“Wait.” It was just one word, spoken hoarsely, but it froze Stefan like a troll caught by sunlight. It took him a moment before he could compose himself enough to look back into the room.
Meredith was standing up, but she was farther from the door than before. She was standing by the window, looking out as if she were seeking answers in Mrs. Flowers’ kitchen garden.
“Wait,” she said again, as if to herself. “Stefan, do you think—that he can get into our thoughts as well as our dreams?”
Stefan felt a bound of hope in his chest, followed by the inevitable fall. “I don’t know. He would have to be very powerful. And we would have to be very vulnerable—“
“—such as when I’m concentrating all my energies on relaxing and letting myself be controlled by something from the outside?”
Stefan studied Meredith for longer this time. He noticed that her eyes did not skitter away from his gaze. She wasn’t afraid to look at him.
“Is it all right if I come back in?” he asked, as if it wasn’t his own room and she nodded without hesitation. She wasn’t afraid to be alone with him.
But despite the warmth that kindled inside him at such signs he had to be rational.
“Meredith, what you were thinking—I caught some of it. I couldn’t help it. And you were right. I’m not human. I’m not the same species as you are. I’m a carnivore that would live only off humans if . . . if I could live with myself that way.”
“And I am a . . . a xenophobe.” She glanced at him as if to see if he knew the English word. “Someone afraid of aliens, that’s the dictionary definition. But it really means someone afraid of humans from other countries, or people who are just too different.” Very suddenly, she put her hands to her face, which wasn’t like Meredith at all.
Meredith was always in control. Her voice, muffled, went on, “I’m ashamed of myself. I know you, and yet I could thin
k all that . . . crap.”
And she didn’t swear, not even mildly. Stefan began to speak to her to explain that she was the one who was right, and that he was just as alien and dangerous as she had thought, when she took her hands away from her face.
“I know you, Stefan Salvatore. And if you say that everything I was thinking is true then I have some thinking to do. I can’t help but be prejudiced on the side of ordinary humans. But I also owe an apology to the one of your . . . species . . . who is willing to die to save mine.”
She walked toward him, her hand held out. Stefan stood mute. Then he took her hand, but instead of shaking it, bent and kissed it.
But he was thinking about Elena, and about just how rare she had been. Without him controlling her mind, she had accepted him. Without him controlling her mind, she had seduced him—for that had been, in truth, what had happened. Without the slightest fetter around her mind or body, she had given him her blood, and had delighted in it.
Elena had been like a force of nature: take her or leave her for the passionate, cynical, idealistic, selfcentered, generoustoafault, girl that had been her mortal self. A wild tropical storm in rising in a millpond. An orchid in a field of daisies; a gryphon in a herd of sheep. Elena had never been like anyone but herself. And she had absolutely gloried in the moment when she could drop all her defenses and submit entirely to the fate of the quarry caught by the hunter—because the hunter had been her heart’s desire, and because in all other things he was her slave, to cherish or spurn or destroy as she pleased. And Stefan had gloried in that.
They had been a pair of mad little things, in love in a way that was senseless and probably hopeless from the start. First love—for he now realized that before Elena he had only experienced infatuation—on a planetary scale. But it had changed him, he would swear, from a creature who gloomily enjoyed his doom; a zombie that could only remember and remember the time of his humanity, into an approximation of a human being—for the little time that he had had her.
Maybe I’m insane, he thought, shame always ready to leap for his throat. I helped her—after the first time when she had it all her own way—to do those things. If what they had done equated to madness, as it would seem to, then he had aided and abetted her . . .
Stop it, Stefan!
The voice was so sharp it was almost like having Damon mock him, urging him to renounce the role of martyr. Stefan flushed, full of new blood, full of anger—
And then in shock, glanced upward.
There was no mistaking that voice—or that indignation. Bonnie had been right, his inamorata was here, watching over him. He looked at Meredith to see if she had heard anything and saw that she hadn’t.
Who was he to flout one of Elena’s edicts?
Meredith’s dark eyes were on him. He said, apropos of nothing, “You rigged the drawing of the twigs. You made sure you’d be first.”
She didn’t admit it aloud, but he could still pick up thoughts from her mind.
Rigorously, he tried to shut his own mind to it.
“You wanted to see if it was bearable.”
This time she answered him. “If it would be bearable for anybody except Elena. I think Bonnie will be fine, if you control her mind, and keep it light and romantic.”
“Like the kiss?”