Stefan barely managed to wrestle himself to sanity before he drank too deeply, and dropped his virus into Matt’s undefended mind. Then, not knowing what else to do with him, he ordered Matt to follow him and took him to the dark ICU room where Meredith and Bonnie were sleeping. He propped Matt up against a wall by the window and hastened back toward Elena, only to stop dead in consternation.
Elena’s Aunt Judith was advancing on the central nurses’ reception area. But she was accompanied by more than just her husband Robert.
She had brought a very wide-eyed five-year-old Margaret, too. Probably no time to get a babysitter, Stefan thought, eyeing Elena’s little sister askance. The child had a strange ability—not witchcraft as he understood it—to see certain things that adults missed. Fortunately, he told himself with desperate optimism, Margaret also had a tendency to keep Elena’s secrets to herself.
But the little girl wasn’t the biggest problem, by far. There were two women behind her.
One was Dr. Alpert, who had been such a steady friend in the battle against the fox-spirits and their mind-poisoning creatures called malach, now forgotten by all ordinary townsfolk because the Celestial Court had reset the world so that the war hadn’t happened.
The other woman, walking with a cane but briskly, was Stefan’s one-time landlady: the shape-changing, erudite, and most-thoroughly-perceptive town witch, Mrs. Flowers. Why had Elena’s aunt called her?
Wrong assumption, Stefan thought. Dr. Alpert had probably brought the old woman, who had probably been warned about what was going to happen and called Elena’s physician looking for a lift.
But even this group was nothing compared to the presence that Stefan could sense arriving just above the hospital. Up there the weather had suddenly turned very nasty indeed for September, with thunder clashing like a war of the gods overhead, and freezing, foggy rain cutting the visibility down to a distance of three feet, all lit by greenish-purple clouds in flashes of many-tongued lightning. Stefan could sense it easily with his heightened Power.
Someone out there with a great deal of Power of their own was seriously unhappy, and Stefan recognized the unique signature of the one in the midst of the holocaust.
Damon had arrived.
Stefan had no idea of how to handle him. But handle him he must, and immediately, because Damon’s mental voice was now crashing like a tsunami into Stefan’s mind.
On the roof, little brother. And right this instant. I want to see you coming at a dead run.
* * *
Yes, as Damon had sat in the dimly-lit booth with Kenzy, he recognized the psychic screamer, and it was his own little redbird, Bonnie the brown-eyed enchantress, caught in a moment of unbearable trauma and funneling all her terror and distress into a tight psychic message addressed to him.
Someone was hurting Bonnie, he’d realized, perhaps even killing her. That meant someone was going to be exceedingly sorry exceedingly soon. Whoever it was would learn the meaning of pain in a hundred languages before they would be allowed to die. Damon had flashed his most gorgeous barracuda smile at nothing at all.
“Excuse me for just a bit, will you, sweetheart?”
He had extricated himself from the surprised Kenzy’s embrace and slid out of the booth before she could say a word. “I need to dash off on an errand for maybe half an hour. Then I’ll be back—or you’ll know I’m not coming. Keep the booth warm for me just in case?”
But I won’t be hungry when I get back, he thought, pocketing his hipflask—it would never do to let humans reverse engineer Black Magic—and walking with swift grace to the surly bartender. He dropped a crisp hundred dollar bill on the bar, said, “See that my friend gets everything she needs and nothing she doesn’t want,” and was out of the door before the man could gather his wits for a response.
Outside, Damon had sniffed the air: brisk and chilly, and getting colder by the minute in response to his mood. He didn’t even glance at his beloved matte black Ferrari 458 Spider blending into the shadows at the back of the parking lot. Instead, he took a bearing on the direction of the psychic scream, and then promptly disappeared.
Where a compact young man with dark hair and eyes had been standing, a single, downy crow’s feather fluttered. It glinted for an instant in rainbow iridescence before alighting, black as midnight, on the dirty sidewalk. By that time, however, the crow itself was high in the air, winging its way toward the town of Campbell, as storm clouds piled up suddenly in what had been a moonless but clear and starlit sky.
Damon-the-crow admired his clouds from underneath by lightning flashes: their shape; their menace; their unusual and inventive color scheme.
Meanwhile he was making his best speed toward Campbell using the Power he’d gained from Kenzy in the last few hours, and the Power he’d gained from Grace at supper, and the Power he’d gained from Arianna at lunch to boost his own considerable natural Power. He couldn’t teleport; not even he had found a way to do that, but he could fly much faster than any ordinary bird, which often gave others the impression that he could travel instantaneously.
And right this minute he was dive-bombing a building where just a short while ago Bonnie had released her deafening shriek of terror. It seemed to be a hospital, he noted, and another surge of fury washed over him. He needed to be invited in to any building where humans lived and slept, and waiting around for an invitation did not appeal in the least.
In mid-dive however, he sensed something that overwhelmed his fury with a surge of baffled frustration. He was close enough to the hospital to get a range of energy signatures, but what he saw didn’t make any sense. He could see every life-force in the building clearly, and Bonnie was in a room, lying down on a bed perfectly still. The only other readings he got in the room were from Meredith, Bonnie’s roommate and childhood protector, and Mutt Honeycutt, a completely harmless human, whose surname Damon had at last been able to master because it was so much like a brand of ham.
Even weirder, when he tried to contact Bonnie psychically, he got an answer that would have fooled lesser telepaths into thinking they’d achieved a connection and everything was fine. Damon was too powerful and skeptical to be misled. He was accessing an answering machine. Bonnie’s real brain was shut down, comatose, but a layer at the top had been added that reassured a shallow probe that she was fine, just fine, just very fine.
Then Damon caught other familiar life readings and his dive almost turned into a spin.
Elena! Elena was there, but her aura was so dim that he could hardly get a fix on it. Normally, it shone out warm and bright and all shades of gold, from antique to platinum, like the silken web of her hair.
For an instant, horror and astonishment set Damon’s rage on the back burner. Gods, he thought, stricken, what had happened last night? He didn’t bother trying to contact Elena psychically; she was too weak even to sustain an answering-machine proxy.
And then—finally—Damon noticed the aura he should have seen first. He had been so focused on Bonnie and her surroundings, and then he’d spread out his probe over just a little more physica
l space . . . but still, he rebuked himself, that was no excuse. Any ordinary visitor would have seen in the hospital one aura that overshadowed all the others, one so strong that Damon had to zoom his out perception several times so that he could view all of it.