In the classrooms, though, everything seems quite ordinary and modern. I don’t know what I expected. Huge cobwebs and black candelabra hanging from the ceilings? (Actually, there are some candelabra in what used to be the entryway and great rooms of the old mansion. But they’re not black and they’ve been converted to electric lighting.)
Of course, you already know about the one thing that’s quite odd. At least you should if you got my previous letter (to which I am still waiting for an answer . . . dearest.) The campus is nestled snugly between the town of Dyer and Dyer Wood. The wood, of course, is where we . . .
She read the last paragraph over thoughtfully. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be too specific. Alaric might be older than her, and have graduated from Duke, but sometimes he had a ridiculous boyish habit of being careless with
pieces of paper.
Besides, something was bothering her. The room was too quiet. Usually Bonnie hummed like an amiably off-tune bumblebee, or sang quite loudly—still off-tune—to the music in her ear buds, or else drummed her fingers when confronted by a difficult quadratic equation. Right now she was doing nothing of the kind. If she thought that Meredith didn’t know she was worried, then she had another think—
“I do not need a cup of soothing chamomile tea,” Bonnie said in tones of withering dignity.
Meredith turned around to see Bonnie’s small stiff back, the shoulders hunched too tightly.
“I don’t even like soothing chamomile tea,” the petite redhead was going on, but Meredith crossed the few paces between the desks in their room and laid gentle hands on those fragile-looking shoulders.
“What about a backrub?” she suggested.
Bonnie just clutched at her strawberry curls. “I’m not that worried—I mean I am—and I’m sorry! There! Now I’ve started trouble and I don’t even know anything for certain!”
Meredith tried to begin a gentle massage of the slender neck bowed in defeat. The muscles were so tightly cramped that she couldn’t do anything to them without kneading hard with her strong hands and hurting Bonnie at first.
Instead, she flopped on her bed, gazing at the lacy homemade curtains that framed the darkness of the dorm room’s window. She narrowed her eyes as she examined the curtain rod.
“Bonnie?”
A sniffle.
“Bonnie, talk to me! Come on, girl,” Meredith said, bringing all her powers of persuasion to bear. “You’re a witch and I’m a hunter-slayer and there is absolutely nothing that you can say that would startle me.”
“I know,” Bonnie replied wretchedly. “But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? You’ll believe me, Elena will believe me, Stefan will believe me . . . but I don’t know whether I believe me!”
“Well,” Meredith said sensibly, “then you have to let us decide what to do about the prophecy on our own.”
“Who said I had a prophecy?” Bonnie turned around at last, brown eyes wide.
“Well, you—I mean, if you didn’t, then what are we talking about?”
“It’s not a real prophecy or even a prediction. I didn’t even trance—unless these Algebra word problems bored me into one.”
“Well, what’s wrong, then?”
“It’s just a feeling. A stupid, stupid, stupid feeling I can’t shake. I’m scared, is all. I keep thinking ‘something awful is going to happen tonight’ over and over.” Bonnie put her head back on her desk.
“Something awful . . . but that’s almost exactly—”
“I know!” Bonnie cried irritably. “We read Elena’s diaries together, remember? It’s how she started the very first of her . . . her vampire diaries! She wrote: ‘Something awful is going to happen today!’—and it did!”
Meredith was surprised into sitting up straight. She found herself looking at her own reflection in the shadowed window, dark eyes, dark hair and serious expression all taken in at once. Then, abruptly, she jumped up on the bed and reached for something that lay hidden by the top ruffle of the curtains. It was lying on the curtain rod.
She brought out her fighting stave: a deadly spear made of ironwood, with tips that were embellished with tiny spikes of different sorts. It was lethal to vampires, werewolves, and humans, among many other nasty creatures. It had belonged, once, to her great-grandmother.
Bonnie was watching her wide-eyed.
“Elena’s going to be safe tonight,” Meredith said grimly. “She’ll be with Stefan. And she’ll keep an eye on him, so he’ll be all right. That Damon will be fine goes without saying. Which leaves us with you and me and Matt—and Caroline, I guess.”
“She crossed it out,” Bonnie muttered, looking harassed.
“What? Caroline—?”