“I don’t suppose you’ve been scanning or probing for a Power signature that would fit a new vampire,” Damon said thoughtfully.
“No. It never occurred to me.”
“Well, it occurred to me, and I’ve been doing it since I saw the news story. I haven’t found anything.”
“Which means that somehow I still could have done it. Although, after the buck I wasn’t hungry at all, only tired to death.”
“Where did you hunt this magical buck?”
“Where do you think? In the Old Woods. First I found a doe, then I slept, but I woke up hungry again. I tracked this gorgeous buck and—I killed him. I hated to do it, but he was full of energy.”
“A shape-changer?” Damon wondered aloud.
“No, no. It was just a beautiful reddish-brown buck with an incredible aura. After that I slept through the day. And then, just as I told you, I was driving back to pick up Meredith’s fighting stave when I heard the news on the radio.” Stefan shrugged. “I can scan the area now.”
Damon let him. He wasn’t surprised when Stefan came up with no results. But they were over half an hour away from Fell’s Church, and even farther from Heron. The girl had presumably been attacked either where she lived or where she’d been hospitalized. Someone that far away might be able to hide among the werewolves that inevitably showed up on any scan.
“There’s another reason it couldn’t have been you,” Damon said when Stefan admitted defeat. “Bonnie’s been going into trances again.”
“What? What did she say?”
“The first two times were just general scare-everybody stuff, like ‘You’re all going to die.’ But tonight, right after the news broadcast she said that—well, essentially that both Elena and the new girl were sacrifices. Blood sacrifices. Also that whoever was behind the sacrifices was going to continue making them. . . for ‘fun.’”
Stefan’s head came up. “But how can—what I did with Elena—be part of anyone else’s sacrifice?”
“I don’t know. Although Bonnie did mention tonight that something more was going to happen to Elena. She didn’t specify what. And that first night at Mercy Havenwick she said that Elena was going to die.”
“And you never even thought about telling me?” Stefan asked in a deadly cold voice.
“Honestly? No, I didn’t. I imagined that you had enough to deal with already. And besides, at the hospital I didn’t really take anything Bonnie said in trance too seriously. I thought she was picking up on some insane patient’s nightmares or something.”
Stefan shut his eyes and shook his head slowly. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m getting a headache.”
“Serves you right,” Damon said unkindly. “You’ve been giving them to me for half a millennium.”
“How? By not screaming loudly enough when you attacked me? By occasionally finding someplace to hide where you couldn’t persecute me?”
Damon decided that discreet silence was the better part of valor for the moment. He merely smiled faintly.
“You realize,” Stefan said heavily, “that I can’t leave now. Not until I’m certain that she’s going to be safe.”
Damon had his own private theory as to whether Stefan would have been able to leave under any circumstances, but all he said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Stefan shrugged. “I can’t leave you supposedly watching over Elena when half the time your eye is on Bonnie.”
There was a silence.
It stretched. Damon was trying to figure out what the proper response to a comment like this would be.
A full thirty seconds later, he decided. Wordlessly, he dove for Stefan, got his hands around Stefan’s neck, and tried to throttle the undeath out of him.
This time Stefan didn’t try to choke him in return. He gathered a huge amount of Power and let it loose at Damon at point-blank range.
Lights went off behind Damon’s eyes. He didn’t feel the pain at the moment, though. That was part of his last-ditch weapon during fights: to store up the pain for later. It kept his head clear and had the added benefit of making him never want to stop fighting.
He prepared his own bolus of Power and slammed it into Stefan. Stefan flinched slightly and Damon pressed his advantage, knocking his brother into the nightstand with the lamp on it. There was a splintering crash as the nightstand went over and the lamp shattered on the ground and went out.
The two of them went on fighting for quite a while in what, to humans, would have been pitch darkness. Occasionally one or the other would snap sharpened canines at his opponent, because to bleed another vampire is to finish the fight with honors. They were too evenly matched, however, for either of them to manage this.