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It was true that this was her method, or her opening method anyway, when she was on dates and boys misbehaved. From here on it went to broken noses, blackened eyes, and . . . well, serious dislocations of the groinal regions. When Bonnie didn’t want to play Bonnie didn’t play.
Unlike most of her combatants, however, Damon did not scream. He didn’t even blink. And he certainly wasn’t hopping around cursing, or doubled up moaning in pain. He simply stood exactly as he had been standing and looked at her as he had been looking, curious and hopeful of amusement.
Then he flashed one of his inimitable smiles, onethirtysecondth of a second on, and then instantly off again, and said, “And what are you planning to do now?” She looked up at him. Matt was in the car, his back to them, probably listening to music if he wasn’t under some spell of Damon’s. Stefan and Meredith were even farther away, and—preoccupied.
Vampires. You just couldn’t trust them to feel pain like real people. Even her patented kneetothefamilyjewels—patented because of its speed, force, and a secret second bounce she wasn’t demonstrating for anyone—probably would have no effect.
She started to look at Damon again, but suddenly her pointofview was whirling. He had picked her up as if she weighed no more than a kitten and put her down again, facing away from Matt and the house. She felt the whiplash of a bramble. When she looked back at Damon her bravado had undergone a serious change for the worse. She found herself thinking how fortunate but unlikely it would be for Stefan and Meredith to come out on the porch right this very minute. She blinked and found that she was blinking back tears.
“I’ll—I’ll put a spell on you,” she said in a small voice.
“A spell to do what?” He reached out and touched her jaw where a jutting tree branch had caught her. “You’re bleeding.”
Bonnie felt her heart begin to gallop. “It’s nothing.”
“It ought to be taken care of.”
“Not your way,” Bonnie said, and she heard the oddest thing—a sort of faint echo to her voice, saying, Not your way.
In any case, Damon looked around. “So the hero has admitted he’s just like the rest of us raptors at last,” he said, eyeing the window to Stefan’s attic room from which surely, any minute now, Stefan and Meredith would be starting downstairs.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Neither do I really. Except that Stefan couldn’t keep his vow, could he? He knows he needs to have human blood.”
“We made him do it,” Bonnie said fiercely. “Matt and Meredith, and, yes, even Elena told him that he had to. And me.”
Something sparked in Damon’s eyes. “So the lovebirds are having conversations at will now?”
“Elena talked to him, to order him to do it,” Bonnie said, stretching a point.
Again, the feeling of rushing through the air, being lifted like a doll, and this time, ending up pinned against a tree. Her arms and legs were much too heavy to try any of the usual selfdefense in her repertoire. And of course there was no chance of screaming.
Damon’s face was close to her. There floated back to her a memory of a much more immature Bonnie saying that it would be so romantic to be killed by someone this handsome. She’d been a little idiot, that’s what she had been. God, if s
he could get her hands on that younger self of hers now . . .
“So you made Stefan take your blood,” he said, “but I’m still just a poor outsider, forced to stalk you for your own good.”
“I haven’t done it yet,” Bonnie said, knowing that she sounded like a kitten spitting rage with all its fur fluffed up. But then she thought of something else.
“Elena is watching you,” she said, combining what she was sure was the truth with the guess of the next question. “Elena wants to know what you’re going to do tonight. You said you were watching us for our own good. Are you going to help us? Help him? Or just watch?”
“I really haven’t decided,” Damon said, and Bonnie, looking into those blackasobsidian eyes, felt that this was the simple truth and all bets were truly off with him.
And, although tears flooded her eyes and down her cheeks, she wouldn’t look away from him. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her break down entirely and whisper, “But we’re goners without you . . .”
“You’d be goners with me, too.’’ He plucked her thought out of the air. “You must know that. What you’re challenging isn’t beatable. That’s the truth, maybe not in words of one syllable but as simply as I can put it without resorting to sockpuppets. Do we understand?”
Bonnie was beyond being distressed over personal things.
“It’s the town I’m worried about. Fell’s Church—”
“Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall. When you’ve seen enough of them as I have you develop an indifference. And this miserable place is hardly a dot on the map, anyway.” Bonnie looked up angrily but he had already turned on his bland face and his purring, persuasive voice.
“If you have blood to give to little brother, then you have blood to give to me,” he said, looking at her with lastpuppyintheshopeyes. “It doesn’t take much, you know.
And maybe it will persuade me . . .”
