It was such an unequivocally good thing to do—no shades of gray, no occasionally evil vampire allies, no icy Guardians—that Matt’s heart swelled with love for her. Jasmine, with her sweet, soft lips and her shining intelligent eyes, was good all the way through. And she loved him, too, despite everything he had seen and done.
Matt leaned back against the vending machine, looking at the elevators. Soon she’d be here. His heart fluttered in his chest at the thought that any minute now, those elevator doors would open and he’d see Jasmine.
His phone vibrated, and he took it out to see a text from Jasmine:
Come up to room 413. There’s something I want to show you.
Matt rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, found room 413, and tapped lightly on the closed door. It immediately jerked open, and Jasmine smiled up at him, almost bouncing with excitement.
“Come on in,” she urged, tugging him by the arm. She yanked him inside and closed the door behind them, then leaned against it, grinning.
“What’s going on?” Matt asked, looking around. This was obviously some sort of lab, full of shiny white-and-chrome equipment, none of which gave him the faintest clue to its purpose.
“Look at this,” Jasmine said. Leading the way across the room, she hopped up on a stool in front of one of the machines. She turned on a screen and began adjusting dials, her fingers moving competently over the controls. Two complicated-looking graphs showed up on the screen, one above the other.
“I have no idea what you’re showing me,” Matt said, staring at the screen.
“I ran an analysis of the two samples of blood I took,” Jasmine told him. “This is basically a genetic breakdown of Damon’s blood—” she pointed at the upper graph “—and this is the manmade vampire’s blood.” She indicated the lower graph. “They’re ridiculously similar. Much more similar than either is to normal human blood.”
“I still don’t know what that means,” Matt said apologetically.
“Long story short?” Jasmine arched an eyebrow, a pleased little smile on her lips. “Jack may have made his vampires in a lab, but he didn’t do it without help. There are all kinds of chemical and genetic modifications going on here,” she said, pointing to one edge of the lower graph. “But the basic structure of the blood shows that Jack didn’t start with just ordinary human blood. He used real vampire blood. That’s not in the lab notes Damon stole from him, but it’s definitely true. There was a first step he didn’t document in that notebook.”
“Wow.” Matt ran his eyes across the screen as Jasmine explained her conclusions in more detail. They still meant nothing to him, but he believed she knew what she was talking about. “It’s amazing that you figured this out.” He hesitated. “Is it going to help us kill them?”
Jasmine’s face fell. “I don’t know,” she said. “The mutated strands must be what keep them from being vulnerable to the things vampires usually die from. But I can’t—I’m not a geneticist.”
Seeing the disappointment in her eyes, Matt felt like a jerk. “This is great, though,” he said hastily. “The more we know about what Jack’s doing, the better.”
He was glad to see Jasmine’s lips tilt up again into a smile. And it was true. He had to believe that every bit of information they could scrape up about Jack and his vampires would bring them closer to killing him.
Raccoon, Damon thought, scraping his tongue against his teeth, is even more disgusting than rabbit. That was a fact he could happily have gone without ever knowing. He sighed and leaned back against a birch tree, looking up through branches at the stars, so clear and distant. The night forest was quiet around him.
He should just discreetly find a girl who would let him feed on her, as he had in his travels, but somehow he couldn’t with Elena around. Even though he hadn’t tasted her blood since after the fight with Jack, it didn’t seem right to find another companion. Hence the unpleasantly furry entrées.
How had Stefan managed it, decade after decade, resigning himself to the blood of deer and doves and other woodland rabble? Damon bit his lip and then consciously relaxed, lounging against the tree, pushing the thought away. He wasn’t going to think about Stefan.
Instead, he reached for his connection with Elena. It was better to think of her, of her soft skin and shining eyes, of her proud spirit and sharp, fierce mind, than to poke again and again at the painful scars left by Stefan’s loss.
Her grief was still there, haunting the bond between them. It would never leave her, he supposed, never leave either of them completely. But there was something else there, he thought, something gentler and warmer creeping into her emotions. He thought—hoped—that perhaps it was the way she felt about him.
