the spurting blood into Elena’s mouth. But he knew the truth already. Elena was dead—too far gone to even become a vampire.
Usually, Stefan woke then, sitting bolt upright in bed with a scream trapped in his throat. Tonight, however, there was no such merciful awakening.