Because tonight what happened wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.
He was holding Elena in his dorm room at Dalcrest College and Elena’s skin was as white as the stark white sheets of his bed, except for the two little puncture wounds in her throat. They were ruby-colored. Literally. Human blood was the shade of a ruby held to the light.
Stefan had gotten lost in the fog of passion of biting this new Elena, the human girl of eighteen summers, who had been returned by the Celestial Court to live an ordinary life. And now . . .
. . . he had murdered her. In truth.
He could just make out the echoes in his mind of her last thought to him.
Stefan . . . this was my fault . . . not yours. Please . . . I’m not afraid . . .
And then, in heartbreaking tones:
Dream of me now and then . . . nothing is ever really forgotten . . .
Stefan Salvatore stared down at Elena Gilbert, boneless in his arms, exactly like a beautiful white bird shot from the sky. He made no effort to slash his throat. He knew it was useless. It was useless even to call her name, although he found himself doing that, over and over, with mind and voice.
Elena did not, could not respond.
Fragments of pointless, pathetically cliché thoughts floated through Stefan’s head. Please, let this not be happening . . . I never meant any harm . . . Elena wanted it so much . . . she was so happy . . . I would never hurt her!
Yet he was swollen with Power, filled with a dangerously high percentage of the bloodstream of the young woman he loved. The enormous energy of the Power sickened him. Used as he was to the bare-sustenance stimulation of animal blood, Stefan found that Elena’s donation brought every sense, every emotion into appalling clarity.
Moreover, the unique flavor of Elena’s blood still filled his mouth each time he swallowed. That was unbearable.
Frantic, Stefan tried to dissipate some of his Power into the atmosphere, but he simply had too much. He was going to be sick. He wanted to die.
Then—all at once—he sensed something that made everything else completely irrelevant. Through his increased Power, he suddenly detected what he had imagined to be impossible.
A heartbeat.
Elena still had a pulse: intermittent and hideously faint, but clear in his mind. Her heart was contracting feebly, still fighting for her. She was even trying to breathe, although the movement of her lungs was almost imperceptible even to him.
Without a thought, Stefan began to use his Power to aid Elena’s laboring organs. He helped them to do their job more efficiently. It didn’t bring any of Elena’s aura back, but it did keep oxygen flowing to her brain.
Wait, a small voice inside him suddenly counseled. Think! There are two ways you might save her!
For one instant Stefan sat perfectly still. He could see two futures equally clearly before him. In the first, he did what he had done in his nightmare and opened an artery for Elena to drink. His blood would be potent in her nearly exsanguinated body, and she would die and change into a vampire instantly and forever.
In the second, he did something different. He kept Elena’s heart and lungs working until he could get her to a hospital set up to give immediate transfusions. The small Dalcrest College clinic was out of the question. That meant he had to get Elena to Mercy Havenwick Hospital in Campbell, ten miles away.
In that scenario, Elena might come out of this as a living, breathing human girl, not as some heartbreakingly innocent undead thing.
It took only a moment for Stefan to decide. The only ethical choice was to try to save her as a human.
From that instant, his movements were swift, precise, and almost dispassionate. He enhanced the workings of Elena’s heart and lungs so that she was breathing shallowly and her pulse remained steady. Then he stood and lifted her body in one motion, absently touching a finger to the markings on her throat. If she was to be an ordinary human, she could not afford to be the center of a debate about vampires. The little wounds healed at his touch. He flung the door open and ran down the hallway with the long, easy strides of a predator. He was lucky; he had encounters with only three groups of open-mouthed students on his way to the parking lot. Without pausing, he Influenced them all to have seen nothing of him carrying a beautiful dead girl.
In moments he had Elena in his black Porsche Panamera Turbo Executive. He broke just about every traffic law he had ever heard of in driving to the hospital, and collected an entourage of two police cars. That wasn’t important. He could outrun them in this particular car. His reflexes were so much faster than the officers who were driving that he could lose them entirely if he wished.
He didn’t wish. He didn’t give a damn. He was going as quickly as he safely could already. And he was thinking desperately.
How could this have happened? If Elena lived, how could he explain to her? He had warned her when she had first discovered that he was a vampire that he would harm her through sheer unthinking force. Back then, Elena had been no more afraid than she’d been tonight. She had come to him in all gentleness, and had defeated the raging beast that he could feel inside his head.
After that, though, he’d done things to that beast within himself. He had chained it—or at least he thought he had. He had set up a system of checks and balances that were supposed to cut in and awaken his conscious mind if he stayed too long at Elena’s throat.
How, then, had it happened? How? How could he have brought Elena to this hideous state? She was his world, his heaven on earth. She was all he wanted of heaven, and all he could ever have. Damon’s coma had not been death, and Stefan remained grimly convinced that vampires were, in fact, damned to simply lose their souls when they died.
How could he have fallen so far into hell, then, that he had almost killed the one human creature he adored?