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  Elena rang the doorbell and waited impatiently. After a minute, she tried again, then knocked on the door. No one came. Andrés, she remembered, had planned to spend the afternoon at the library, and then go out to dinner.

  James had probably had a quick errand. Pulling out her phone again, Elena dialed his number. It rang, and rang again. Elena cocked her head. She was pretty sure she could hear James’s ringtone coming from inside the house.

  So he had gone out and forgotten his phone, Elena thought nervously, shifting from one foot to the other. That didn’t mean anything was wrong.

  Should she just sit on the porch and wait for James? Stefan would probably be here soon, too. She looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. She was pretty sure Stefan’s class let out around five thirty. It would be dark soon, though. She didn’t really want to wait here alone after dark. Not with Klaus’s army out there somewhere.

  And what if something was wrong? Why would James have left, when he’d asked Elena to come over? If he was in there, and he wasn’t answering . . . Elena’s heart was pounding hard. She tried to look in the window over the porch, but the shades were drawn and she only saw her own worried reflection.

  Making up her mind, Elena reached out and twisted the doorknob. It turned easily in her hand, and the door opened. Elena stepped inside. It wasn’t the way she had been raised—Aunt Judith would be horrified to know Elena was walking into someone’s house uninvited—but she was sure James would understand.

  Elena had already closed the door behind her when she noticed the streak of blood. It was wide and still wet, a long stripe of blood just at hand-level, as if someone with bloody hands had strode down the hall, carelessly wiping the blood on the walls as he went.

  Elena froze, and then, her mind blank, walked forward. Something in her was screaming stop stop, but her feet just kept going as if they weren’t even under her control anymore, down the hall and into the usually neat and cheerful kitchen.

  The kitchen was still flooded with sunlight through its western-facing windows. The copper pots hanging from the ceiling reflected the light back, illuminating all the corners.

  And everywhere, on all the shining surfaces, were great dark splashes of blood.

  James’s body was slumped over the kitchen table. Elena knew at a glance that he was dead. He must be dead—no one could live with their insides spilled across the floor like that—but she went to him anyway. She still felt numb, but she realized she had clapped one hand over her own mouth, holding back the whimpering noise that wanted to come out. She made an effort and pulled the hand away from her mouth, swallowed hard. Oh, God.

  “James,” she said, and pressed her fingers against his neck, trying to find a pulse. His skin was still warm and sticky with blood, but there was no heartbeat at all. “Oh, James, oh, no,” she whispered again, horrified and so, so sorry for him.

  He had been half in love with her mother when he was a student, she remembered; he’d been her father’s best friend. He could be stuffy and wasn’t always brave, but he had helped her. And he had been funny and smart, and he really hadn’t deserved to die this way just because he had helped Elena. There was no question in her mind that this was because of her: Klaus had come after James because he was on Elena’s side.

  She reached for her Guardian Powers, tried to sense his aura, to see if there was anything she could do, but there was no aura left around him. James’s body was here, but everything that made him a person was gone.

  Hot tears were running down her face and Elena wiped furiously at them. Her hand was sticky with James’s blood, and, sickened, she wiped it on one of the kitchen towels before pulling out her phone again. She needed Stefan. Stefan could help.

  No answer. Elena left a brief, tense message and tucked the phone away. She had to get out of here. It would be unbearable to stay any longer in this room with its slaughterhouse smell and James’s sad, accusing shell at the table. She could wait for Stefan outside.

  As she was about to leave, something caught her eye. On the kitchen table, the only thing not spattered with blood, sat a single pristine sheet of expensive-looking stationery. Elena hesitated. There was something familiar about it.

  Almost against her will, she walked slowly back toward the table, where she picked up the paper and turned it over. It was just as blank and clean on the other side.

  Last time, she remembered, there were dirty fingerprints. Perhaps Klaus had washed his hands after wiping them on the walls. A deep, warming anger was building inside her. It felt like such a violation that, after . . . doing that to poor James, Klaus might wash his hands in the porcelain sink James had kept clean, dried his fingers on James’s carefully arranged towels.