Licking his lips, Damon let the blood flowing inside him—disgusting, but full of the energy of life—warm him and quicken his Power. Elena thought Siobhan might be in one of the hunting cabins up here in the hills. So Damon was looking.
It probably wasn’t what the Guardians wanted, as they’d assigned Elena the task of finding and killing the old vampire, but who cared what they wanted? Dead was dead, and he didn’t like the idea of Elena following auras by herself, finding corpses in the night. She was strong, he knew, but she was still so young.
And he was ready to take someone down. His experiments in killing the synthetic vampires were at a standstill. Nothing worked, and his prisoner had taken to staring silently at Damon with dull, resentful eyes instead of fighting back. Restlessly, Damon touched his tongue to his sharp canines. He needed to do something.
He pushed his Power outward, searching, categorizing what he found. There was life all around him. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth, an owl swooped overhead. He felt the quick nervous mind of a deer a few yards away and, farther on, a family of black bears searching for food. Humans down in the town below, sleeping or indoors. One walking a dog at the edge of the forest.
Nothing other. No vampire consciousness stirring. If Siobhan was in a cabin in the woods, it wasn’t one of the ones up here in the hills past the edge of town.
Damon looked up at the stars again and thought about whether he should call another animal to him before he went home. He hadn’t tried bear yet; maybe it would be less vile. All that fur seemed like it would be a pain to bite through, though, which might be even worse than the raccoon.
Or maybe he should head down into town, find a game of pool or a fight, make a few humans uncomfortable with a brush of his Power.
He had taken one undecided step toward the woods’ edge when something stopped him short. Tensed, he held his breath and listened.
There was the lightest crackle, as if someone were carefully stepping across dry leaves. Suddenly, with a tingling shock of awareness, wrongness crept up on him, the faint chemical wrongness that was now all around.
Jack’s vampires. Now that Jack knew Damon was in Dalcrest, they had been tracking him. The little vampire outside his and Elena’s home hadn’t been there by coincidence. He had been scouting, and only the fact that Damon had captured him had stopped more from coming there. And now they’d found him here, in the forest. If they were able to track him, they would pursue Damon the same way their kind had chased him and Katherine across Europe. Only now he was alone.
Pushing away a flare of panic, Damon stepped backward so that the birch tree was at his back once more. They wouldn’t be able to come at him from behind. He stretched his Power, feeling for the shape of their minds. Even using his Power to its fullest extent, he could barely sense them. It was lucky he had just fed, or he might not have sensed them coming at all. There was more than one—maybe as many as eight or nine, the feel of them quiet but, once he’d found them, distinct from one another.
Jack wasn’t among them, he thought, nor was Meredith. He knew the feel of those two minds now, and these felt like strangers. Just how many minions had the mad scientist created?
They were coming closer, almost close enough for him to see them. He peered into the darkness, watching for movement. There was a crackle of dry leaves somewhere to his right, but he couldn’t spot them, couldn’t find exactly where they were coming from. Growling low in his throat with frustration, Damon took one step to the right, glaring off into the tangle of trees.
The first vampire slammed into him from the left, unexpected, knocking him sideways. She was a young blond girl, no taller than Bonnie and probably a few years younger. She took advantage of his surprise, going straight for Damon’s throat, her white teeth flashing in the starlight.
Damon caught his balance and grabbed a fistful of her thick hair, yanking her head back and away from his throat. With a quick motion, he managed to snap her neck. She fell limply at his feet, her face empty and innocent. It wouldn’t keep her down for long, but she’d be out of the fight for the moment.
“Come on then, children,” he said to the dark shapes he knew were just out of his field of vision, taunting them. “Are you monsters or cowards?” He hesitated and stared out into the darkness, feeling with his Power. Could he feel something now? The faintest shine of a rust-red aura in the night? “Dilly, dilly, ducks, come and be killed,” he shouted wildly, an old nursery song popping into his head as he strained to pinpoint just what it was he was on the verge of sensing.