After greeting Andres, Stefan turned back to Elena. "I think we're all good to go," he told her. "Are you ready?"
"Okay," Elena said. Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply, feeling Andres feed her his Power, opening herself up to let it stream into her.
"Think of protection," Andres told her, his voice barely more than a whisper. "Think of defending those you love against Klaus. " Elena concentrated, and as before, it was like blossoms unfolding within her, one by one.
She felt the familiar ominous gray and blue of Damon's aura off across campus, and pushed it away, concentrated harder. Klaus. Klaus. There was something else, greasy and dark, like a pall of foul smoke. Worse than Damon's aura, much worse.
Her eyes snapped open. "This way," she said.
Even to Meredith, who was easily the best human hiker in the group, it felt like they'd been trekking for hours. They were deep into the woods now, and the sun had passed overhead and was hanging above the horizon; they were going to lose the advantage daylight would have given them. But Elena still walked on, as straight and certain as if she was following a clearly laid-out road through the trees.
Meredith pulled the hair off her neck into a ponytail, trying to cool off, and continued after Elena, pushing away the memory of the last time she'd let Elena lead them, of Damon's vicious feeding. A good warrior focused on the battle ahead of her, not conflicts within her own army.
The ground was growing swampy, their steps leaving little puddles of water seeping through the mud behind them, when Elena suddenly halted and gestured the others to come closer to her.
"We're almost there," she said. "Just through that next stand of trees. "
"Are you sure it's Klaus?" Meredith asked, and Elena shook her head.
"It's a big group of vampires, anyway," she said. "I can sense that. Who else could it be?"
Stefan nodded. "I feel them, too. "
Now that everyone knew where they were going, Elena dropped back to walk with Alaric and Bonnie, who began muttering spells of protection and concealment, their hands extended. Andres, breathing deeply and seeming to draw Power into himself, joined them. It was time for the fighters to take the lead.
Stefan and Meredith moved side by side, Meredith balancing her stave. Stefan was poised on the balls of his feet. His mouth was slightly ajar, and Meredith could see that his sharp canine teeth had descended in anticipation of their attack. She felt a slight, unexpected pang: not long ago, Damon had fought beside her and he had been a worthy comrade, quick and brave and relentless. Stefan was all of that; but he didn't take the same pleasure in a fight that Damon did. If only Damon could be trusted.
Zander, Shay, and the four other Pack werewolves who could shift without the full moon at its peak had changed, and they flanked Stefan and Meredith. Moving quietly, they paced ahead with their tails held out straight behind them and their ears pricked forward, lips pulling back in silent snarls. Zander and Shay, leading the Pack on each side, moved in tandem, each one's step perfectly in time with the other's. The five remaining werewolves, who would not be able to change until the moon rose, walked behind them, as alert and focused as their lupine family. Matt and Chloe came next, halfway between the warriors and the others.
They shouldered their way through the last grove of trees, placing their feet carefully to avoid making noise. Bonnie and Alaric mouthed quiet spells, muffling their approach.
But when they came at last into the open, they found Klaus, dressed now in the shabby raincoat Meredith remembered with a stab of terror from their encounters in Fell's Church, his face alight with terrifying good humor, laughing. There was a huge group of vampires there, easily outnumbering their own forces, and every eye was already fixed upon them.
In that frozen moment, Me
redith could see all the vampires in sharp definition. Her brain snagged on a face and stopped in confusion. Elena. But Elena was behind her, and Meredith had never seen Elena's face hold so much malice. Then she realized: the paler gold of the hair, the lighter blue of the eyes, the slightly mad glee in the pretty face. This wasn't Elena. It was Katherine, somehow reborn.
And then, just behind Katherine, Meredith saw another face she knew, and her heart froze. It couldn't be Cristian. Her brother was human now; the Guardians made sure of that. Didn't they?
But there was Cristian, his face familiar only from the pictures at home, and he smiled at her intimately across the clearing, his vampire canines visible. For a fraction of second, Meredith's hands loosened on her stave and she swayed on her feet. But then she tightened her grip again and took a fighting stance. She'd thought her family was safe, that Cristian had been returned to them. Everything was crumbling again at this very moment, but she still had a battle to fight.
Chapter 20
People were rushing past Elena on all sides, buffeting and banging against her, so she flattened herself against a tree. The noise was overwhelming - shouts and groans and bodies slamming together.
Klaus's army was too big, but her friends were holding their own. Stefan, his face a mask of fury, was grappling with a slim, fair-haired girl. When Elena caught a glimpse of the girl's face, her heart seemed to stop for a second. Katherine.
Elena had seen Katherine die, seen lines of fire crack her face open as she screamed. How could she be here? Katherine raised a hand and scratched at Stefan's face, her fingers bent into claws, and he twisted her arm viciously, snarling and knocking her to the ground, where they were lost to Elena's view.
Meredith was sparring with a handsome, dark-haired guy whose face was vaguely familiar to Elena. They were evenly matched, each blocking the other's blows with deadly speed and efficiency. Meredith looked tense and serious, without the gleeful expression she often had in battle.
Matt and Chloe had squared off against a female vampire, Chloe shielding Matt with her body and yanking the vampire's head back, trying to turn her so that Matt could stake her through the heart. The vampire snarled and twisted in Chloe's hands.
A wild howl came from one side of the clearing, making the hair on the back of Elena's neck stand up on end, and her eyes shot to the horizon: the sun was hanging low and a full moon had just risen. The rest of the werewolves had changed as they fought, and now the vampires who had been battling them in human form fell back as the Pack leaped eagerly upon them. Zander and Shay, who was easily identifiable by the reddish tint of her fur, pulled a vampire down together, their heavy bodies pinning him as they tore at his flesh.
Bonnie and Alaric were chanting in Latin, their voices steady but strained. Beside Elena, she could hear Andres muttering softly in Spanish. She glanced at him, and his aura was so clear she could see it without even trying: a circle the color of beech leaves in spring was spreading out from him, touching on their allies in the fight. She realized that like Bonnie and Alaric, Andres was using all the Power he could call on to protect her friends.
They were fighting hard, but there were so many of the vampires, at least twenty. Both men and women of different races and ethnicities, but all young, all beautiful. All with a certain mad savagery in their expression that echoed Klaus's. Their faces were wild with hate and with anticipation. They wanted to fight, Elena could tell, wanted to kill. One, a golden-haired boy who looked younger than Elena herself, high-school age maybe, wrestled a werewolf to the ground laughing, his face smeared with blood.