  She knew what to expect from Klaus’s message, but she still stiffened, hissing involuntarily through her teeth as black letters began to appear on the paper, written with long jagged downstrokes as if slashed with an invisible knife. She read them with a growing sense of dread.

  Elena—

  I told you I’d find out the truth. He had plenty to say by the time I let him die.

  Until next time,

  Klaus

  Elena doubled over as if she had been punched in the stomach. No, she thought. Please, no. After everything they’d been through, Klaus had found out her secret. He’d find a way to kill her now—she was sure of it.

  She had to pull herself together. She had to keep going. Elena shuddered once, her body jerking, and then took a deep breath. Carefully, she folded the paper and put it in her pocket. Stefan and the others ought to see it.

  She was still operating on automatic as she walked outside, shutting James’s front door firmly behind her. There was a spot of blood on her jeans and she rubbed at it absently for a moment, then raised her hand and stared at the red streaks. Without warning, she convulsed, retching into the bushes by the door.

  He knew. Oh, God, Klaus knew.

  Chapter 32

  Thanks for meeting me,” Cristian said. He grinned up at Meredith from his seat on the weight bench. “I know you don’t remember,” he added, “but we used to work out together a lot.”

  “Really?” Meredith said, interested. She could believe it, easily: anyone raised by her father would try hard to excel physically. “Which one of us was better?”

  Cristian’s smile widened. “That was pretty hotly disputed, as a matter of fact,” he said. “You were a little faster than me, and better with the stave and martial arts, but I was stronger and better with knives and bows.”

  “Huh.” Meredith was good with knives, she thought. Of course, in her reality—the real reality, she reminded herself—she’d had a lot more actual battle experience than Cristian. “Maybe we should see if that’s still true,” she said challengingly. “You know, I’ve gotten pretty strong.”

  Cristian chuckled. “Meredith,” he said. “I’m a vampire now. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten stronger, too.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, his face fell. “A vampire,” he repeated, rubbing one hand across his mouth. “It’s hard to believe, you know?” He shook his head. “I’ve become the thing I’m supposed to hate.” He raised his eyes to meet Meredith’s, and his face was bleak.

  A pang of pity swamped Meredith. She could remember how she’d felt, before the Guardians changed everything, when she’d learned that Klaus had left her wrong, a living girl with kitten vampire teeth and a need for blood.

  It had gone away. But now Cristian was changed, and desolate.

  “There are good vampires, you know,” she told him. “My friends Stefan and Chloe, they fought with us against Klaus. Stefan’s saved a lot of people.” Cristian nodded, acknowledging her words, but didn’t speak.

  “Okay,” Meredith said, mimicking her father’s time-to-train, no-nonsense tone as best she could. It wouldn’t help Cristian to dwell on his misery. “Enough flapping of the lips. Show me what you’ve got.”

  Cristian grinned, welcoming the change of mood, and stretched ba
ck on the weight bench, his hands on the racked barbell overhead. “Load me up,” he said. “I want to see how strong I am now.”

  Part of this achingly reminded her of Samantha, Meredith thought, of how they’d trained together, goading each other to fight harder, longer, better. Maybe, Meredith thought as she added weight plates to the bar above Cristian, he’d want to try sparring later.

  Meredith started Cristian at about two hundred pounds, which he pressed easily, his mouth giving a wry twist. “Come on,” he said. “I could press this when I was alive.”

  There was no one else in the weight room, and so Meredith didn’t have to be subtle about loading on the weights. Cristian handled as much as she could give him, his muscled but thin arms moving up and down like pistons.

  “I’m so strong,” he said giddily, smiling up at her.

  Meredith recognized his smile. It was the smile she’d seen in the mirror on her own face when she was suddenly, startlingly happy. When she’d gotten her black belt. The night after Alaric had kissed her for the first time.

