Destiny Rising (The Vampire Diaries 10)

Bonnie clenched her eyes and her jaw shut tighter. Even if she were willing to betray Elena - which she wasn't, she never would, no matter what, she told herself firmly - she didn't believe Klaus would keep his promise. She remembered dazedly how Vickie Bennett had died, though, at Klaus's hands. She'd been torn to shreds, her blood spattered like a kid had swung around a can of red paint in her pink room. Maybe Klaus had killed Vickie in her dreams.

Klaus chuckled, and the air around Bonnie shifted again.

"What's going on?" a confused, frightened, and oh-so-familiar voice asked. Bonnie's eyes snapped open.

Next to her in midair dangled Zander. All the color was bleached out of his face, so that his wide, terrified eyes looked even more impossibly blue than usual. He was grasping at empty air with both hands, struggling to find something to hold on to.

"Bonnie?" he croaked. "Please, what's going on?"

"Your girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, is refusing to tell me something I want to know," Klaus told him. Klaus was seated on the railing of the bell tower, his own legs dangling off the side. He smiled at Zander. "I thought if I brought you in, you might provide some incentive for her. "

Zander looked at Bonnie pleadingly. "Please tell him, Bonnie," he begged. "I need this to stop. Let me down. "

Bonnie gulped, panicking. "Zander," she said. "Zander, oh, no. Don't hurt him. "

"Whatever happens to Zander now is your fault, redbird," Klaus reminded her.

And then something clicked together. Hang on, a voice said inside Bonnie's head. The voice, cool and cynical, sounded sort of like Meredith. Zander's not scar

ed of heights. He loves them.

"Stop it," she said to Klaus. "That's not Zander. That's just something you made up. If you're finding stuff inside my head, you're doing a terrible job. Zander's nothing like that. "

Klaus gave a sharp growl of irritation, and the Zander he'd created went limp in the air beside her, his head flopping to one side. He looked disturbingly dead like that, and even though Bonnie knew it wasn't real, she had to look away.

She'd known all along this was a dream, of course. But she'd forgotten the central thing about controlling dreams: they weren't real.

"This is a dream," she murmured to herself. "Nothing is real and I can change whatever I want. " She looked at the false Zander and blipped him back out of existence.

"Clever, aren't you?" Klaus commented, and then, as easily as opening his hand, he let her fall.

Bonnie sucked in one frightened breath, and then remembered to make a floor under her feet. She stumbled as she landed, her ankle turning under her, but she wasn't hurt.

"It's not over yet, redbird," Klaus said, climbing down from the railing and walking toward her across the air as if it were solid, his dirty raincoat flapping in the breeze. He was still chuckling, and there was something about the sound that frightened Bonnie. Without even thinking about it, she flexed her mind and threw him as far as she could.

Klaus's body flew backward, as floppy as a rag doll, and Bonnie had just a second to see his startled expression turn to rage before he was only a falling black speck on the horizon. As Bonnie watched, the speck stopped falling, turned, and rose, coming back toward her. It moved alarmingly fast, and soon she could make out the outline of some great predatory bird, a hawk perhaps, swooping toward her.

Time to wake up, she thought. "It's just a dream," she said. Nothing happened. Klaus was getting closer, much closer.

"It's only a dream," she repeated, "and I can wake up anytime I want. I want to wake up now. "

And then she really did wake, warm under her comforter in her own cozy bed.

After one gasp of pure relief, Bonnie began to cry - great, ugly, choking sobs. She reached onto her desk, feeling for her cell phone. The images of Zander, his face intent, kissing Shay, hanging powerlessly in the air, stuck with her. They hadn't been the real Zander; Bonnie knew that intellectually. But she needed to hear his voice anyway. Just as she was about to push the button to dial, she hesitated.

It wasn't fair to call him, was it? She was the one who had said they should take some time apart, so Zander could think about what would be right for him, not just as a person, but as the Alpha of a Pack. It wouldn't be fair to call him to make herself feel better, just because Klaus had used his image in Bonnie's dream.

She turned the phone off and shoved it back onto the desk, sobbing harder.

"Bonnie?" The bed dipped as Meredith crossed the space from her own bed and sat on the edge of Bonnie's. "Are you okay?"

In the morning, Bonnie would tell Meredith and the others everything. It was important that they know that Klaus had gotten into her dreams again, and that the techniques Alaric had researched had let Bonnie fight him off this time. But she couldn't talk about it right now, not in the dark.

"Bad dream," she said instead. "Stay here for a minute, okay?"

"Okay," Meredith said, and Bonnie felt her friend's thin, strong arm wrap around her shoulders. "It'll be all right, Bonnie," Meredith said, patting her on the back.

"I don't think so," Bonnie said, and buried her head on Meredith's shoulder and wept.