“O-kay,” Damon said, aloud this time. “And then?”
“And then we stayed up there too long, high up, in the light. In the sunrise. We were so happy.”
“And then?” But Damon was beginning to have uncomfortable feelings of déjà vu. In the Dark Dimension, in the mansion of the Silver Nightingale, he had bitten Elena. He couldn’t even remember if he had kissed her first. And he had drunk Elena’s blood, thirstily, desperately, because he had been fighting back the pain of massive blood loss himself.
She had tried to pull back from him, he remembered, but he’d clung to her until she scarcely had the strength to move. Afterward, she’d fainted and needed transfusions—and that in a culture which was barely more advanced than medieval.
Who was he to judge Stefan?
But it still didn’t make sense. He could understand that Stefan had fallen under the spell of bliss and taken far too much blood. What he couldn’t understand was Bonnie, lying motionless in a dark room along with Meredith and Mutt, also as still as waxworks.
“After you realized that Elena was—a little dead—you drove her to the hospital,” he coaxed Stefan.
“It was the fastest way, driving,” Stefan agreed in a level voice. “But the police followed me. I had to Influence them, and then Influence the doctors here to give Elena a massive transfusion instead of cutting her open to find internal bleeding.”
Ha. Yes, Damon thought. Elena must have posed quite a puzzle to the first doctors who saw her. Stefan was too smart to have left a mark on her, so it would have been The Case of the Vanishing Blood.
“You didn’t bite the doctors, though, I presume.”
The sarcasm went right over Stefan’s head. “No, of course not. I had plenty of Power. I just put the right ideas in their minds and then I blurred myself in their memories and removed my name.”
“But Bonnie. Why did you have to bite Bonnie? Did she come with you?”
“No,” Stefan said, doing the eerie, ageless serenity thing that was beginning to drive Damon crazy. “I called our friends at Dalcrest when Elena was out of danger. I’d had plenty of time with Elena; I sat with her for hours during the transfusions. I found a way to make a sort of neurological virus. Well, I say a virus, but I mean a friendly one.”
“To help Elena get her strength back, you mean,” Damon hazarded.
“Oh, I was doing that all along,” Stefan said.
Damon had a sense of having gone astray or missing something important.
“But you bit Bonnie and others—why?”
“To make them forget me.”
“Forget what about you?”
“Everything about me. I bit them to gain more Power to Influence them and I put
this seek-and-destroy virus in their minds. It erases all memories of me and puts in a little bit of blurriness around where the memory was. It should be as effective as when I worked it out bit by bit with Elena.”
Without looking at all less weird Stefan suddenly looked very earnest. “I had to,” he said. “I’m too dangerous for Elena—and if I left her friends’ memories intact they would just try to remind her of me. She wouldn’t believe them because all her memories of me are gone. Not just inaccessible, but completely gone, blasted away. Lots of tricky work there. But if they kept insisting on something that she knew wasn’t true . . . well, I guess she might end up in an insane asylum.” He cocked his head to one side.
Hairs were standing up on the nape of Damon’s neck. It wasn’t an experience he was used to and he suppressed the desire to back away slowly. This is Stefan, only Stefan, my little brother, he told himself. I know how to deal with him; I’ve dealt with him hundreds of times before. Usually just by beating him up, all right, yes, but I must have learned some other strategies sometime.
Unfortunately his brain seemed to be as blank as the ones that Stefan had meddled with tonight. Reply hazy; ask again later.
“Listen,” he said, carefully keeping his voice low and devoid of inflection. “I’m sure you know—Elena must have told you—that I did the same thing to her five or six weeks ago. It seems much longer, but it was just the first time we went to the Dark Dimension. One night I took so much blood from her that she collapsed and had to be transfused. I did even worse than you did because there wasn’t even a modern hospital to take her to—”
Damon noticed that his voice was rising. He reined himself in and found that he was holding up his hands like a negotiator entering a hostage situation.
“Anyway, Elena forgave me, and we put it behind us.”
Stefan hadn’t blinked throughout Damon’s monologue, not once. Now, he did blink, once, as if deliberately. Then he glanced up.
Damon followed his gaze to see that all his beautiful thunderheads had dissipated somehow and that the stars were scintillating in the moonless black-satin sky.
When he quickly looked back at Stefan he found that Stefan was doing the stare-out again.