  Maybe they could get past all this, become a team. Meredith let herself picture hunting with Cristian, fighting beside him. He was a vampire—a good vampire, she told herself fiercely, like Stefan—but he was a hunter, too. A Sulez.

  “Your turn,” Cristian said, clunking the bar back up into its support. It was so heavily loaded with weight plates now that the bar itself was bending.

  Meredith laughed. “You know I can’t lift that much. You win, okay?”

  “Aw, come on,” Cristian said. “I’ll cut you some slack since you’re human. And, you know, a girl.” Meredith looked up to snap at him that being a girl had very little to do with how much she’d be able to press, and caught a teasing glint in his eye. Right then, she could believe he was her brother. Cristian started taking the plates off and putting them back in their racks.

  “All right,” Meredith said, and fastidiously, showily wiped off the bench, although it wasn’t actually sweaty: apparently sweating was one of those things vampires didn’t do.

  Cristian started her off at a hundred and fifty pounds, heavy but manageable, and watched as Meredith began a set of reps.

  “So,” she said, keeping her voice casual and focusing on raising and lowering the bar. “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like?” Cristian asked absently. She could just glimpse him out of the corner of her eye, examining the weights, picking what to put on next.

  “Being a vampire.”

  “Oh.” Cristian moved across the room, just out of Meredith’s sight, but his voice was clear and thoughtful, a little dreamy. “It’s a rush, really,” he said. “I can hear everything and smell everything. All my senses are heightened, like, a million percent. They say I’ll get more Power, I’ll be able to turn into animals and birds, make people do whatever I want.”

  He sounded excited at the prospect, his tone losing the bitterness it had held when he talked about becoming something he hated, and Meredith wished she could see his face.

  “More?” he said brightly when he was right above her, extra weight plates in hand. His smile was bland, giving nothing away.

  “Okay,” she said, and instead of helping her get the bar back onto its support, he simply steadied it with one hand and slid more weight onto each side. Meredith grunted as he let go: it was heavier than she usually made it now, but still manageable. Almost too much, but she didn’t want to let Cristian know that. In a funny way they were still competing despite his vampire strength, and she was going to take as much as she could.

  Cristian was still really close, spotting her as she lifted, and Meredith’s arms shook and strained after a couple of reps.

  “The details are sharper, you know?” Cristian said suddenly. “I can even hear the blood rushing through your veins from here.”

  Meredith went cold and breathless. There had been something almost hungry about the way he spoke about her blood. “Take the bar,” she ordered. “This is too much.” She needed to get up.

  Cristian reached for the bar, but instead of guiding it back into its support, he carefully added still more weight to each side.

  “Stop it,” Meredith croaked. It was far too heavy now, and Cristian must know that. She was in trouble here, real trouble, but she needed to stay calm, needed Cristian not to realize that she was scared.

  “You forgot something about vampires,” Cristian said, and smiled down at her, that same teasing, brotherly smile. “Dad would be so disappointed.” He let go of the bar and it crashed down toward Meredith’s chest; she was unable to support its weight.

  She grunted as it fell, managing to slow it enough to keep it from cracking her rib cage, but with no breath or energy to focus on anything except protecting her chest from the dead weight of the bar. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, and she turned her head to look at him, her heart beating hard, and made a muffled, breathless moan. No one would hear her. She could die right here, at the hands of her brother.

  Cristian went on. “A vampire, as you should know from our training, Meredith, is completely focused on his or her sire when they’re first turned.”

  Maybe she could shift it, this weight pressing down on her, driving all the breath from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. Black spots swam in front of her eyes.

  “All that matters to me is Klaus, what Klaus wants,” Cristian told her. “If you were a good hunter, you would have remembered that bond trumps everything else. I don’t know how you could have imagined my human family”—his voice curdled on the word, like there was something disgusting in it—“would matter to me more than that.”

  Meredith pushed at the bar helplessly, dizzy now with pain. She tried to signal Cristian with her eyes, desperately: fine, whatever, be Klaus’s if you must, but don’t kill me like this. Let me up so we can fight as we’ve been trained.

  Cristian was kneeling beside her now, his face so close to hers. “Klaus wants you dead,” he whispered, “you and all your friends. And I’ll do whatever I can to make him happy.” His gray eyes, just like her mother’s eyes, held hers as he took hold of the bar she was clutching and pushed it down onto her chest.

  Everything went black for a moment. Red flowers bloomed and burst in the darkness, and Meredith realized muzzily that it was her brain sending out random signals as it began to shut down from lack of oxygen.

  She was beginning to float, as if she was suspended in a black sea. It would be good to rest. She was so tired.

  Then a voice snapped through the darkness in Meredith’s mind, her father’s voice. Meredith! it said. It was impatient, firm but not unkind, the exact tone that had gotten her out of bed to run laps before school, encouraged her to practice a tae kwon do form when all she wanted to do was go out with her friends. You’re a Sulez, the voice said. You must fight!

  With a nearly superhuman effort, Meredith opened her eyes. Everything was blurry and she felt so slow, as if she was trying to move underwater.

  Cristian’s hand had relaxed on the bar. He must have thought all the fight in her was gone.

  Meredith took every bit of strength she had gathered and pushed the bar up and away from her, tumbling her unwary vampire brother over with the bar on top of him. She had one glimpse of Cristian’s startled, infuriated face before she ran as fast as she could, legs weak, heart pounding, gasping for breath, straight out of the weight room, out of the gym, and onto the paths of campus.

  She had to slow as she approached her dorm, her legs sore and her lungs burning now that that original surge of adrenaline had worn off. Meredith tried to push herself onward, but she was stumbling now. At any moment, Cristian might grab her. He could have caught her by now, of course.

  Just outside the dorm, she gathered her courage and spun around. No one was there. He had intended to kill her alone and in secret, and he would no doubt try again. Meredith unlocked the door and staggered in, flopping down to sit on the bottom step of the staircase.

  She was still gaspin
g for breath, and she choked on a sob. Meredith had wanted to know her brother, but he was already gone; he was Klaus’s family now.

  As she rubbed at her strained muscles, Meredith realized dully what she was going to have to do. She was going to have to kill Cristian.

  Chapter 33

  Damon licked a trace of blood carefully from the back of his hand and smiled at Katherine. They’d come across a couple walking through the woods just after dawn and fed together, and now it was midmorning, sunlight streaming down through the trees and casting black and golden shadows on the path. Damon felt full and content, ready to go home and sleep away the brightest of the daylight hours. A slight unease crossed his mind as he remembered the expression of panic on his victim’s face, and he pushed it away: he was a vampire; this was what he was supposed to do.

  Dabbing delicately at the corners of her mouth, Katherine cocked her head at him, as dainty and quizzical as a little songbird. “Why didn’t you kill yours?” she asked.

  Shrugging defensively, Damon slipped his sunglasses out of his pocket and over his eyes. He wasn’t, to be completely honest, sure why he hadn’t killed the girl this morning, or why he hadn’t killed any of his victims since the blond jogger he’d hunted down more than a week before. He could remember how good the kill had felt, the rush as her life passed into him, but he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, not when the lingering aftertaste was guilt. He didn’t want to feel anything for them; he wanted to take the blood and go. If that meant letting them live, that was fine with Damon.

  Shielded behind the sunglasses, he said none of this, but merely smirked at Katherine and asked, “Why didn’t you?”

  “Oh, we’re all keeping a low profile. Too many deaths and this campus will panic again. Klaus wants to keep the humans happy and easy to hunt while he finishes off your girl and her friends.” Katherine eyed Damon as she smoothed her long golden hair, and he kept his expression carefully blank. Whatever Katherine wanted from him, she wasn’t going to get it by bringing up Elena.